IN HER FEATURE-FILM DEBUT Herzsprung, a DEFA coproduction with (West) German television, director Helke Misselwitz narrates the story of Johanna, a young woman struggling to make ends meet in the small eastern German town of Herzsprung shortly after unification. Deceived by unified Germany’s seeming promise of a better life, Johanna must face unemployment and the gruesome suicide of her grief-stricken husband. While she sees a glimmer of hope for starting a new life in her romance with a handsome, mysterious foreigner, the violence that lurks underneath the surface of her desolate hometown finally erupts in a brutal hate crime that brings a tragic end to the lives of Johanna and her lover.

Both reviews of the film Herzsprung that are provided here appeared in publications of the former GDR. While Klaus Renke’s piece was published in Neues Deutschland, the Socialist Unity Party’s official newspaper, which retained its socialist leaning after unification, Hannes Schönemann’s longer article appeared in Film und Fernsehen, a journal that featured serious critiques and discussions on the art of filmmaking.

The respective reviews offer radically different positions. In criticizing the film above all for its failure to portray the causes of racism accurately, Renke subtly links the discussion to the specifically “German” problem of assuming individual responsibility for the nation’s crimes against humanity. In contrast, Schönemann, a filmmaker himself, praises the film for its poignant images and unique ability to evoke the atmosphere of the Wende in a rural community that had belonged to East Germany. While Renke describes Misselwitz’s break from DEFA aesthetics in negative terms, Schönemann, who was persecuted by the Stasi along with his wife Sibylle Schönemann in the 1980s, celebrates the more personal, emotional, and dramatic qualities of the film, which lend it its “authenticity.” For Schönemann, Misselwitz’s deviation from the “cookie-cutter” documentary realism of DEFA is not a failure but an accomplishment.

The nature of the publications themselves clearly call for different kinds of interpretations, one more from a political and the other perhaps more from a cinematic-aesthetic perspective. Yet the reviews also bring into relief the tension between different ways of measuring what constitutes a “good” film during the transitional moment of the Wende.

Klaus Renke

On the Death of All Hope

First published as “Vom Sterben aller Hoffnung” in Neues

Deutschland (November 19, 1992).

Translated by Lisa Haegele.