IT WOULD BE FORCED or exaggerated to claim that all Wolf 's films are of equal interest or value. Along with a few that are, or should be, part of the German and international film canon—Ich war neunzehn, Sterne, Solo Sunny—there are films that are intelligent and subtle but remain stubbornly marginal due to their intimate dependence on a GDR context unfamiliar to most viewers, such as Der nackte Mann auf dem Sportplatz; films that mark an important historical event but are flawed, such as Der geteilte Himmel, with its often ponderous script; and finally an ambitious work like Goya, that falls short of greatness due to an unconvincing performance by Olivera Katarina as the Duchess of Alba. The role for Margarita Terechova in Mama, ich lebe feels also not quite plausible (and did for the actress herself at the time of filming); Wolf himself later realized that the rhetoric of Professor Mamlock (especially the final sequence of the suicide) was overdrawn. In general, Wolf is at his least effective when trying to be dramatic or overtly emotional, as in Mamlock or parts of Goya (where the intent seems to oscillate between a Brechtian distancing and the absorbing grandeur of historical-epic spectacle), and best when most understated and reflective, as in Sterne or Ich war neunzehn. The kind of drama that Wajda could pull off in Man of Marble (1977), or The Promised Land (1977), or in which Fassbinder so often excelled, was not his forte.

There are also, in Wolf's oeuvre, films that seem either to be a socialist realist potboiler, such as Leute mit Flugeln, or oddly marginal to his larger project, like Der kleine Prinz. Busch singt is another matter altogether: his last completed work, and one that in many ways sums up or returns to key medial and historical concerns that run through all of his films. These films are perhaps less interesting in themselves—as independent artworks—than in relation to the rest of Wolf's overall work, and they will be viewed accordingly in this chapter.