Berlin (AP) – John F. When Kennedy saw communist East Germany on the Berlin Wall in 1963, the red curtain blocked the American president’s opinion through the Brandenburg Gate, accusing him of violating international agreements with the United States. “To prevent the rebirth of German militarism.”
Documented by a Western newsreel Crowds complimenting Kennedy on the west as well as on the East German stunt, the narrator notes that Kennedy did not get a good look at the gate, as “the iron curtain was complemented by a huge cloth, as the Communists make sure” he saw his propaganda. ”
That visit could be the final word, if it were not for a new project, 30 years after Germany’s reunification, to digitize thousands of East German newsreels. Scan Online scans, transcripts and post-movies provide a perspective within the country that no longer exists but was a crucial part of the Cold War.
Newsreel on the visit of the East German gen Gunzuez, or Chakshvadi, Kennedy He joked that the US president had received “unexpected surprises instead of great visions” in the East German capital promised by his secret service and had allegedly cut his visit “from 20 minutes to five”.
“History and who we are is a story, so it’s important to compare different narratives,” said Gunnar Dadio, a filmmaker and media entrepreneur who bought Progress last year., A company licensed for East German film collections.
“It’s not just the propaganda side, but the whole social side, where we can better understand the differences in today’s Germany – why people in East or West societies are often different in their thinking, because of their background, Their history was quite different. “
Dedio charges license fees for document makers, museums and others who want to use movies, but is currently available for free to view online.
The basement of its lipzig operation is a floor-to-ceiling stack from a canister of 35mm film reels, each labeled, cataloged and waiting to be scanned, a process that is expected to take another two to three years. With the German Democratic Republic, or DDR by its German initials, being made every week, there are more than 12,000 films, including about 2,000 newsreels.
A series of home movies featuring digitized films from other archives such as Western Newsreels and Adolf Hitler’s girlfriend and his later wife, Eva Brown, can enjoy the holidays in Offerline Ings Fur. Accompanied by family, friends, pets and a Nazi dictator, the German army marched on Europe.
Although some well-known movies have been available on DVD for a very long time, the collection is a goldmine for researchers, said Stephen Wall, head of research at the DDR Museum in Berlin, who is not involved with the project.
“For me and for us, these films are extremely important and valuable, in part as historical historical documents, which say a lot from the perspective of time – ideology, cultural policies. And they are also artistically valuable, ”he said.
After World War II, the Soviet-influenced East Germany and the American, British and French territories of West Germany were then divided into four business zones.
In the Soviet territory, the authorities signed the DAPA in 1946. Founded, which was a monopoly film production company that used the famous Babelberg studio outside of Berlin and began making movies for its employees. The Germans were to be punished again after years of Nazi rule.
The DFA soon expanded its productions to feature broader themes of communism, such as the emancipation of women and the redistribution of wealth in feature films, documentaries and newsreels.
In 1950, a year after East Germany was established as a country, the authorities formed another company, Progress, as a state monopoly for the distribution of DEFA films and for the importation of foreign productions.
After the fall of Berlin and Wall in 1989, DEFA’s studio was sold and its film collection was donated to a state-run foundation. Progress went hand in hand before it was acquired by Dadio’s company in 2019.
From an Eastern perspective, DFA teams fired around the world, exploring South Africa’s inequalities under apartheid, while still being largely tolerated by Western countries, focusing on civil rights movements in the US and protests against the Vietnam War, and six 1967 – Day between Israel and its neighbors as an act of “imperialist aggression” by Tel Aviv In conjunction with “USA and other NATO countries”.
These films have leaders like Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Indira Gandhi, Yasser Arafat, Ho Chi Minh and Salvador Allende, as well as leading figures such as American civil rights activist Angela Davis And actors and entertainers such as Marlene Dietrich, Jane Fonda and Louis Armstrong.
“It’s a picture to show that ‘our system is right and Western democracies are far from being good societies, and some of them, of course, are propaganda,'” Dadio said. “But today some of them are visible to the naked eye. And reveals. It shows that the west side of the iron curtain which is not captured. “
In the 1980s, as anti-government sentiment grew in East Germany, the director was encouraged to wrap up messages about topics that would talk about the state’s strict censorship past, such as shooting unsuitable buildings in the visual background of the country’s documents. Decaying infrastructure.
“Mostly, they find these very small ways to express what they really think, in metaphors, symbolically, in a very intelligent way, where censorship was difficult to intervene. But for most people, it was clear what that meant, “said Dadio, who was born in 1969 in the East German city of Rostock and grew up watching DEFA movies.
A documentary on the underground music scene, created just before the fall of Berlin and the Wall, features the beach concert of the former Berlin punk band Feeling Bee, many of whose members later rose to fame as part of the post-reunion band Ramstein.
A group of young people, their pants cuffed and boots lancha as they danced wildly in the sand, did not look out of place in New York. London or Toronto Mosh Pit In the 1980s, beyond official rhetoric, most residents east of the Iron Curtain simply lived their lives.
“You see a lot of real life in pictures outside the East that you can’t find in official publicity,” Dadio said.
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