3 - Lissy (1957)

Summary

DEFA FILMS ARE (as noted in the introduction) characterized by a peculiar and uncanny historical quality unlike that of other films because of the disappearance of the nation that produced them. This “pastness,” this historical index or datedness—DEFA's “spectral” quality— is particularly evident in Lissy, which—like Fassbinder's later films on the early history of the BRD—tries to uncover an archaeology of fascism in the Weimar past. In doing so, the film not only recreates a fiction of Weimar, of its working-class and petty-bourgeois milieu, but also refers back to the filmic inheritance of Weimar (its left film traditions, its didactic or “propadeutic” narratives of conversion to political consciousness). The film is thus an archive in multiple senses, both historiographically (of the Weimar working-class past) and in medial terms (of generic narrative templates).

Generic Memories

Lissy (1957) has been seen as Konrad Wolf's first mature film, yet in some ways it is still a transitional work; its protagonist's exit from the ritualized world of Nazism at the film's end could be seen as an allegory for the director's own departure from the aesthetic practice of Stalinism that had crippled DEFA production in the first half of the 1950s. The film tells the exemplary story of a working woman in depression-era late Weimar whose unemployed husband joins the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), but who herself learns, through the death of her brother at the hands of the Nazis, to become an antifascist resistance fighter. In this process she is aided by her friendship with the loyal Communist fighters Max and Toni Franke, as by her own working-class parents’ experience with Nazi thugs who destroy their home in a search. The screenplay derived from an exile novel by a now-forgotten socialist author, Franz Carl Weiskopf (1900–1955), who had been (with Willi Bredel) one of the editors of Neue Deutsche Literatur in the early ‘50s, a publication known for its fidelity to Party demands.