8 - Der geteilte Himmel (1964)

Summary

DER GETEILTE HIMMEL, based on Christa Wolf's 1963 novel of the same title, is without doubt one of the key films not only in Wolf's work but also within DEFA as a whole. It marks not only the beginning of the very short-lived DEFA “New Wave”—which lasted not much longer than a year (if one counts from the premiere of this film on September 3, 1964 to the Eleventh Plenum in December 1965), or perhaps a few years at most (if one counts from films like Rolf Kirsten's Auf der Sonnenseite [On the Sunny Side] from 1962)—but also addresses the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Based on Christa Wolf's novel of the same name, which similarly marked a breakthrough for its author and for GDR literature into a less rigid form of writing (one less molded by the patterns of socialist realism), it tells the story of a young woman named Rita (Renate Blume) and her older lover Manfred (Eberhard Esche), who ends up leaving for West Berlin on the eve of the building of the Wall, due to his frustration about his inability to get a new chemical procedure supported by GDR authorities. Manfred is a man on whom the burden of his family's (especially his father’s) Nazi past weighs heavily, and he cannot shake off cynicism when he sees his father replace Nazi party membership with that in the Communist Party. Rita visits him in West Berlin, but finding both the milieu and a newly cold and selfish Manfred unsympathetic, chooses freely to return to the East and its more communal social project. Although she is studying to be a teacher, she also works in a train wagon factory, which gives the film a double plot structure. At the factory she meets Wendland (Hilmar Thate), a young idealistic manager (and socialist foil to Manfred's world-weary cynical individualism), and Meternagel (Hans Hardt-Hardtloff), an older man whose health is failing, but who manages to implement a new production system in his brigade, one that will increase productivity.