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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2020
LATE IN LIFE, Konrad Wolf remarked on the ability of even fiction films to acquire quasi-documentary value over time, and on human memory’s need to be kept alive with such documents:
Der Film hat—vorausgesetzt, es ist gelungen, darin etwas wirklich Wesentliches genau und kunstlerisch komprimiert zu gestalten— mehr vielleicht als alle anderen Kunste die Eigenart, nach einer gewissen Zeit zu einem Dokument zu werden.[…] Eben dieser Eigenart wegen empfinde ich das Filmemachen als eine so grosse Verpflichtung […] Das Gedächtnis der Menschen kann aber nur wachgehalten werden, wenn es immer neue Nahrung erhält. Wir konnen uns darum nicht mit dem begnugen, was aus der Vergangenheit geliefert ist. Jede Generation sucht ihren Zugang zum Vergangenen.
[Film has—assuming it has managed to create something truly essential in a precise and artistically compressed form—perhaps more than any other art the quality of becoming a document after a certain time. […] It is precisely due to this quality that I feel filmmaking to be such a great obligation […] People's memory can only be kept awake if it receives ever new nourishment. We cannot therefore be satisfied with what has been bequeathed from the past. Every generation seeks its own approach to the past.]
We could read this statement as an understated criticism of the official GDR faith in das Erbe, the “inheritance” from the great bourgeois classics: for Wolf, that inheritance, although it is binding, must always be created anew. It is also Wolf's own variant of Bazin's mummy complex. This documentary status holds true in particular for the films of the state film studio of the GDR (DEFA), but not only due to the long dominance of a neorealist aesthetics within DEFA. Film was, in the GDR as in other Eastern European countries, the national keeper of History in a very particular and emphatic sense. For the GDR, film also has a peculiar status as the visual archive of a society or a nation (terms that will need to be explored more in the course of this book) that no longer exists. This strange documentary status thus invites one to speculate as to how it might best be described.
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