The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949-1989


 Like other Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany sought to control even its citizens’ leisure time in the 1960s and 1970s, with the goal of making it useful or at least not subversive to state interests. Certain hobbies, like amateur photography, found support from the state in the form of increased access to equipment and supplies. Other scholarship has shown that sex was a locus of privacy and self-assertion in a society with a high degree of surveillance and state control. Focusing on a previously unanalyzed collection of erotic photographs of men, the article argues, first, that the support for amateur photography makes the state an unwitting participant in the creation and circulation of these illicit images and, second, that the images are an archive of queer men’s self-presentation and critique in a context wherein their existence and affect are transgressive.

Homemade Pornography and the Proliferation of Queer Pleasure in East Germany

Rosemary Stott Bern, Peter Lang, 2012 x+308 pp., illus., bibliography, index, €43.30 (paper) Limiting herself to films produced in the US, UK and West Germany exhibited in mainstream theatres in Ea...

Crossing the Wall. The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany

The 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of the East German SED, held in December 1965 and resulting in the ban of over a dozen feature films, marks the most ferocious act of political censorship i...

Michael Wedel

Papers

Traces of Dissent: The Journal Filmspiegel and Readership Responses to the Ban of Frank Beyer’s DEFA Film Spur der Steine (1965/66)