The "Filmhauskino" in Nuremberg have started a program which will focus in different sections on the East and West German cinema after the 2nd World War. The beginning has been made this November and December with a selection of respectively 6 films from both sides that were realized between 1946 and 1953. 



Today I went to see one of them with two friends. Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows / 1947) was not only one of the first German films made after the war, but is also reported to have been very popular amongst the population. It was released throughout Germany in all occupied sectors and dealt, as many films in the following years would, with the dictatorship during 1933 and 1945 and its effect on the German population. Produced by the DEFA, the film has a less overt political and propagandist overtone than some of the later films, and was the first feature-film effort of director Kurt Maetzig who would become one of the dozen or so filmmakers whose 1964/65 productions would be banned by the Government - in his case the contoversial Das Kaninchen bin ich (I Am the Rabbit / 1965).

In "Marriage in the Shadows", Maetzig appears as a technically assured director who uses a seemingly conventional story to confront the audience with their recent past and demonstrate the consequences of the fascist ideoloy on the outsiders of the Thirs Reich. Ilse Steppat plays a successful actress who is aspiring to become a new star of the German theater. It is 1933, shortly after the definitive rise to power of Hitler and his party, and the actress and her fellow colleagues are depicted as artists who are yet quite unconcerned about the political situation. Though they are aware of the political climate and even discuss it early on in the film when they are on holiday...

to be continued...