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| SUMMER 2005 |
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Der Sonnensucher Konrad Wolf -Wolfgang Jacobsen, Rolf Aurich - Aufbau Verlag ISBN:3-351-02598-0 Germany's largest film school carries his name. The HFF-Konrad Wolf commemorates this East German film-maker and cultural politician. He was recently described to me as a 'truly remarkable man' by Hans Otto Braeutigam, West Germany's former-diplomatic representative in East Berlin. 3-SAT will soon be airing a television portrait of the man and are one of the co-sponsors of this biography by two film historians, along with the Berlin Film Museum, the DEFA Foundation and Progress Film-Verleih, who distribute Wolf's films. So, who was Konrad Wolf? Certainly, his 15 films as director are more, or less unknown outside Germany, though 'Solo Sunny' (1980) was received with interest at the Berlin Film Festival and is regarded as one of half a dozen productions of importance for East German cinema, along with the work of Frank Beyer, notably 'Spur der Steine' (1966), a banned film which Wolf defended, or 'Das Kaninchen bin ich' by Kurt Maetzig (1965), another banned film, first seen in 1990 after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Wolf had worked as assistant director for Maetzig in the 1950's. A country where unseen films have more importance than than those that are shown is an elusive context for any biographer, or film historian and making sense of Konrad Wolf is a slippery subject at best. This biography is stronger on context than the man it portrays, though the life described here is strange to behold, an almost unique story of pre-war communism and cold war experience matched only by that of Wolf's brother, Marcus, who rose to become Head of the East German Secret Service and is often described as the model for 'Karla' in John LeCarre's spy fiction. While Marcus Wolf has become a regular fixture in the German media and Conference scene, charming, hale and hearty in his mid-eighties despite his sinister background, Konrad, the younger brother died at the age of 57 in 1982. They were born in south west Germany, living in Stuttgart until their father, the writer Friedrich Wolf was forced to flee Nazi Germany, taking his familly into a Moscow exile, where the boys grew up alongside one another and attended the Karl Liebnecht School in one of the city's suburbs along with other children from Communist emigre families. Although the victims of Stalinist terror included one of their teachers and several of their Father's colleagues and associates, the two boys emerge as convinced communists and Soviet citizens. Both became directly involved in the War against Germany. Marcus Wolf worked in the Soviet Foreign Service, while Konrad joined the Red Army at the age of 19 and served as a Propaganda Officer as the Red Army repulsed the Germans and began the slow campaign that defeated Hitler and brought them to the heart of Berlin. Not only were the two young men native German speakers, but as the sons of a trusted Comintern loyalist, they could be relied upon. In one of those strange quirks of wartime necessity, Konrad was appointed Soviet Commander of Bernau, a small town on the outskirts of Berlin, at the age of only 20. Though this was a temporary appointment lasting only a few days, it demonstrates the ease with which both brothers achieved positions of prominence. In the post-world-war II era of incipient cold war, they were Soviet Germans in a Germany about to be Sovietised. Konrad Wolf began his career in the Department for Agitation and Propaganda at the House for Soviet Culture in Berlin, where he organised theatrical events and became familiar with East Germany's emerging post-war cultural scene. He was already a candidate member of the Soviet Communist Party before completing his school exams (abitur) in 1949 at the age of 24. Following training at the Moscow film school, Konrad Wolf returned to the DDR and began a career with DEFA at their studios in Babelsberg, His first film, 'Einmal is keinmal' (Once is Never) was finished in 1955 and he was immediately appointed to the artistic committee at the DEFA Studios. This pattern of film production and political office culminated in Wolf's election as President of the East German Academy of Art in 1974 (a job he described as like running a travel agency) and the Central Committee of the SED (the ruling 'Socialist Unity' party) in 1981. In many ways, this biography is a tour through the political culture of East Germany. The authors have little to say about Wolf's aesthetics, or much at all about his films as cinema. The importance of culture within the DDR authoritarian regime is curious anomaly. A country of only 17m people, there was a fairly small pool of talent and within this privileged minority, the 'talking shop' of cultural politics had a malicious edge. Inclusion and exclusion from the cultural political hierarchy was a sharp edged tool. Those inside had access to the highest echelons of government and political leadership. Novelist, Christa Wolf.(no relation to Konrad and Marcus) could expect a hearing from Party Chief Honecker. Anyone falling foul of the system, like Christa Wolf's friend, Franz Fuhrman could expect to be harried by state security. Konrad Wolf navigated these waters with charismatic orthodoxy, but this biography tells us little about his temperament, or provides much insight into the man's own thought. Among my own acquaintances, I consider the experience of a writer colleague who spent winter nights humping sacks of cement from railway trucks to waiting lorries in Berlin Lichtenburg after falling foul of the authorities for his involvement in a theatre project in Prague in the spring of 1968 and was banned from his profession as a scipt-writer . I think too of a colleague who spent a couple of years in the political prison at Bautzen (a town also famous for its mustard) and acquired a stammer that prevails to this day. I think too of a friend who upon reading her files from the Stasi archive, discovered notes copied directly from her private diaries, but augmented with lies and faked information. She could work out who the thief was, but not who had done the malicious re-writing in the Stasi files. The excesses of Stalinism were repudiated in the 1950's, but it is difficult not to suspect that the oppressive masters of East Germany simply realised that you could break people without needing to kill them. Konrad Wolf was clearly creative and talented, a very public person in the corridors of Government and its cultural institutions; his brother Marcus, highly intelligent, a key figure in the secret workings of that same regime. Jacobsen and Aurich raise the question whether Konrad Wolf was an artist, or a functionary? They tell us his films handled one great theme, 'German history from an anti-fascist perspective with the broader goal of making the world more habitable'. They conclude by suggesting his life in the DDR was the continual attempt to orientate himself, 'the vain search for a homeland'. This is to trivialise Wolf's experiences. Why should anyone brought up within the framework of communist ideology with all its international aspirations be especially concerned by the cosiest convention of German culture, the pursuit of 'heimat'. The authors quote Lothar Bisky, a conservative left politician and sometime head of the HFF Film School, as saying that Wolf 'never really settled into East Germany' (Ganz in der DDR ist er nie angekommen). Perhaps he had no reason to? As I read this book, I found it difficult not to see Konrad and Marcus Wolf as two sides of the same coin, both committed anti-fascists in lifetime service to communist ideals in an authoritarian form, one fully integrated within the apparatus of oppression, the other an important fixture of its public face. After one very public case of cultural repression, the expulsion of Wolf Biermann, Christa Wolf wrote to Konrad telling him that 'anyone who fails to speak out now, must share the responsibility'. Wolf chose to remain silent. Quite why the Film School in Babelsberg commemorates his name is an enigma. Was there some hidden deed that commends Wolf in memoriam, a claim more pressing than that, for example, of Fritz Lang, to name but one of the great directors who worked in the Babelsberg Studios. If so, this biography has failed to unearth it.
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