Berlin - Schönhauser Corner [GDR 1957]

Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser
Director: G. Klein
Cinematographer: W. Göthe

Like Born in '45 and Black Peter, this is a socially critical film about the post-war generation and its alienation from the demands and ideals of the older generation; but unlike those films, it is explicitly a film about not just alienation but social deviance and crime, as well as direct engagement with the conflict with the West. It is therefore socially a highly interesting film, interesting also for its frank and critical depiction of problems, possible undoubtedly because of the recent beginning of the 'thaw' period.

The main characters in this film are teenagers, some of whom are drop-outs from secondary school, who spend their time hanging out on a street corner, vandalising things, going on trips to West Berlin to watch Western movies, and of course dancing, having sex, and dreaming about motorcycles. They are all alienated from society in one way or another; their families disapprove of them as do workmates, police, and people on the street. They all romanticise the West in some way or another--the main villain is actively involved in an ID racket, presumably selling IDs to Western intelligence, and another character seems to base his view of reality on Western movies--and even dies as a result.

But the main character is right on the fence. On the one hand he hangs out with this bunch and ends up in a bad way because of it. On the other hand he seems to be a decent person; he risks his life to save a train driver, he refuses to steal a girl's ID for the more villainous character, he works an honest job at a construction site, and he seems generally not malicious. He does, however, have a distinct distaste for authority, and for all those who try to win him away from the troublemakers. This includes his brother (a policeman) and the representative of the Free German Youth at his workplace. It is, in the end, he who survives and he who the good policeman finally manages to convince to settle down and take some responsibility. But he is indeed the symbol on which the whole movie turns. For he appears to symbolise those young people who are neither socially adapted nor too far gone to be saved from crime and treason, but rather could be won over if only the older generation and those in authority could learn to relate to them. The policeman makes this point in the end, as has been pointed out elsewhere; either we find a way to reach them, or the enemy will.

The depiction of that enemy is also interesting. The parents of the main villainous character want to move to the West, as they have an inheritance of two houses and some wealth there; but interestingly, the father says mainly that the system in the West is 'psychologically superior', and we do not get a feeling that these people are being caricatured, but rather that they are relatively measured, if misguided, people. West Berlin is shown more or less as it probably was, with a lot of advertising, cafes, shops and cinemas. But the main depiction of the West comes symbolically, through characters from the East. That is, at a certain point when two of the characters have gone to the West after being associated with a crime, they are in a house holding boys who want to defect where they are being interviewed and processed. There, after the main character is overheard saying he wants to go back to the GDR, he is surrounded in the garden of the house by a group of other boys, who have defected for various reasons (apparently economic ones) and who threaten to beat him. In this scene there is a sense that the world he has entered is one in which the law of the jungle rules; he is only wanted by the West German authorities for what he can tell them, for what kind of political use he may have for them, and if he wants to go free and to go home he will be turned on as if by a pack of wolves. This seems to suggest symbolically the nature of the West, and the way in which the boys have misunderstood it. He seeks solidarity from his friend, saying they must stick together; and again this contrasts the solidarity of the East with the violence of the West.

Throughout all of this, there is a clear message that these boys are completely apolitical; they simply are disaffected, lost, short-sighted. They are interested in Western clothes, movies, money. They even say explicitly at one point that they know nothing about politics. This sends us a message that defectors often invent stories about political persecution in order to be granted asylum, and that often they are defecting purely to avoid trouble in the East. It also tells us that we should go easy on people like this; their disaffection does not imply that they are politicised, but rather the opposite.

It is interesting that this film was released--and viewed widely--when contrasted with the fact that nine years later, Born in '45, a much milder film about some related themes, was not released. By that time, after the eleventh party congress, there was a backlash in the GDR against criticism in film, but it would also seem that one of the reasons why this film is able to be so critical is that it depicts the nihilism of youth as being something related to criminality and deviance rather than a general thing. It also paints a picture of the West which is not unrealistic but which is clearly negative and associated with criminality. So although this film did incur criticism from the socialist realists, it does seem to both achieve the goal of sending a (perhaps unheard) message about the necessity of addressing these problems and meanwhile stick to the portrayal of the undesirable as only part of what was actual.

Stylistically, it is hard to believe this film was made by the same Gerhard Klein responsible for The Gleiwitz Case four years later. For although it is clearly a formal step forward from socialist realism, and was apparently heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism, its cinematography is often formulaic and at times has the feeling of an American TV detective show from the 1950s. It makes abundant use of shots dramatically closing in on faces and rather repetitive short tracking shots as transitions. There are however a considerable number of well-composed still shots; but these are mainly buried in the weaker cinematography which seems to serve largely as a vehicle for the plot.