The class register

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Movie
Original title The class register
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1999
length 80 minutes
Age rating FSK -
Rod
Director Astrid Gabler
script Astrid Gabler
production Gabriele M. Walther
music Andreas Weidinger
camera Thomas Bresinsky
cut Elke Bodmeier , Jeanette Magerl
occupation

The class book is a documentary by Astrid Gabler , which was made in 1999 as a thesis at the University of Television and Film Munich . It was first broadcast on television on January 15, 2000 on Bayerischer Rundfunk .

content

The documentary, which is based on the book “Das Klassenbuch - Geschichte einer Frauengeneration” by Eva Jantzen and Merith Niehuss from 1994, begins in 1998: Two young high school graduates from the Erfurt Königin-Luise-Gymnasium leaf through and read a long book. It is a very special " class register " , as it turns out.

Director and screenwriter Astrid Gabler (* 1971) uses this book to retrospectively describe the story of 15 young women who graduated from the Königin-Luise-Gymnasium in 1932. In order to stay in touch after school, they decided to start a class diary that each of them should write in. For decades the women sent their “class register” to each other in the mail or brought it personally to the next. The first entry dates from June 12, 1932, the last of the classmates goes back to the 1980s, but the coverage in the book, as in the film, ends on July 25, 1976. At that time, five of the women were still alive.

Over the years, the “class register” has become a mirror of both German and personal history. First, the writers described the time after school, their professional training, marriages, children, life during National Socialism , the Second World War , then the post-war period and the division of Germany (some now lived in the "West" , others continued in the "East" , others abroad, e.g. in Mexico or Canada ). The periods of time that elapsed between the various entries became longer, not only because of the separation by the zone boundary , shortly after the war the class register even seemed lost: Between 1949 and 1958 there was a gap in which the book was lost until it was surprising reappeared.

This “class register” is neither a “class register” in the classic sense, nor a “diary”, but rather an exchange of letters or a reading drama . In 1998 Gabler succeeded in tracing the events of the decades and the fate of women together with Eva Jantzen, the last living class register writer, and in closing gaps in the biographies through private photos of and interviews with people who knew the writers. The class register is now kept in the Erfurt City Archives . The resulting film can be used as a VHS at the university libraries in Jena and Lüneburg.

literature

  • Eva Jantzen, Merith Niehuss (Hrsg.): Das Klassenbuch - Chronik einer Frauengeneration 1932-1976 , Weimar 1994. (7th edition published in 2013)
  • Astrid Gabler: The class register. A journey into the past of a generation of women. In: City and History. Magazine for Erfurt. , Issue 69, 2018, pp. 14–15.

Web links