The condemned village
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The condemned village |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1952 |
| length | 107 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Martin Hellberg |
| script |
Jeanne Stern , Kurt Stern Martha Fürmann (dramaturgy) |
| production | DEFA |
| music | Ernst Roters |
| camera |
Karl Plintzner , Joachim Hasler |
| cut | Johanna Rosinski |
| occupation | |
| |
The Condemned Village is a propaganda film of the DEFA of Martin Hellberg from 1952. The film, in which Bavarian villagers American US against the demolition of their village in favor of a military airfield ask, was awarded the 1953 International World Peace Prize of the Soviet Union influenced World Peace Council awarded and is one of the most successful DEFA films.
action
After years of Soviet captivity , the farmer Heinz Weimann returns to his small village Bärenweiler in Bavaria . His former lover Käthe is now married to the farmer Fritz Vollmer, but this hardly affects Heinz. It is enough for him to be able to work his fields again as a farmer. The luck only lasted for a short time, as news reached the mayor during the harvest festival that the US military authorities wanted to clear Bärenweiler so that a military airfield could be built in the country .
The mayor wants to take the case to the state government , but is turned away, and the village pastor can not get the bishop to intervene either. The residents decide to fight back and organize peaceful protests in front of the government building, which are violently suppressed by the police . However, the village continues to stick together. Only Käthe's husband Fritz leaves the village. He sees communist activities in the resistance organized by Heinz Weimann, which he is not prepared to support. Weimann, in turn, was later arrested for resisting state violence and sentenced to one year in prison.
Bärenweiler has in the meantime received moral support from all over the Federal Republic of Germany , so they are encouraged by friends from the Ruhr area and Hamburg shipyard workers, even citizens of the GDR, but this does not make the US military government rethink. Military police soon appear to evacuate the village. When the village church bells ring out, the residents of neighboring villages and the city workers come together in Bärenweiler. Together they strike against the evacuation of the village. In the end, the US military withdraws without having achieved anything, and Bärenweiler is saved.
production
The screenplay for The Condemned Village was written by Jeanne Stern and Kurt Stern after reading about a similar case in the Franconian town of Hammelburg in the newspaper. However, director Falk Harnack refused to realize the “stencil-like book of DEFA” and was replaced by Martin Hellberg , who had previously been general manager of the Dresden State Theater and had no film experience , after other directors refused . Hellberg rewrote parts of the script, which now became much more pathetic .
The film was made in the Babelsberg studio and in the Althoff studio with outdoor shots from the Mark Brandenburg region . The buildings were designed by Wilhelm Vorwerg and Alfred Schulz, production manager was Adolf Fischer . The condemned village had its premiere on February 15, 1952 at the same time in Berlin's Babylon and in the DEFA-Filmtheater Kastanienallee. With 3.7 million viewers, The Condemned Village was one of DEFA's 50 most successful films.
criticism
The convicted village , with clearly agitating features, was considered a “DEFA prestige project” and was appropriately praised in the GDR press: Martin Hellberg had created “the model of the film that we need today”. A distorting representation was denied: "The disposition of the US-American intruders is particularly instructive, who are embodied according to the truth without a stenciled description and arouse in every patriot the hatred they deserve." In 1952, Der Spiegel wrote that the US -Americans in the film "look like veritable gangsters".
In retrospect, "today the film is primarily important as a document of the times", which reflects the then real fear of a third world war. However, it has a falsifying effect, since it "in complete misunderstanding of reality [conjured] a revolutionary situation in the Federal Republic".
The Lexicon of International Films wrote on The Condemned Village :
“The story of a late expulsion and an early protest action, created with staging skill, is used for a flawless propaganda film: the priest who is close to the people stands against the bishop who has fallen into capitalism, the upright people against the cringing government. A film from the Cold War that conjures up an anti-capitalist and anti-American popular front in West Germany and can provide information about the nature and effectiveness of demagoguery. Very interesting in terms of contemporary history. "
While the film was showing in the GDR cinemas, several thousand people in the GDR were forcibly evacuated from the border area between June 5 and 8, 1952 . In defense, the residents of Streufdorf barricaded their village. When police squadrons and water cannons tried to end the uprising, the mayor, who was also affected by the forced resettlement, is said to have shouted: "Think about the film The Condemned Village ".
Awards
Albert Garbe, Martin Hellberg, Karl Plintzner, Kurt and Jeanne Stern and Eduard von Winterstein were awarded the first class national prize for the film .
The convicted village received the Peace Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 1952 . In the following year Martin Hellberg, Kurt Stern and Jeanne Stern were awarded the International World Peace Prize.
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films. The complete documentation of all DEFA feature films from 1946 to 1993. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 668–669.
- Thomas Lindenberger : Hoam soiz gåhn, Ami, hoam soiz gåhn! Homeland Exploitation and Anti-Americanism in Early DEFA Films . In: Jan C. Behrends , Árpád von Klimó , Patrice G. Poutrus (Ed.): Anti-Americanism in the 20th Century. Studies on Eastern and Western Europe . Dietz, Bonn 2005, pp. 187-202, especially pp. 185-195.
Web links
- The Condemned Village in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The condemned village at filmportal.de
- The condemned village at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ F.-B. Habel: The great lexicon of DEFA feature films. The complete documentation of all DEFA feature films from 1946 to 1993. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , p. 669.
- ^ Alfred Bauer: German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , pp. 300 f.
- ↑ a b c See progress-film.de ( Memento from July 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ List of the most successful DEFA films on insidekino.de
- ^ Carl Andrießen in: Weltbühne , No. 8, 1952.
- ^ Daily Review , February 21, 1952.
- ↑ Soviet Zone. Bitter laurel . In: Der Spiegel , No. 7, 1952, p. 32. Online under Soviet Zone. Bitter laurel , spiegel.de, February 13, 1952 .
- ↑ Ralf Schenk: The second life of the film city Babelsberg . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 74.
- ^ The condemned village. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed August 3, 2018 .
- ↑ Internet site of the Thuringian state commissioner for dealing with flight and displacement http://www.thla-thueringen.de/index.php/startseite/jahresthema/421-flucht-und-vertrieb-in-thueringen
- ↑ The forgotten uprising, in Tagesspiegel on May 12, 2012 [1]
- ↑ See film-zeit.de ( Memento of the original from December 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
