Novel of a young marriage
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Novel of a young marriage |
| Country of production | GDR |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1952 |
| length | 99 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Kurt Maetzig |
| script |
Bodo Uhse Kurt Maetzig |
| production | DEFA |
| music | Wilhelm Neef |
| camera | Karl Plintzner |
| cut | Lena Neumann |
| occupation | |
| |
The novel of a young marriage is a DEFA German feature film directed by Kurt Maetzig in 1952. The film has been criticized for its strongly propagandistic features.
action
In 1946, the young actress Agnes Sailer came from Dresden to Berlin to play theater here. When an actress fails, she is immediately engaged for the role of Recha in Lessing's Nathan the Wise . The temple gentleman is played by the charismatic Jochen Karsten, with whom she later goes on a hamster tour and whom she gets closer to. Both of them get married before the premiere. The premiere was overshadowed by an incident: the director of the propaganda film Jud Süß , Hartmann, was sitting in the audience and had to be expelled from the hall by the artistic director Möbius. Only a few weeks later, however, numerous friends of Jochen stand up for the director during the public trial against Hartmann.
Agnes and Jochen endure difficult times together, when Agnes is hardly responsive for many weeks due to pneumonia. The four-sector city will soon become a divided city. Agnes is becoming increasingly involved in East Berlin, which Jochen wants to be suspicious of in the face of massive propaganda. However, Agnes argues that the mentalities are different in both parts of the city. She takes on the leading role in a socialist film - at the premiere Jochen leaves the cinema prematurely and then makes such derogatory comments about the flat propaganda of the material that Agnes bursts into tears. The film is panned in the West Berlin newspapers by a friend of Jochen's who at the premiere had made positive comments about the film and the leading actress. While Agnes is working on a cultural program for the opening of the new buildings on Stalinallee, Jochen is planning to perform at a cultural evening at which a girls' choir from Dresden will also sing - allegedly they were rescued from the GDR, but in reality they were kidnapped, like the East Berlin newspapers write. Agnes first asks Jochen not to go and finally gives him the choice: Either he stays or the marriage is over. Jochen takes part in the event, which is only half attended and in the end has to realize that Agnes was right. This occurs at the festive event on the occasion of the inauguration of the new buildings on Stalinallee, as it has otherwise been very involved in various associations in the GDR. At the end of the event, she is the only one besides the activists who also receives a lease for one of the new apartments.
Meanwhile, Jochen is frustrated in West Berlin: His theater engagement is terminated because theater director Plisch prefers to turn to film. He offers Jochen a role on the day of his divorce - as a Nazi in a film that Hartmann is supposed to make. Jochen is horrified and cancels. Shortly afterwards, on the street, he saw a group campaigning against militarization being crushed in West Berlin. He picks up one of the flags with the dove of peace and goes to the divorce judge. He confesses to Agnes that he has changed since their separation and gives her the flag. They walk away together.
production
The novel of a young marriage was shot in 1951 in the Babelsberg studio with exterior shots from East Berlin . The buildings were created by Otto Erdmann and Franz F. Fürst , production manager was Alexander Lösche .
The film had its world premiere on January 18, 1952 in the Babylon cinema in Berlin and in the DEFA film theater Kastanienallee. In 1954 it was shown in China as part of the German Film Week and was shown in Czechoslovakia in 1957 at the same event . In 1991 he was part of a retrospective at the Berlinale .
The propagandistic film deals one-sidedly with cultural politics in East and West, with real personalities from art and culture serving as a foil for certain characters in the film: Möbius portrays Wolfgang Langhoff , Burmeister is Boleslaw Barlog and director Hartmann is supposed to portray Veit Harlan . "[T] he clichéd presentation is just as embarrassing as the cheers for Stalin and the avenue named after him," says Frank-Burkhard Habel, looking back.
reception
Due to the strict black and white drawing of the film - even Jean-Paul Sartre's play The Dirty Hands is rejected in the film by Agnes as anti-socialist and Des Teufels General as militaristic - the film itself was panned by critics of the GDR. “Unfortunately, we still do a lot with the mallet,” stated Albert Wilkening in 1952. Der Spiegel ironically noted that “the novel of a young marriage by the national award-winning director Dr. Kurt Maetzig ( Ehe im Schatten ) [...] even the most loyal to the line [was] too progressive. "
In view of the criticism, director Kurt Maetzig was forced to comment and said:
“With the film 'Roman einer Junge Ehe' we, the collective that created this film, made an artistic attempt to shape one of the greatest problems that concerns every honest German today, namely the tearing up of our fatherland and the possibility of its reunification . We chose a marriage story because in the two spouses, as it were, the two parts of our torn fatherland can be expressed, because their love corresponds to the feeling of togetherness of our people, their separation can be compared to the separation of East and West Germany and because we are in it the final reunification that we have to fight for in reality. "
For the film service , the novel of a young marriage was a “propaganda film that portrays the events in Berlin between 1946 and 1951 from a strict SED perspective […] Artistically insignificant, the film is an authentic contemporary document about the hysteria and the resulting falsifications of the Truth in the Cold War is important and meaningful. ”This is the verdict of film critic Ralf Schenk, who described the novel of a young marriage in 1994 as an“ artistically outrageous, but politically highly interesting contemporary document ”.
literature
- Agde, Günter: Ambivalences galore. Kurt Maetzig's feature film NOVEL OF A YOUNG MARRIAGE (1952). In: Filmblatt Volume 18, No. 51 Spring 2013, pp. 23–36.
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 489-490 .
- Constantin Parvulescu: Producing Revolutionary Consciousness in Times of Radical Socialism ( Orphans of the East, Indiana University Press, 2015)
Web links
- Novel of a young marriage in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Novel of a young marriage at filmportal.de
- Novel of a young marriage at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ^ Alfred Bauer: German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , pp. 288 f.
- ↑ See defa.de - 1954
- ↑ See defa.de - 1957
- ↑ progress-film.de ( Memento of the original from October 1, 2011 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.
- ↑ F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films . Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 490 .
- ↑ a b bitter laurel . In: Der Spiegel , No. 7, 1952, p. 31.
- ↑ Quoted from: Bitterer Laurel . In: Der Spiegel , No. 7, 1952, p. 32.
- ↑ Novel of a Young Marriage. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ^ Ralf Schenk (Red.), Filmmuseum Potsdam (Hrsg.): The second life of the film city Babelsberg. DEFA feature films 1946–1992 . Henschel, Berlin 1994, p. 61.
