What would you do if a creepy man in a bar claimed that he had sold your guardian angel – but could get it back to you for a price? If you are Mick, the older of the two boys living on the street, you might be wise to this trickster “Landolfi” and tell him to get lost. If you are the young Sauly, you might be confused that he knew your name (Mick’s “He overheard it!” does not convince you) and begin to wonder whether you had been living without a guardian angel all this time. It would explain a lot for two homeless boys trying to figure out how to get to the beach. Sure, they’re pretty clever and know how to survive – but is that enough?
Mick and Sauly (filmportal)
Frank Beyer‘s 1983 film Bockshorn (Taken for a Ride) – tells the story of two boys’ adventures hitchhiking through a fictive country that looks suspiciously like America and Cuba. They let themselves get tricked (ins Bockshorn jagen lassen) into Landolfi’s attempt to punish them for rejecting his favors. Although they had wanted to make it to the beach, Sauly becomes literally sick with the thought that he might be missing a guardian angel, so they go off to look for it in the town of Prince. Mick, trying to solve the riddle of this guardian angel story, tries desperately to find the Mr. Miller who supposedly bought the angel from Landolfi. The joke is on him, since everyone in the town is named Miller and no one has a clue about angels, real or imagined. The boys continue on their way, Sauly gets sicker and Mick is at his wits’ end. They track down Landolfi, but even his incredulity that they would have believed such an absurd story is not enough to turn their fate around. Sauly, still longing for a guardian angel, uses his last energy to try and attack Landolfi, but falls to this death.
Sauly attacking Landolfi (filmportal.net)
If Sauly’s tragic death seems to be the result of a con man’s evil sense of humor, we would not be so moved by the poetics and larger moral tale of the film. In some ways, Sauly and Mick had both lost their guardian angels long ago when they wound up homeless. Although they try to look out for one another, they are ultimately only two children faced with a world that does not want them. Mick is not old enough to be a father figure for Saul and himself both; the few adults who want to help them turn out either to be scheming against them or not entirely trustworthy. In the family town of Prince, not a single Mr. Miller takes them in. On a farm, the family offers to let them stay in exchange for back-breaking work for Mick. The disappointment turns the film title’s warning into an ominous foreshadowing. There is no reason to think that Sauly would have lived happily ever after had he not been bullied about by Landolfi in the bar; the problem is that he and Mick were in a place where there was no one to care for them. It is more than a road movie, despite some characterizations of it as such. Hitchhiking is not child’s play, and their initial good luck at tricking adults out of money and food does not make them good candidates for the open road. They did not have a family or home, a situation they are confronted with at every turn when everyone else seems to have one, whether biological or a family of like-minded friends. That is the real tragedy, and one that is not new to the twentieth century. Homeless children are not safe in or from society, and there is nothing they can do but hope the next truck driver who stops for them is honest and will get them to the beach. They had been tricked long before they met Landolfi – they had no escape for a life in which the search for a guardian angel is their best hope of survival.
In the 1985 delightful East German children’s film Operation Violin Case(Unternehmen Geigenkasten, dir. Gunter Friedrich), young Ole finds himself in a hospital bed with a broken leg after crashing during an attempt to fly using a kite as wings. His father begins to lecture him on the need for scientific theory: “You can’t just run off and try to fly like that!” he tells his son in exasperation. Ole, having heard too many of these speeches, turns to the hospital television and discovers a German-Austrian version of a Sherlock Holmes movie, the 1937 mistaken-identity comedy The Man Who was Sherlock Holmes(Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war, dir. Karl Hartl). Ole has found his next passion: solving crimes.
“Holmes,” theorizing about the case
Back home, he assigns his friend Andreas the role of Dr. Watson, and the two set of to solve mysteries – with the appropriate props, of course, including “Holmes’s” pipe, violin case and hat. It is not so easy to find crimes, though, with so many honest people around. Then they witness a bicycle accident, and Andreas notes that the harried cyclist not only refuses help but is also wearing a fake mustache. Clearly the man must be up to no good, a suspicion confirmed quickly when they find “Mr. Neumann” loading electronics into a van. The police meanwhile have put out a bulletin on a van full of stolen goods worth 10,000 East German Marks, and Ole and Andreas talk their classmates into skipping the first hour of school to help find the criminal. When that action fails, it is up to Holmes and Watson to solve the case, even if no one takes them seriously.
Neumann kidnapping Ole
They do, of course, catch Neumann in the act, but he sees them as well and kidnaps Ole. Andreas informs the police, finds his friend, and the police find Neumann. The two boys are sent home to their agitated parents, awaiting punishment for skipping the entire school day and acting outside of the law. In an attempt to teach his son a lesson and perhaps keep him busy and out of more trouble, Ole’s father has decided that violin lessons are in order. The irony of pushing his son further into the Holmes character is lost on the adults, but not on the boys or on the cinema audience. The police officer who arrives at the house deciders that further discipline is unwarranted. He warns against not involving the police in further “detective mysteries,” but then proclaims that the boys have helped protect socialist society against those who would undermine it and presents the boys with a medal.
Despite the clear nod to socialist values, including black market activity as one of the worst imaginable crimes against the state, the film is impressive in its universal appeal as well as its references to German filmmaking. No ones finds it odd that two boys decide to imitate characters in a film made during the Nazi era about two detectives pretending to be Holmes and Watson. This aspect of Operation Violin Case suggests that the 1937 film appeared on GDR television often enough to be an obvious reference and points to an acceptance of two British literary icons who lived a rather bourgeois lifestyle. The tension between judging individual actions against a responsibility to act as part of the socialist collective is also central to the film’s moral; here, again, a children’s film serves as a vehicle for communicating a socialist value system through the presumed innocence of children. Boys will be boys, after all, which is fine as long as they grow up into law-abiding socialist men.
In the East German (DEFA) 1962 fairy tale film Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen, dir. Götz Friedrich), we meet some of Red Riding Hood’s friends – and enemies. Her best pals are the ever-worried Rabbit and the clumsy and rather childish Bear. The Big Bad Wolf finds a partner in crime, Fox, both of whom are out to get Red Riding Hood and co.
3 friends: Red Riding Hood, Bear and Rabbit
As in the original story, Red Riding Hood must bring Grandmother a basket – no wine this time, but rather a healthy pail of milk, some bread, and the time-honored remedy for colds, a bit off snuff. While the three friends stray from the path and play around, Bear accidentally knocks over the pail of milk. No problem – Rabbit runs home to bring a new pail of milk, only to return and find Bear and Red Riding Hood leaving the path for the forest again. The wily Fox has tricked Bear to go in search of honey, while Red Riding Hood goes to pick mushrooms for Grandmother. Rabbit’s hand-wringing and begging earns him Red Riding Hood’s anger, telling him not to be a Hasenfuß (a scaredy cat; literally, a rabbit’s foot).
Red Riding Hood has chased away the evil Fox.
Predictably, it is a set-up: Fox and Wolf attack her, but they are no longer working together: Wolf hits Fox over the head with a stick and turns to snatch the girl, but Red Riding Hood has outsmarted him. She blows a handful of snuff in his face. He then sneezes so much that he must crawl away, with Red Riding Hood throwing stones after him. Fox has meanwhile finished off the rest of the basket’s goodies, but the exhausted Red Riding Hood is gleeful – she has outsmarted Wolf and does a little victory dance.
The jarring part of this scene is Red Riding Hood’s anger. She throws the stones not only to scare away Fox, but to hit him, that is, to hurt him. The fight has left her with dirt smeared on her face, her clothes disheveled, and a look of hatred that the camera captures in a close-up. What is the purpose of showing this new side of Red Riding Hood? She has defeated Fox, but the traditional fairy tale lesson is lost, since she once again wanders into the forest, allowing Wolf time to beat her to Grandmother’s. It is a turning point that is not really a turning point.
In a film that is otherwise careful to avoid outright violence (her hunter-father carries Wolf away to a place where he can do no more harm, his hunting rifle unused), Red Riding Hood’s reaction suggests a different kind of moral. Perhaps she will keep her promise to never stray from the path again, perhaps not. What is certain, though, is that the next time she encounters an evil-doer, she will know how to take care of herself.
The phrase “Nazi fairy tale films” seems like either a bad joke, or else yet another area that Nazis turned into propaganda. Yet, Nazi film adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales represent important examples of children’s films in cinematic and educational history. Although the film industry in Nazi Germany came under the purview of Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, he stated explicitly that children’s films should be free of Nazi symbols and ideology. It is time to lift the taboo of freely discussing Nazi filmmaking beyond the well-known overtly anti-Semitic and nationalistic films. After all, in 1940 alone, German film companies produced nine 35 mm feature films based on fairy tales, seven of them Brothers Grimm adaptations – almost half of the total nineteen fairy tale films intended for the Big Screen in Nazi Germany made between 1935 and 1944. From Puss in Boots to Red Riding Hood, Nazi fairy tale films offer us a unique glimpse into the values of good vs. evil that the Big Screen presented young cinema-goers – values that cannot be reduced to stereotypical Nazi slogans of the supremacy of the German race.
These films are not easy to come by, with rare exception, but I think this lack of access to films is part of the problem. What happens if Nazi fairy tale films were remastered as DVDs and made available through, for instance, the Goethe Institute or the German Center for Political Education – as many East German iconic films are? They would then become part of a clear socio-political framework that would situate them within German and cinema history. More important, they would not remain such a Big Secret, and more scholars than the few now writing about them could offer more interpretations than currently available.
Rumpelstiltskin, 1940
Let me give a small taste of some of these films, which I will be discussing in the weeks that come: Let’s start with the delightful Puss in Boots (Der gestiefelte Kater, dir. Alf Zengerling, 1935), which demonstrates the director’s successful transition from puppet films to live action films mixed in with the occasional costumed animal character and odd documentary film footage of animals (the lion jump cut is a bit odd, but the film still rates as one of my all-time favorites). And of course there is Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen, dir. Fritz Genschow and Renee Stobrawawhich, 1937), which smacks of Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) Dorothy-in-Kansas reality (b/w) and dreams (bold color) of the fantasy world. Unfortunately, Red Riding Hood’s Nazi-era hunter is decked out in Nazi gear or else I would recommend it for any family film evening… maybe a bit of Film-Photo-Shopping could rescue it. Then there is The Rabbit and the Hedgehog(Der Hase und der Igel,dir. Alf Zengerling, 1940), interestingly particularly for the rabbit character, played by Paul Walker – a world-renowned actor of diminutive stature who, with Zengerling, managed to make a living in Nazi-era filmmaking, including starring in such classics as Rumpelstilskin (pictured above with the farmer’s daughter and the instruction to turn straw into gold, 1940). I lose trace of Walker after his last films in the 1940s – reason enough to open up the files and film-reel canisters and release Hitler’s celluloid princes, princesses, and all of their subjects to some scholarly scrutiny today.
Empty filmic spaces tell us as much about life and politics in East Germany as do the movies that made it to the Big Screen. I have often wondered, for instance, why the socialist film production company DEFA never made a live-action film based on “Hansel and Gretel.” DEFA pulled out most of the stops for other Brothers Grimm fairy tales favorites, like Red Riding Hood(dir. Götz Friedrich, 1962), and The Frog Prince(dir. Walter Beck, 1988). So what kept them from imagining a full-length movie version about two hungry siblings, a controlling stepmother, breadcrumbs, and a gingerbread house owned by an evil witch? There is, after all, much to love about the brother and sister team of Hansel and Gretel, who, chased away from home, wind up in an adorable cottage where the sister is in charge of fattening up her brother for the witch’s meal. Pathos, irony, murder, and a reminder to never, ever use edible objects to mark one’s way through the woods: this fairy tale had it all.
Hansel and Gretel, Illustration from “Die Gartenlaube,” 1894
To be fair, the fairy tale did make its way to the Dresden animation studio as a 1975 hand puppet short feature. A year later, the comedic duo Rolf Herricht and Hans-Joachim Preil played the parts of Hansel and Gretel in a trailer for DEFA’s summer film line-up. In this brief version, the “children” encounter an attractive, singing witch, who wants nothing more than to lure them into the magical world of cinema during vacation. Perhaps part of the trailer’s cast made filmmakers nervous about any further mention of Hansel and Gretel. The witch was none other than the young Nina Hagen, who a few months later followed her expatriated stepfather Wolf Biermann from East Germany into the West and a successful record career.
But the Grimms’ fairy tales had staying power, enough to overcome even political intrigue. Given the line-up of DEFA fairy tale films, it seems more plausible that the story itself presented too many obstacles. Key parts of the tale would have proven difficult to change for a happy socialist ending, and DEFA filmmakers were most successful when they did not tinker too much with the general arc of the Grimms’ narratives. “Hansel and Gretel” is about a society marked by insufficient food supplies, parents who force their children out of the house and Gretel’s heroic saving of her brother by pushing the witch into the oven to burn to death.
Nina Hagen as a witch, this time in “7 Dwarves: The Woods are Not Enough,” 2006. FAZ 10/24/2006
These were not topics that could be transformed into a feel-good, socialist-humanist morality tale. Two desperate German children tricking an elderly woman in to a fiery death would have summoned unwelcome images of the Holocaust – an association that would have been impossible to ignore or treat lightly. The witch would have to be burned properly for the end to make any sense, as demonstrated by Rudolf Jugert’s forgettable 1971 West German production of the fairy tale. In that 8 mm version, a confusing blinking red light pulsed underneath an apparently cold oven, making it more of a convenient container in which to jail the witch instead of a place to turn her to ash. This was one part of the German national heritage that the East was willing to ignore. Still, “Hansel and Gretel” marks the top of many lists of DEFA movies that are noticeable for their absence. One wishes that DEFA might have given it a shot.
What is it about youth on the verge of disaster that makes for such compelling films? The best part of them, of course, comes with the inevitable sacrifice of one of the young protagonists, preferably a suicide or murder that – although useless for the individual in question – catalyzes the rest of the group (or the film audience) to see the error of these adolescent ways. If we can see all of this drama unfold in black and white, in the 1950s, in a West German production that was as much about postwar anxieties about youth as it was about caring what happened to young people, the film gets better before we even watch it. Give it a cool English title for export and those American GIs stationed in West Germany in the 1950s, and show it in retrospectives alongside its (much better made) East German parallel Berlin Ecke Schönhauser, and you have a film worthy of its would-be James Dean-like coolness, auf Deutsch.
I am talking, of course, about Die Halbstarken(dir. 1956, Georg Tressler), the West German production about a wanna-be gang of young people who get involved in the usual juvenile delinquency problems: unfair and rigid parents who will not admit that they have financial problems, let alone solve them; a disinherited son of said parents; sex and the dangerous promise of it; alcohol, including the timeless tradition of raiding the parents’ liquor cabinet; hip music and dancing; high-maintenance hair-cuts (for the young men – girls had it so much easier in the 1950s); the eternal search for the perfect leather jacket; a cash shortage related partially to the desperate need for a Big Car (a Buick, of course); gunfire; poorly-planned and dangerous shenanigans-cum-heists; and – most important – teenage boredom. A bonus is the lead hooligan, the actor Horst Buchholz (aka Henry Bookholt) as the gang leader Freddy, best known for his role in The Magnificent Seven. The unfortunate English titles are variously Teenage Wolfpack, Wolfpack, and, once in a great while, the more accurate Hooligans. The movie can be downloaded for free in German and English at the Internet Archive, and is the perfect film for fans of such movies as Blackboard Jungleand all things that are a memorial to James Dean, whether as part of a course on post-World War II Germany or Cinema of Divided Germany or sexuality or anyone who just really enjoys pop culture of the 1950s.
One of the key sites in this film is the city’s swimming pool – a public setting that allowed for a gathering of youth. This kind of public setting that seemed to be a harmless or at least neutral part of the built landscape was suddenly the domain of the Halbstarken. The teenagers at the pool smoke, harass the lifeguards, tease the girls. Other public areas include the gas station, where the protagonist of the story, Freddy, works when he and his boss can be bothered to allow this brief interaction with true wealth: gas-guzzling big cars that young men without connections or a decent robbery can only dream of. His buddies hang out there, watching expensive cars drive by on their way to assuredly exciting places. The kids drink Coca-Cola and eat “exotic” foreign treats like candy, talk about society in the most derogatory terms possible – and in a new, adolescent language that seems foreign to adults around them – express their hopes and fears, both in rebellion of and embrace of a new modernity. The ultimate public space becomes the “Espresso” club, where these young good-for-nothings can dance, drink alcohol, and be in charge of their world: Adults fade into the background.
In this film, the role of girls among boys, but also boys among boys, is particularly interesting: peers become a reason to show off, to get in trouble, and to drag others around them into situations that they have a hard time getting out of. Thus, the very same society that the Halbstarken want to leave behind them looks eerily like their own society, where people go along with other people in the interest of fitting in, almost consciously ignoring the frightening everyday life and consequences for their actions that they have created for themselves. Ultimately, members who get out of this society find themselves confronted with it violently – more violently than any adults could have imagined for the teenagers – and are forced to “grow up” in the face of a society whose morals are, at least here, at best ambivalent.
But why do we care so much about this era? To begin, the 1950s offered a new age in West German, and thus Cold War, history. With the introduction of a new currency in West Germany (the Federal Republic) in 1948 (replacing the Reichsmark with the Deutsche Mark), the financial aid package “Marshall Plan” funded by the United States, and a joint US and West German priority of bringing the country out of its postwar social and economic destruction, West Germany was in the midst of its “Economic Miracle” years – a term often used by outside observers and Germans themselves. A new consumer culture had evolved, with a stress on the return to a traditional nuclear family, with a working father and a stay-at-home mother (see Robert Moeller’s book on the subject, Protecting Motherhood: Women and the Family in the Politics of Postwar West Germany). Commodities such as new kitchen appliances, fashion, evenings out (including at the cinema) and cars marked a decided public sense of having left the Second World War behind. Travel, too, was a key part of this era, marked especially by the Volkswagen Beetle – which also helped enable a near manic-desire for West Germans to travel (for more on this topic, look at Rudy Koshar’s German Travel Cultures). It was not unusual to see a packed VW of family or friends descend upon a Spanish beach just for the weekend.
But such periods of a seeming utopia also have other, darker sides. Not everyone can be part of the miracle, and some people do not want to be. West German adolescents comprised one of the most important group of outsiders, sometimes excluded, and other times simply disgusted by, the appearance of a society that had “made it.” Indeed, adolescents became one of the most important participants in this new society: some young people embraced a consumer culture that they could now afford; others refused to part of that society and developed their own sub-culture, referred to by the adults around them (and seldom themselves) and as”Halbstarken,” or “Hooligans.”
“Hooligans” (although better than the movie’s English translation, which brings up images of Nazi werewolf movements or animal viciousness in general) is perhaps an unfair translation, since it connotes people who are interested only in getting whatever they want, at any cost, with a palpable desire to leave destruction – or at least defacing of public and private property – in their wake, and without a political or even consciously social agenda. The Halbstarken might better be described as a post-World War II “lost generation,” with some roots in the interwar lost generation years that provided little meaningful existence for young people. The Halbstarken-Hooligans had a political and social agenda: the protesting of what appeared to be a hypocritical, bourgeois society that allowed no criticism, and certainly allowed no open discussion of the sudden disappearance of all mentions of the Nazi period.
The Halbstarken wanted meaning in their lives, and they found it in their subculture of – literally – their bodies. Fist-fights dominated many Halbstarken activities, part of an attempt to both reject and threaten the “peaceful” culture of traditional society. In fighting each other, they let it be known that they were ready to fight others, and not only metaphorically. In common perceptions, at least, violent fights between police officers and these young people were daily news in most large cities; teachers complained of their disruptive behavior in class (if the students even showed up), and many a politician put it on his or her agenda to “deal with” these young people for once and for all. The public feared the potential aggression of these young people, believing Halbstarken of perhaps not only creating chaos but also destabilizing the government and the regime.
Still, what we see with this movie is a kind of Bildungsroman, an attempt to find meaning in life without responsible adult or traditional societal directives. Perhaps ironically, these sorts of inner voyages cannot truly be separated from the very society that a subculture rejects. The Halbstarken had a “uniform” of their own – leather, denim, slicked back pompadours – all iconic symbols that defined the group for each other and for the “insiders.” It is thus not surprising that, ultimately, the identities of these young people eventually transitioned into their participation in traditional society, with university studies, jobs, and families. That is to say, there could be no sequel to Die Halbstarken that would not be a boring and disappointing follow-up of teenagers turning into their own bourgeois parents. No wonder we cling to these heroes and heroines who were not afraid, to the point of folly, to ridicule the very cinema audience watching them.
If you have not seen Iron Sky(dir. Timo Vuorensola, 2012), march (there is no real goose-stepping in it or I would make that bad joke) to the nearest rental store or your favorite on-line streaming source and get it. Don’t read the negative reviews about it or go its Facebook site until you have seen the movie, or you will fall into the kind of Weltschmerz despair that will keep you from enjoying the ride. And what a ride it is: Nazis flee to the Dark Side of the Moon in 1945 and spend the next 75 years preparing their return to (yep, take over) Earth. The headquarters/fortress looks like the Pentagon, except it is in the shape of a swastika; a blonde beauty (Julia Dietze) with perfect skin prepares her students for the message of friendship that National Socialists will bring with their invasion, err, triumphant home-coming; the African-American model/astronaut falls into the Moon Nazis’ hands and gets “albino_ized” – whitened – against his will; two Nazi soldiers stare at the centerfold of an Earth porn magazine and try and figure out why the hair “down there” on women looks like “our great Führer’s mustache.” If there is a bad joke or science fiction film allusion or a scene in poor taste that the movie misses, it’s probably in the director’s cut. At least I hope so.
The movie was several years in the making, a Finnish-German-Australian co-production that relied heavily on Wreck-a-Movie – an early crowd-funding site that asked anyone and everyone for suggestions on what should be in the movie, and for donations while they were at it. It is a small wonder that the film is not the length of Wagner’s Ring Cycle(don’t worry, the reference makes it into the movie). So perhaps fans of an idea are not the best source of good filmmaking…but I fear that a critically-acclaimed version of a film on Moon Nazis would have been, well, either uncomfortable or boring. Maybe both. Reviewers’ complaints about bad acting and a failed plot line missed the rather tricky sleight-of-hand that it took to make a movie born of a persistent campy-fascination with Nazis that cinema audiences and an awful lot of people in general hang on to. Even a cult film like Starship Troopers (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1997) only dared dance on the edge of Nazi allusions, with cinema-goers fighting for the right to be the first to point out the Gestapo-like uniforms here or the references to war propaganda movies there.
So, to summarize: Iron Sky is not subtle. Any jokes anyone has ever made about Nazis abound – but then the same goes for the films’ Americans, whose only positive contribution to humankind was apparently Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 The Great Dictator. Spoiler alert: The Moon Nazis don’t win, primarily because every country in the United Nations (except Finland) has a secret spaceship program ready to nuke any and all impending threats to Earth. Second spoiler alert: After defeating the Moon Nazis, the Earth’s nuclear powers turn on each other, a scene in outer space that it is not nearly as exciting as the fisticuffs action in the UN conference room after the U.S. lays claim to the vast, untapped resource of “helium-3” on the moon. The crowd-funded sequel to the movie, Iron Sky: The Coming Raceassures me that all I need to know about it is the title. Nay-sayers might read the lack of a script, contracts for actors, or the general absence of a plan into that statement. I can’t think of a more winning combination.
Final triumphant scene of father and son in “Somewhere in Berlin”
I have been writing on children’s films specifically for half a decade, and began to include them in my general work more than a decade ago. Yet, the more I write about, research and watch them, the less confident I am in my answer of what a children’s film is. Part of the dilemma is that filmmakers seldom know what their target audience is, evening arguing the point with studios up until the point that a film is premiered (in which case the audience seems to have the say). The third film in the East German film production company DEFA’s repertoire, Irgendwo in Berlin(Somewhere in Berlin, dir. Gerhard Lamprecht, 1946) has consistently been included in volumes about East German children’s films. The story of a boy struggling to understand his despondent father, returned from World War II, the film might well have spoken to other young children after the war who despaired at ever seeing the “real” return of their fathers – the letters of a young Brigitte Reimann who described her Vati’s disheveled appearance at the train station where the family went to meet him after his release from a Soviet POW camp come to mind. Certainly, Somewhere in Berlin has enough pedagogical messages to instruct young boys (never mind the girls) as to how to push their fathers to re-assume their roles as heads of household and the nation. Still, given the choice between that much reality and the brilliant colors and fantasy of the Soviet folklore film The Stone Flower (dir. Alexandr Ptushko, 1946), released the same year in German cinemas, would children or even their parents willingly have chosen Somewhere? Or does Somewhere merit the category of children’s film more because of its subject matter – the everyday tragedies and victories of young people – than does a film that must make its appropriateness for a children’s audience explicit by framing the movie with an old man who tells the tale of the “stone flower” to a group of excited children?
“Sabine Kleist, 7 Years Old,” dir. Helmut Dziuba, 1982 (East Germany).
This photo is a screen shot of one of DEFA‘s children’s films, Sabine Kleist, 7 Jahre. In many descriptions of the movie, the orphaned Sabine is a lonely girl who must come to terms with the bitter-sweet reality that she has no real family, no real home – just the orphanage. I am working on the idea that the orphanage in this film is her home, indeed a happy one.
