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Another offering of vintage East German pictures gives us all the pieces of a cinematic puzzle: Heiner Carow’s 1968 memory- movie of traumatic experiences in WW2 displeased the Communist authorities and was shelved… only to be cannibalized as a back-story for a new 1970 release aimed as a dig at West German values. It’s a fascinating comparison — an ideologically-challenged art film becomes a piece of well-produced propaganda.

The Russians Are Coming & Career

DVD

Defa Film Library

B&W / 2:35 widescreen / Street Date April, 2017 / available through Defa Film Library /

Cinematography: Jürgen Brauer

Film Editor: Evelyn Carow

Original Music: Peter Gotthardt, Dietrich Kittner

Written by Heiner Carow, Herman Herlinghaus, Claus Küchenmeister inspired by the short story Die Anzeige by Egon Richter

Produced by Defa

Directed by Heiner Carow

Defa, or Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft was the film producing arm of the former Communist East German regime, that ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Leaning back and shrouded in the nocturnal darkness of an interrogation room with only a glint of overhead light hitting his upper chest, a convicted serial killer glares at his psychiatric interrogator and insists “you already know that!” This is the introductory image of taboo-obsessed German filmmaker Romuald Karmakar’s The Deathmaker (1995), and the jarring lack of context to the statement is by design; it’s as if Karmakar is saying, “This is a film about knowledge.” Confined entirely to the space of a single nondescript room in Weimar-era Germany yet surprisingly and exhilaratingly expansive, the rest of the film constitutes a diverse set of interrogations into what it means to know, what can be known, different types of knowledge, and the depths of human behavior that knowledge actually complicates and obfuscates rather than illuminates.

Until a brief appearance of two prison guards and a final-act injection of a young victim and a visiting doctor,...

Spiegel Online and the Süddeutsche Zeitung are reporting that character actor Jürgen Hentsch has died at the age of 75. Having made a name for himself at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Hentsch made his onscreen debut in the East German television production of Herrmann Zschoche's Carla (1965) and appeared in Konrad Wolf's classic antiwar film I Was Nineteen (1968).

Hentsch will probably be best remembered for his portrayal of Ernst Schultze, the psychiatrist who attempts to determine the psychological stability of the infamous serial killer who terrified Germany in the 1920s, Fritz Haarmann (Götz George) in Romuald Karmakar's The Deathmaker (1995). Hentsch also impressed German television viewers with his performances as the Social Democratic Party Chairman Herbert Wehner in Oliver Storz's Im Schatten der Macht and as Heinrich Mann in Heinrich Breloer's mini-series The Manns (2001).

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