Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film [Paperback]

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film merges feminist film theory and cultural history in an investigation of womens films that span the last two decades of the former East Germany. Jennifer L. Creech explores the ways in which these films functioned as an alternative public sphere where official ideologies of socialist progress and utopian collectivism could be resisted. Emerging after the infamous cultural freeze of 1965, these womens films reveal a shift from overt political critique to a covert politics located in the intimate, problem-rich experiences of everyday life under socialism. Through an analysis of films that focus on what were perceived as womens concerns marital problems, motherhood, emancipation, and residual patriarchyCreech argues that the female protagonist served as a crystallization of socialist contradictions. By framing their politics in terms of womens concerns, these films used womens desire and agency to contest the more general problems of social alienation and collectivism, and to re-imagine the possibilities of self-fulfillment under socialism.

Not only is this monograph sure to become an essential resource for Germanists and historians of socialist media and East German culture, but it will also make rewarding reading for feminist scholars keen to explore the implications of the public/private dichotomy and possibilities for womens emancipation under socialism. With this well-researched and skillfully argued study, Creech undertakes the critical intervention of rescuing East German womens films from the dustbin of history.

This volume is recommended to film enthusiasts and scholars as well as anyone interested in the history of DEFA and the complex relationship between cultural politics, feminism, and cinema. In her innovative and internationally oriented approach to DEFA, Creech demonstrates the enduring relevance of these films and their critical engagement with the feminine as mother,lÓp