DEFA Film Library - The Cinema of East Germany

If you have trouble finding anything, please call us at (413) 545-6681 or e-mail us at defa(at)german.umass.edu.

We are proud to present the long-awaited DVD release of Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?, directed by Slatan Dudow and co-written by Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Ottwald. This release represents the first restoration ever undertaken of the Weimar Republic classic. Long-time fans of Kuhle Wampe who have seen the restored version are astonished at the amount of detail now visible in the film.

In addition to such unprecedented audio and visual quality, the new DVD release includes new English subtitles, supervised by Brecht scholar Marc Silberman, and very special bonus materials.

•   Director Slatan Dudow’s first documentary How the Worker Lives (1930)
•   A 1974 film essay about the director by DEFA documentarist Volker Koepp
•   Essays with new information about the film and its history

We even discovered a short Prologue, featuring the film and theater critic Herbert Jhering, which was added by Dudow when the film was first re-released post-war in East Germany in 1958. We are grateful to all the many people whose support and technical expertise made the restoration and DVD-release of Kuhle Wampe possible . . . and we’d also like to thank our patient customers!

To order the film, click here.

To watch the trailer, click here.

Upcoming DVD Releases - May 2008

· Last to Know, an intense 2006 documentary by Marc Bauder & Dörthe Franke (pictured at left), features four – out of approximately 250,000 – former political prisoners in East Germany. Nearly twenty years after the fall of the Wall, it is still difficult to answer the questions of their children and friends and come to terms with a very personal and painful past.

· Censored: Kuhle Wampe is a docudrama is a detailed reconstruction of the censorship case against the landmark Weimar-era film, Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World? (1932). Directed by Slatan Dudow, the crew and cast included leftwing luminaries such as dramatist Bertolt Brecht, composer Hanns Eisler and balladeer Ernst Busch. The subject of vehement disputes, the case was argued over the course of three sessions. The film was banned twice for revolutionary and communist tendencies, and was perceived to threaten the state. About 230 meters of the original film fell victim to the censor’s shears. Based on original minutes and documents, as well as personal records of the case, Censored: Kuhle Wampe shows the censorship hearings and re-enactments of the scenes that were cut. In addition to footage from the original film, this docudrama includes original clips of Berlin in the 1920s and 30s and short testimonies filmed in the 1970s, with some of the actors involved in the Kuhle Wampe production.

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