It was different with cinema. There was less censorship and more freedom. Here, life in this little country of the GDR – its everyday, its life stories and fates – were more often the center of attention . . . .

I was in the middle of possibly the most exciting shoot of my life. We had been filming the Monday demonstrations on the streets of Leipzig...

When director Helke Misselwitz and film-conservation expert Harald Brandes arrived at Babelsberg Postproduction on July 27, 2009 to approve the new print of Herzsprung, they learned that the facility was closing—–after almost 100 years in service...

Certainly, we tried to tell an enthralling story and chose the narrative structure of a crime genre, although you cannot describe this film as a crime movie in a conventional sense ...

There was nothing to smuggle that day. Other than the usual groceries, cheese, fruit and a TV magazine, we had nothing in our luggage...

Our hangout was one of those East Berlin corner pubs that gave you the feeling that nothing had changed in the last hundred years...

I was living in Prenzlauer Berg at the time. I was home by myself for the first time in days...

DEFA dramaturg Dieter Wolf remembers the production of For Eyes Only — Top Secret, the film that became an East German box office hit in 1963 . . . .

The DEFA documentary whisper & SHOUT (Dir: Dieter Schumann, 1988) is the only official documentary ever made about the East German rock scene before the Wall came down...

At first sight, this is a dump in northern Berlin: a place where you unload household items, state and status symbols, love letters, military uniforms, an accordion. It is fall 1989...

I had marked the date in my calendar: November 4, 1989. Everybody knew about the call put out by artists, Neues Forum and other organizations—the call to demonstrate for democracy...

I came to my film La Villette like “Hans in Luck” in the fairy tale. It was late fall 1989 . . . .

 In the scenario, there was the scene with a gay man, and someone said, as long as there is a gay character, why not do a real story? This made sense to us . . . .

Heinz Kersten was one of the few West German critics who focused on East German theater and cinema, making his a rare cultural voice from across the Wall...

I was at Mount Holyoke College in [South Hadley], Massachusetts. Film editor Gudrun Plenert, director of photography Thomas Plenert and I, as director, had been on tour with Winter Adé...

I had had no choice but to work as a documentary director, as I was not allowed to make feature films . . . .

There were different kinds of juvenile detention centers in the GDR: open vs closed, single gender vs mixed . . .  The guys and girls in the detention centers were no saints . . .

From 1928 until 1931, I worked at the Schauspielhaus in Leipzig. I had also starred in Girls in Uniform, which had not yet premiered. Brecht and Dudow were preparing to make Kuhle Wampe and were looking for a new face for the role of Anni . . . .

I wanted to consciously search for the beginning. What do I believe in? Why did I say yes? Why did I join the Party? Why was I thrown out? That’s what I wanted to find out . . . .

In the 1960s, when I studied at VGIK, an ideological “thaw” in the Soviet Union was taking place, which had been initiated by Nikita Krushchev. It was a time of upheaval and re-evaluation . . . .

I experienced the first manned launch into outer space while studying in Moscow, along with all the excitement that accompanied it. At that point my interest in the cosmos . . . .

We assume the same fiction in film that we see on the music theatre stage. The fiction implies that the work has not yet been composed and that orchestral musicians skilled in improvisation receive their impetus from the actions and reactions of the performers . . .

The opera Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) does not tell a saga, nor is its substance a saga; rather, it talks about people who tell a saga . . .

The differences between television and DEFA had to do with the fact that television was a part of the state apparatus that was primarily responsible for propaganda, while DEFA was a state-owned enterprise ... which met its annual production plan more like a business . . .

On the phone, Thomas Plenert asked me, “Hi Jörg. What’s happening?” He sounded as if he were just around the corner, but he was calling from the USA, where he was on tour...

In the immediate postwar period, our thoughts about the Ufa Studio were based on what we had seen in movie theaters during the War. We wanted to clearly distinguish the newly-founded  DEFA Studio from the Ufa tradition . . . 

I had a lot of fear and a lot of luck. After I finished my studies in 1990, I worked for a year as a dramaturg at Deutsche Fernsehfunk (DFF), the former East German television station. It was a one-year grace period... 

That evening I had an old friend over, an astrophysicist I had known for many years. He was a world-renowned expert in solar physics. Despite this, the East German higher-ups did not allow him to travel to the West...

A very special invitation was sitting on my desk: an invitation for the premiere of Coming Out, the first East German gay film, to be held on November 9, 1989...

It was not the idea from the beginning for Mein lieber Robinson (My Dear Robinson). It emerged unexpectedly shortly after we started shooting . . . .

Our conversation is a little tricky. The last scenes for The Actress have been shot, the film is edited and the mix is done. Nothing more can be changed at this point . . . .

Caution! In your hand is a film that was rated “extremely dangerous” at its 1994 premiere in Germany. But before you panic, let me start from the beginning . . . 

“You can believe it! Comrade Schabowski said so. Ask Comrade Schabowski!" The couple—in their late 50s, stocky, typical Berliners—stood at the infamous Palace of Tears...

For me, the only good painting is one that includes a secret.  - Strawalde

Herwig Kipping was born in 1948 in Meyen and studied first mathematics, then film in Babelsberg. He was considered early on an unusual talent but also something of an enfant terrible at DEFA...

Christian Steyer became famous in 1970s East Germany as a heartthrob on the silver screen...

There is no need to come up with a heroic story about the fall of the Wall. Such a story exists very personally in the heads of all crew members...

First the group had the neutral name “Nachwuchs” [Younger Generation]. But when our first DEFA-film, Latest from the Da-Da-R) by Jörg Foth, premiered in October 1990, we found the name a little silly – Jörg, for one, was already 41 years old – and we agreed quickly on DaDaeR . . . .

At the end of the 1970s, a lake disappeared in East Germany. And with the lake vanished all working equipment over night, including an excavator...

One of them read aloud from the notes he had taken in the dark. Halfway through it I laughed, and they were shocked . . . .

Still, I can’t manage to render a STATEMENT on the fall of the Berlin Wall. HOW COULD I? Was it a turning point that led to German unity? Or to re-unification? Was it a revolution, a peaceful one?...

In the early 1970s, we in our dorm, out in the sticks in Babelsberg, devoured everything by Fassbinder that was broadcast. In Warsaw, Prague and Budapest we spent whole days at the cinema...