Reinhard Hauff

Quote:
Nik, a released prisoner who started writing in prison, wants to leave his past behind, but refuses to contact his former girlfriend and her family. Under the name of his jail buddy Henry, he moves in with his pen pal–who has never seen him–and is always watched suspiciously by their roommate. Nik seeks contact with the literary culture, although he feels disgusted by the pompous fuss of this society. He is not without talent and works on a novel in which he minutely describes the abduction of an industrialist. Henry gets shot at the prison breakout and visits Nik to get help from him. He likes his novel plot and wants to put it into action.Read More »

Plot Summary
Arnulf Kabe and his wife Andrea live in East Berlin. Arnulf has only one ambition in life: to be able to leave the East and live in the West. He hatches a plan to get himself arrested at a border crossing and is eventually bought out by the West Germans. He has reached his aim and is living in West Berlin now, he even has an affair with the attractive Veronika, but he can’t help missing his wife. And he finds a way to be able to return to the East: he will work as a spy for the East German state security. That way he’ll be able to cross the border any time and pay her a visit. Eventually, he even manages to bring his wife to the West on a borrowed passport. However, she finds it difficult adapt to life on the other side of the Wall.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
An excellent example of a particularly interesting new genre of young German cinema; bizarre, deadly serious variations on the reactionary German “Heimat” films of yore – those insufferable, sentimental “kitsch” prosodies to Fatherland, Soil, and Family. This fully realized work effectively upsets this tradition by recounting a tale of oppressed 19th-century German peasants who become rebels against the state out of poverty, revealing (instead of romanticizing) the brutal degradation of German rural life at the time. Particularly audacious is the presence of an itinerant Jew peddler as mastermind (!) of the conspiracy, predictably leading to (unfounded) charges of anti-semitism against a young director who has dared to reintroduce the Jew into German dramaturgy.Read More »