Kurt Maetzig (1911-2012)
By Dorothea Holloway | August 21, 2012
Am 8. August 2012 ist Kurt Maetzig gestorben. (1911-2012) Der bedeutende DEFA-Regisseur Kurt Maetzig und Ron waren Freunde.
Im Jahre 1990 schrieb Ron Holloway in KINO – German Film No:36 über Das Kaninchen bin ich (The Rabbit Is Me) (1965/1989):
A cause celebre among the dozen DEFA feature films shelved with one sweep of Walter Ulbricht’s hand on the 23rd of January 1966, Kurt Maetzig’s Das Kaninchen bin ich The Rabbit Is Me) was singled out on that day by the GDR party chief in a personally signed editorial published in Neues Deutschland. From then on, the East German shelved films dating from 1965/66 were referred to euphemistically in the German Democratic Republic as “rabbit films.”
One would naturally suspect that a film gathering dust on a shelf in an archive for a quarter-century will perforce show its age, something like an old horse being finally let out to pasture. But just the opposite was true when the film’s belated premiere was officially celebrated in mid-December at the Academy of Fine Arts in East Berlin. If anything, the events of the last few months, with the mounting revelations of moral indiscretions among the SED Party elite, conveniently paved the way for a ready recognition of the film’s underlining theme.
Based on Manfred Bieler’s novel, this is the story of 19-year-old Maria, whose brother has been arrested as a student counter-revolutionary (apparently for demonstrating against the erection of the Berlin Wall and the “safeguarding” of GDR borders.) Without anyone else to care for her save for a kind aunt, and with no chance to study herself at the university, she slips into a compromising relationship with the very judge who has sentenced her brother to prison – and becomes his mistress. Moreover, she is “kept” in a villa retreat out in the country, where her true identity is disguised under the pretense of being a “close family relative.”
Maria’s misfortune begins when she reluctantly falls in love with her married lover – albeit in hopes of somehow resolving the issue of her brother’s questionable imprisonment, and perhaps one day winning his release. These hopes, however, are shattered when the political realities come crashing in: her lover shows no compunction privately in watering down his principles to advance his career, although always playing the self-righteous in public; her brother returns home to confront Maria with a love affair that, in effect, disgraces the family’s honor; and the final blow is delivered when, in one of the film’s best scenes, the judge’s pays a visit to the country dacha to confront her rival. Kurt Maetzig’s Rabbit, programmed along with a half-dozen other “rabbit films” at the Berlinale (the majority, including this one, in the International Forum of Young Cinema), has set the stage for a vital festival discussion on German/German affairs, past and present, that will surely have its impact abroad at other key film events as well. It also happens to be a fine film, one that has weathered the rigors of time remarkably well.
Cam: Erich Gusko. Mus: Reimer Bredemeyer, Gerhard Rosenfeld. Cast: Angellika Waller (Maria), Alfred Müller (Paul Deister), Ilse Voigt (Aunt Hete), 110 mins., black-and-white, 35 mm.
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