East Germany Embraces <i> Glasnost </i> at Berlin Festival

At last year’s Berlin Film Festival, the Soviet Union showcased, for the first time in the West, politically sensitive features whose distribution had been forbidden. The strategy succeeded perfectly.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s new policy of glasnost captured the good reviews. One of these previously banned films, “Theme,” with a subplot about an unhappy Jewish writer emigrating to Israel, took the Golden Bear, Berlin’s grand prize.

For this year’s 38th Berlin festival, which concluded Tuesday, the Soviets again achieved sought-after publicity by permitting the showing, in mint 35mm prints, of two important films shelved since 1967: “Commissar,” Aleksander Askoldov’s tale of a pregnant Red Army officer shielded from rightists by a peasant Jewish family, and “Asja’s Happiness,” a grim, collective farm love triangle directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, years before he made “Runaway Train” in the United States.

But perhaps even more interesting at Berlin was to observe how the Gorbachev mandate for openness in Soviet cinema is being interpreted elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.

Before glasnost, only Hungary screened and exported films deeply critical of life under communism. But Berlin in 1988 revealed significant movement in the Soviet republics on the Baltic Sea--Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia--and even some surprising changes from rigid, cautious East Germany.

The East Germans adopted the Soviet strategy for their own, dramatically unveiling at Berlin a film not shown since 1968, “The Russians Are Coming.” (No relation to the 1966 American comedy with a similar title.) Such a screening was unprecedented for the East Germans. But there was more: The film director, Heiner Cracow, was allowed to speak at length afterward, and even answer blunt questions about why his movie was suppressed.

West Germans in the audience were amazed. They couldn’t recall such an open discussion with an East German film maker. Almost as if the Berlin Wall weren’t there.

“The Russians Are Coming” was made at an inopportune time, Cracow said, on the eve of the Soviet march into Czechoslovakia. Therefore, it is not surprising that a film would be banned concerning a Soviet army battalion occupying a German village at the end of World War II. Surely, an East German audience in 1968 would have made a direct connection with the Soviet tanks in Prague.

But considering East Germany’s traditionally narrow interpretation of Marxist aesthetic, there were other obvious reasons that the idiosyncratic film was stopped.

The protagonist, a confused, alienated youth who willingly joins the Nazi army, is far from the “positive” collectivist hero prescribed for East German films.

Also, many of the German villagers are portrayed by director Cracow as pro-Nazi, anti-Marxist--until the Soviets arrive. Then they race into the streets and enthusiastically embrace their invaders. No wonder East German officials were distressed: Are such fascist collaborators and opportunists to be considered the founders of the East German communist state?

Cracow made a final blunder for someone wishing East German distribution. “The Russians Are Coming” concludes with a conversation between a Soviet soldier and a German girl in their common language: English! The gentle soldier talks about the need for “peace and love” in the world, as if they were ‘60s anti-war hippies in a park in San Francisco.

“Are there other such films on the shelf in East Germany?” a West German in the crowd asked Cracow.

“Alas, no,” Cracow replied. Unlike their counterparts in the Soviet Union, East German film makers have adhered to the official ideological line.

And now? Is this the beginning of East German glasnost? Americans who crossed the checkpoints into East Berlin during breaks in the Berlin Fest inevitably reported a change from previous years. For the first time, people in the shops smiled at tourists speaking English, and helped with purchases. The woman guide at the home of playwright Bertolt Brecht gave her talk twice in each room, once in German and once in halting English.

And the cinema?

Not all is changed. “The Time Is Now,” a 1987 post-Chernobyl documentary, shows East German officials, including a general, talking rhetorically and responsibly about the need for peace. No regular people, and certainly no dissidents, were interviewed for the film.

In contrast, East German’s most acclaimed documentarian, Jurgen Bottcher, often manages personal explorations in his films without the expected doses of didactic political content. Bottcher was represented this year in Berlin by the feature-length “In Georgia,” an aesthetic and spiritual peek at the Soviet republic that never mentions Georgia’s communist government or the birthplace of Joseph Stalin.

East Germany’s film in competition, “Bear Ye Another’s Burden,” also was a bit “progressive” for East German films. Set in a sanitarium in 1950, the talky story concerns the intellectual arguments of an unlikely pair of roommates: A partisan soldier and the vicar of a Protestant church. One has a picture of Stalin above his bed, the other Jesus Christ.

In the end, they agree that one must fight on Earth for social justice, whether as a Christian believer or a Marxist atheist.

This somewhat simplistic message gains strength in the context of current much-publicized East German fighting between the government and the church over civil liberties issues. “Bear Ye Another’s Burdens” calls for peace, coexistence and mutual respect, a “liberal” position from self-described Marxist director Lothar Werneke.

Werneke, for one, is optimistic about a glasnost- like future for East German cinema. “After 40 years of the existence of (East Germany), we are trying at last to confront our past history. My film is set in the 1950s, a decade about which the younger generation is asking questions of parents and grown-ups.

“I think there’s going to be a little more relaxation in the future of our cinema.”

This year’s festival featured a week of documentaries from the Soviet Baltic republics. These films were handpicked by Berlin festival director Moritz de Hadeln during a first-ever Baltic tour last summer arranged by the Soviets. And they were revelatory: Nowhere in the Eastern Bloc have there been such indictments of the autocratic mistakes of the socialist regimes.

Lithuania’s “The Scar” (1985) is a cynical, melancholy look at the way the Communists deal with delinquent children. Latvia’s “Is It Easy to Be Young?” (1986) shows alienated Soviet youths retreating into drugs and punk music, and also disillusioned soldiers returning from Afghanistan.

The films produced at the Tallin Studio in Estonia are by documentarian Mark Soosaar, who seems particularly brave and subversive. Soosaar’s 1986 “The Men of Kihnu Island” is a methodical, analytical demonstration of how imposed, inefficient Soviet collectivization has brought the Kihnu people to ruin.

“When we lost our self-determination, we lost our historical necessity,” a Kihnu islander says to the camera. “We have lived here for 600 years, and suddenly we can’t make it for ourselves. It’s offensive.”

Soosaar’s 1988 documentary “Life Is Out,” shows the underbelly of collectivization. At 3 a.m., he follows a depressed socialist worker to her impossible job of milking 200 cows. Little wonder she has no time for her 13-year-old son, who commits suicide.

And the fate of “Life Is Out”?

“This film will be distributed to the cinemas,” Soosaar said at Berlin. “In Moscow, it was decided that it will go to all the republics. Of course they noticed that all my films are from the shadow’s side. They were a little unhappy about that and asked, ‘Why don’t you want to show the better things?’

“I explained, ‘It’s necessary to show real life to make a better life.’ Then there were no problems.

“In the Brezhnev period,” Soosaar said, “film productions were only about romantic dreams. All sunshine. With Gorbachev, the Baltic republics are now in competition. Who of us can make the most attractive and most political films?”