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Films to educate me about socialism.

 
 
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 03:50 pm
I'm writing a thesis on a modernist composer and their role the 1960's German Student movement. Does anyone know of any films about either Germany when it was divided into West Germany and the DDR/ the Berlin Student Uprisings/Socialist Germany?
I'm just thinking that way I can passively learn about the era whilst also relaxing....
Thanks X
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Type: Question • Score: 7 • Views: 4,132 • Replies: 13
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tsarstepan
 
  2  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 04:15 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
I haven't seen it but it's on my list to watch:
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008),
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765432/

Quote:
Plot:
A look at Germany's terrorist group, The Red Army Faction (RAF), which organized bombings, robberies, kidnappings and assassinations in the late 1960s and '70s.

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar a couple years back.
The Pentacle Queen
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 04:27 pm
@tsarstepan,
YES tsarstepan I love you.
Any more, anyone?
0 Replies
 
fresco
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 04:39 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
I'm pretty sure Jean Luc-Godard films were part of the late 1960's student zeitgeist.
0 Replies
 
joefromchicago
 
  2  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 04:39 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
One, Two, Three

The Lives of Others

Goodbye, Lenin
tsarstepan
 
  2  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 04:47 pm
@joefromchicago,
Doesn't Goodbye Lenin take place mostly after the fall of the Berlin Wall?
joefromchicago
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 04:48 pm
@tsarstepan,
Yes, but the whole premise is that a son needs to make his mother believe that she's still living in the DDR.
0 Replies
 
OmSigDAVID
 
  -2  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 05:12 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
The Pentacle Queen wrote:
I'm writing a thesis on a modernist composer and their role the 1960's German Student movement.
Does anyone know of any films about either Germany when it was divided into West Germany and the DDR/ the Berlin Student Uprisings/Socialist Germany?
I'm just thinking that way I can passively learn about the era whilst also relaxing....
Thanks X
Adolf Hitler started out that way.
The German Army had him spying on the Nazi Party
(what became the Nazi Party) and he took it over.

I guess its ez to spy on it, if u r the leader.





David
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 05:30 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
You might check out Margarethe von Trotta's films PQ.
I haven't seen all of them, but saw this one quite a while ago .... Very good.

I think it was also called some like The Sisters as well as Marianne and Juliane.

What a long sentence in this quote! But you get the gist ....

Quote:
Marianne and Juliane is a 1981 West German film directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Its original German title is Die bleierne Zeit, an idiomatic expression which can be translated as "the leaden times" and refers to a complex mixture of feelings that were shared by many people of the 1970s political left; including feelings of melancholy over the fracturing and perceived failure of the 1960s social movements (such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the German student movement) and the general optimism that accompanied those movements, feelings of people's personal freedom being still highly restricted by social conventions, deep-seated hate for the official political system, and the strong urge to change that system as quickly and radically as possible by any means necessary, coupled with the perceived inability to do anything that really does change it. The other side of "the leaden times" was the fear of left-wing terrorism that captivated and somewhat paralyzed the general population....


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_and_Juliane
0 Replies
 
msolga
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 05:40 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
Also second the recommendation of The Lives of Others.
Brilliant film!
0 Replies
 
Thomas
 
  2  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 10:15 pm
@The Pentacle Queen,
On a mostly-humorous note, you could watch Billy Wilder's Eins Zwei Drei (English: One Two Three). Since a lot of the action takes place in cars crossing the border between East and West Berlin and back, you can get a pretty good glimpse about the contrasts between the two.

Anther movie I cherish is Spur der Steine, English The Trace of Stones, a 1966 drama about how communism corrupted work life.
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Sun 23 Oct, 2011 11:45 pm
@Thomas,
The wild live gives another view if the 68'er times ...
0 Replies
 
The Pentacle Queen
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Oct, 2011 09:31 am
Thank you so much everyone! Background reading made easy Wink
0 Replies
 
Thomas
 
  1  
Reply Wed 26 Oct, 2011 11:33 am
You might want to try digging up old Tatort episodes from the 1970s and 80s. (That's if you understand German, or if you can get DVDs with English subtitles.) Tatort, which is German for "crime scene", is a West German TV series of police detective mysteries, comparable to America's Crime Scene Investigation. Although political theory is practically absent from this series, many of the crimes take place among working-class people, and the producers generally did an excellent job portraying working-class living conditions and mentalities. In my opinion, some familiarity with these is important to understanding the role of socialism in German democracy.

East Germany, too, had a version of the Tatort. It was titled Polizeiruf 110, which loosely translates to "police call 9-1-1", or whatever the number for police calls is in England. Considering the source, this series was surprisingly light on socialistic ideology and surprisingly candid about the realities of East German life. You will probably enjoy it and learn from it if you can find it somewhere.
0 Replies
 
 

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