Abstract:
The study of national identity formation in the German Democratic Republic
(GDR) vis-à-vis the binary oppositions extant in contemporary socialist and capitalist
political systems has been almost entirely unexplored in anthropology. Despite welcome
augmentations in topical research, the problem today becomes increasingly one of
memory and official history; and in turn, the utilization of traditional anthropological
research methods becomes less useful, even obsolete. In order to overcome this
challenge, films of the formative period between 1946 and 1966 have been selected from
the archives of the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), the East German state film
production company, which reflect the development of East Germany’s sociopolitical
ideals, and the construction of the socialist Self against the menace of the capitalist Other.
Through cinema, DEFA filmmakers engaged simultaneously in artistic expression and
cultural production. The analysis presented here employs a combination of interpretive
techniques borrowed from visual anthropology, and previously existing research to
answer the question of how these films represented this encounter, as well as their
personal creative and individual viewpoints that informed the film.
