Story of A Young Couple

story of a young couple
Directed by Kurt Maetzig
Produced by Alexander Lösche
Written by Bodo Uhse
Starring Yvonne Merin, Hans-Peter Thielen
Music by Wilhelm Neef
Cinematography Karl Plintzner
Edited by Lena Neumann
Distributed by PROGRESS-Film Verleih
Release date
 18 January 1952
Running time
 104 minutes
Country East Germany
Language German

Story of A Young Couple (German: 'Roman einer jungen Ehe')[1] is an East German film, directed by Kurt Maetzig. It was released in 1952.

Plot

Agnes and Jochen are two young actors who meet and fall in love while appearing in a Berlin production of Nathan the Wise. After the two marry, Agnes is drawn to the communist cause, and begins acting in East German films, which her husband views as sheer propaganda, especially when she recites a poem praising Stalin. When Jochen decides to accept a role in Les Mains Sales, his wife cannot bring herself to follow him, viewing the play as seditious. They decide to divorce. Jochen becomes a celebrated star in the West, but slowly realizes that not all is well: he sees that former influential Nazis are rehabilitated. After witnessing an anti-war demonstration brutally dispersed by the police, he arrives in the divorce court and asks Agnes to reconcile with him. The two reunite and move to East Berlin.

Cast

Production

The script was written by Maetzig and author Bodo Uhse. In part, Story of A Young Couple was intended as a response to Jean-Paul Sartre's anti-communist play Dirty Hands, which was also mentioned in the plot.[2] Assistant-director Siegfried Hartmann told an interviewer that the film was made when the Cold War turned into a grim reality, and when Joseph Stalin's cult of personality was at its height, with both those factors heavily influencing the picture.[3] Kurt Maetzig told that "in this film... we attempted to tackle a problem facing every honest German today... namely, the division of our fatherland and the prospects for reunion".[4]

Reception

On 22 January 1952, a Berliner Zeitung columnist wrote that "the film makes us sit up and take notice - and we are pleased to see a film with such sound, humane groundwork".[5] The West German Der Spiegel commented that "Maetzig's work was too 'progressive' even for the party hard-liners" and quoted DEFA official Albert Wilkening who disapproved of the picture, saying that "unfortunately, there is still much rigidity in our film industry".[4]

Seán Allan and John Sandford wrote that the film presented a confrontation between the morally-superior Socialist system in East Germany and the barely de-nazified, corrupt one of West Germany, in a manner common in pictures from the Democratic Republic.[6] Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor described Story of A Young Couple as "painfully true to the party line";[7] according to Alexander Stephan, it also contained anti-American rhetoric typical to the time.[8] Anke Pinkert characterized the picture as one of DEFA's most important "woman films", in which the figure of an emancipated female was the main driver of the plot and played an important role in bringing about social change.[9] John Griffith Urang noted that rather than have love transcend politics, as was the case in Maetzig's Marriage in the Shadows, Story of A Young Couple had the protagonists' romantic relations depend on their world view.[10] In Orphans of the East http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=807544, Constantin Parvulescu shows how the film helps reinterpreting socialist-realist poetics and their relationship to pre-World War II avant-garde.[11]

References

  1. ↑ Story of A Young Couple on DEFA foundation's website.
  2. ↑ Ulrich Pfeil. Die "anderen" deutsch-französischen Beziehungen: die DDR und Frankreich 1949. Bohlau (2003). ISBN 978-3-412-04403-9. Page 317.
  3. ↑ Ingrid Poss. Spur der Filme: Zeitzeugen über die DEFA. Links Verlag (2006). ISBN 978-3-86153-401-3. Page 84.
  4. 1 2 Soviet Zone: Bitter Laurels. Der Spiegel, 13 February 1952.
  5. ↑ Story of A Young Couple. DEFA Film Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
  6. ↑ Seán Allan, John Sandford. DEFA: East German cinema, 1946-1992. ISBN 978-1-57181-753-2. Page 68.
  7. ↑ Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor. Why we fought: America's wars in film and history. The University Press of Kentucky (2008). ISBN 978-0-8131-9191-1. Page 324.
  8. ↑ Alexander Stephan. Americanization And Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with American Culture after 1945. Berghahn Books (2008). ISBN 978-1-57181-673-3. Page 158.
  9. ↑ Anke Pinkert. Film and memory in East Germany. Indiana University Press (2008). ISBN 0-253-21967-1. Pages 14, 131.
  10. ↑ John Griffith Urang. Legal tender: love and legitimacy in the East German cultural imagination. Cornell University Press (2010). ISBN 978-0-8014-7653-2. Page 32.
  11. ↑ https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1509632
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