Looking at the literary scene in West and East Germany between the 1950s and 1980s, a striking difference emerges. In the GDR, many leading writers were also involved in film themselves: Christa & Gerhard Wolf wrote screenplays, Helga Schütz was a student at the film school in Babelsberg, among other things, and Jurek Becker’s international success “Jakob the liar” began as a screenplay. In contrast, for most West German authors, cinema was obviously a “noli me tangere” – except when they released their books for adaptation by others.
Cinefest 2025 will explore the social reasons and cultural implications of this situation. In addition, there will be a few retrospectives on the situation in previous eras, e.g., the expressionist poet Franz Richard Behrens wrote screenplays (1920 HAMLET with Asta Nielsen) and film reviews under the pseudonym Erwin Gepard. Writers who were undesirable to the Nazis (Edlef Köppen) found refuge in the film industry. Leading HJ filmmakers such as Alfred Weidenmann and Herbert Reinecker (JUNGE ADLER, 1943/44) were able to work unchallenged in the FRG (DER STERN VON AFRIKA, 1956/57; DERRICK).