"When lovers are separated, they promise to fix their eyes on one star each night so that they will be united, at least, in their vision.
"The Heavens can not be divided.
"To the contrary, the heavens are the first thing to be divided."
Thus, dialogue in Konrad Wolf's 1964 The Divided Heaven and film based on Christa Wolf's famous East German novel of the same name. (When I was in College, German majors were required to read this sober, earnest East German book -- considered to be diagnostic of East Germany's aspirations as a political system and, also, a feminist novel to boot. I never read the book because I wasn't really a German major and didn't feel I needed to know anything about the DDR. As usual, I regret that arrogant and presumptuous opinion, but now 50 years too late.) Wolf was the best of the East German filmmakers and he has a staggering visual gift -- his movies look stunning and they are incisively constructed with excellent acting. The Divided Heaven (Der Geteilte Himmel) is a dogmatic and partisan film disguised as an exercise in anomie influenced by the pictures of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. Godard and Antonioni were Leftist film directors (Godard was a pretend Maoist); Konrad Wolf is the real McCoy, a committed German Communist of the Old School given big budgets by DEFA to produce and direct movies espousing East German ideals half-concealed by advanced film technique in prestige pictures designed for the Film Festival circuit at Cannes, Berlin, and Moscow. There's no doubt that Konrad Wolf is a great director; there's also no doubt that this picture, at least, is tendentious, irritating, and, quite possibly, evil. It's inferior to Wolf's later picture Solo Sunny but, nonetheless, worth a look, if only for its graphic beauty and stylish trappings.
A naive young woman, Rita, lives in some soulless East German city, possibly Leipzig or Dresden -- the town has an impressive cathedral-like tower with two spires and a dam that looks like the place where St. Anthony Falls cascades over the Corps of Engineers concrete apron in Minneapolis. There is also a very high aqueduct like bridge with soaring masonry arches over which tiny trains pass to and fro. These images are visual motifs to which Wolf refers again and again and seem to be correlates for the love affair between Rita and her boyfriend, the chemist, Manfred. Rita is admitted to a teacher's college but drops out for some reason that I wasn't able to understand. She, then, joins the proletariat as a worker in a factory that makes train cars. East German factories are not heavily automated and Rita with her comrades literally screws the train cars together with torque wrenches and powered screw drivers. The factory is organized like a unit of the army and Rita works with the famous Ermisch brigade, a collective of laborers who are famously productive. When a comrade shows that you can assemble one-frame (a unit of production in the train passenger cars) in a mere 17 minutes, the boss increases the production quota to reflect this innovation -- an increase in production that the movie seems to applaud. Everyone agrees that building more trains more quickly is a good thing for the East German worker's republic. The increase in production leads to some sort of controversy in the workplace -- whatever it is, remained unclear to me. (I don't think that Wolf wanted to suggest openly that workers might be disgruntled about quota increases -- the dispute is postured as a power struggle.) One of the foremen crosses over to West Germany hampering the plant's efficiency. The movie, although released in 1964 portrays a period before the border between the divided Germanys was closed, particularly in Berlin by the Wall.) Rita goes back to teacher's school, possibly under pressure because she backed the wrong boss in the train factory. (The story is told very elliptically with flashbacks and flashforwards and it would require a second viewing to figure out exactly what is going in the narrative.) Rita is sleeping with the chemist, Manfred, and lives with him in the garret of his parent's luxurious house -- his father is some kind of retired director of an East German business. Manfred has developed a wonderful chemical process of great commercial value -- we are never told exactly how it works or what it is. Rita has a friend named Sigrid whose father has left East Germany for the West. She is back in teacher's school where a dogmatic Marxist teacher, Mangold, persecutes her and Sigrid for the father's defection to the West -- the guy seems to teach a class in Marxist dialectics and he is the movie's villain. Pushed out of teacher's school for the second time, Rita returns to the factory, building trains. Manfred's chemical process is not adopted by the local industrial concern, apparently due to a cabal of conspirators who want to entrench their chemical procedures in the industry. This upsets Manfred and, with his lab assistant, Martin, he defects to the West. Rita is torn and doesn't know whether she should accompany her boyfriend or stay in dear, dirty old East Germany. Manfred comes back for a visit and goes with Rita on a test drive of one of the trains that she and her comrades have constructed. The train's emergency brake is pulled on the tracks in the country and it fails to pass specifications which are rigorous and exacting and enforced by the dignified older boss at the factory, a hero of East German productivity called Meternagel. Someone announces enthusiastically that the Soviets have put a man in orbit. There is a quote that the cosmonaut was a farmer's son who sees the blackness of outer space as a furrowed field where seed corn is scattered like the stars in the sky. (The movie responds to this with bombastic snatches of music, played as if in a Godard film in disconnected fragments, accompanying shots of the cloudy sky overhanging the level fields of the Brandenberg Mark -- it's an impressive sequence.) Rita is tempted and goes with Manfred to West Germany (West Berlin) where there are lots of people scurrying around in a square to a sound track of blaring traffic horns. The traffic is never shown and Wolf subscribes to the idea that the less he shows of West Germany, the better. Standing, ala Godard, next to a huge Persil advertisement covering a whole city wall, the two lovers debate the situation. Rita isn't impressed by West Berlin which she describes as shiny with lots of cellophane, but, also, very warm. She returns to East Germany where the noble Meternagel is dying, all worn out by decades of hard labor. Rita has a nervous breakdown at the factory and falls supine onto the railroad tracks as a locomotive is approaching. She is picked up and taken to a sanitarium where she recovers. The film ends with melancholy shots of the great masonry bridge with its soaring arches, the church or fortress with its proudly separate twin towers, and the dam on the river, an empty frame after the manner of Ozu, in that the two lovers who previously frequented this place are no longer present.
The movie is very dogmatic and seems to be an apology justifying the construction of the Berlin Wall and the closing of the border. The people with deep heart and souls opt to stay in East Germany despite the hardships and the fact that everyone, as shown by the movie, is informing on everyone else, West Germany is portrayed as overcrowded, possibly due to a surfeit of East German defectors -- there's one really absurd scene with the young lovers in the foreground and five people to the rear of the shot comically pressing themselves together on a single bench; it's clearly intended to be farcical but I don't know the director's intention as to this gag. The acting is good, if Brechtian in it schematic and abstract quality -- the good people are really good, the bad people (including the Party apparatchik Mangold) are really bad. It's hard to make a successful movie with a purely passive protagonist. Rita is a doormat and you root for her to depart for a real life in West Germany, an emotion that the director certainly didn't want to induce. But she's too passive to do much of anything and can't really carry the movie. The elliptical style feels unnecessary to the relatively clear story that I have narrated sequentially -- the movie fragments the story into bits and pieces and presents them, more or less, randomly. In fact, the elliptical aspect of the movie feels dishonest as if Wolf is trying to hide scenes that might stir up problems for the movie with the East German censors -- and, in fact, the movie was repressed from time-to-time, particularly during the waning years of the regime. It's a deeply irritating movie but has the courage of (some) of its convictions: at one point, someone says that the "people of the future depend upon countless people now alive" -- a true statement, as far as I see, and, perhaps, something important to keep in mind.
