The Stalinstadt spring

 

“The Silent Revolution” is a German film somewhat freely based on Dietrich Garstka´s autobiography “Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer”. The author, who passed away five years ago, was a high school teacher in Essen.

The plot of the film is set in Communist East Germany in 1956. A senior high school class in the town of Stalinstadt (“City of Stalin”) regularly listens to anti-Communist radio broadcasts from West Germany and eventually decides to stage a political protest in school by standing in silence to express solidarity with the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. The protest is duly reported to the Communist authorities, and none other than East Germany´s minister of education, Fritz Lange (an old Communist cadre and anti-Nazi resistance fighter), is called in to investigate the “counter-revolution”. After various complex intrigues involving both the students and their parents, the class decides not to betray the instigators of the protest, at which everyone is expelled from school and forever barred from higher education. Despite this, the story does have a “happy ending” of sorts, since most of the students simply leave for West Berlin and freedom! (The Berlin Wall wasn´t built until 1961.)

While the storyline is interesting, I think it´s obvious that many of the characters are somewhat stereotypical. What are we to make of the sociopathic female “comrade Kessler”, the convinced but simplistic Communist Erik, the virginal Christian girls, or the nerdy Paul? There is also Theo´s cowardly father, and Kurt´s opportunistic ditto. The weak mothers were more convincing but equally stereotypical. One of the scenes is suspiciously similar to the “captain, my captain” climax in “Dead Poet´s Society”. A more interesting feature is that the heroic student Kurt turns out to have a problematic side, since he constantly visits his Nazi grandfather´s grave in West Berlin! And I still don´t understand what character (if any) is supposed to be Dietrich Garstka…

Stalinstadt still exists, now called Eisenhüttenstadt. It seems its local color is still somewhat “DDR 1956”, since the events Garstka describes in his book really took place at another location, Storkow, but that place has changed so much that the producers decided to tape the film in Eisenhüttenstadt instead.

No idea where you can find a copy with English titles. I recently saw the film with Swedish titles, my German being somewhat rusty (I mean, I can hardly pronounce “Eisenhüttenstadt”). Since I actually visited East Berlin before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, I found it very interesting on a purely personal level, despite the fictionalization.

With that, I close this little review.