Screening dissent: the uprising of 17 June 1953 in East German film

Abstract

On 17 June 1953, hundreds of thousands of East German citizens took part in the first major uprising in the Eastern Bloc. Across the country, demonstrators demanded the removal of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime, as well as better living and working conditions. Their protests ended under the tracks of Soviet tanks. No sooner had the dust settled, than the SED began to attempt to shape citizens perceptions of the unrest and limit the information about it accessible to them. Thus, the 1953 uprising entered the East German history books as a brief account of a ‘failed fascist putsch’, inspired by ‘hooligans, former Nazis and CIA agents’. Given the politically sensitive nature of the subject, one might expect filmmakers to have been forbidden from addressing what was the biggest show of dissent in East German history before 1989. Dramatised scenes of the unrest did appear, however, in two films and one television mini-series in East Germany. This article examines the scenes of the uprising in these productions closely. It shows that, while filmmakers were permitted to depict the uprising, they could only do so in very vague terms. Moreover, evidence suggests that motion picture depictions of the unrest were censored much more harshly than those that appeared in literary productions. Despite its desire to take control of the narrative of 17 June 1953, screening such dissent was apparently almost unpalatable for the SED regime.