FORGOTTEN NOTES:  

NARRATIVE FILM MUSIC IN DEFA CINEMA 

 
By 
 

Melissa Anne Elliot  

A DISSERTATION 

Submitted to  

Michigan State University 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements  

for the degree of 

German Studies—Doctor of Philosophy  

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

2020 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

FORGOTTEN NOTES: NARRATIVE FILM MUSIC IN DEFA CINEMA 

 

 

ABSTRACT 

 
By 
 

Melissa Anne Elliot 

Music in narrative film has historically been understood as performing a mood-setting or 

underscoring function. In this study, I challenge this restrictive notion and take an intermedial 

approach to film, positing that music is an important contributor to narrative communication. My 

investigation makes this argument through an investigation of narrative voice in film adaptations 

of literary texts, exploring in particular the translation of voice and structure across medial 

boundaries. More specifically, this dissertation investigates the relationship of music’s meaning- 

and narrative-shaping function to narrative voice in East German film adaptations. The social 

and political realities of the socialist East German state—a context in which expressive language 

was externally censored—creates a unique framework within which to explore questions of 

narration and voice. This dissertation argues that the great aural complexity and experimentation 

in DEFA cinema exploits music’s subtle extra-linguistic qualities to introduce semantic 

complexity and to address controversial topics. Each chapter in the study considers a different 

aspect of subjective literary narration and focuses on music’s role in translating the narrative 

voice across medial boundaries. 

The introduction contextualizes the questions that drive this dissertation against the 

backdrop of previous scholarship on film music, literary adaptations, and the Deutsche 

Filmaktiengesellschaft, or DEFA, the East German state-run film production company. It also 

establishes the multidisciplinary approach of this study, highlighting its relevance to scholarship 

in fields as diverse as film studies, musicology, narratology, East German Studies, and gender 

studies. The following three chapters present case studies on pairs of adaptations. Chapter One 

examines Konrad Wolf’s Goya (1971) and Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula 

(1973), focusing on the use of music and sound to create character subjectivity in the filmic 

medium by placing particular emphasis on the use of mediated music (Miceli) to create an inner 

subjective world belonging to a specific character or characters. Chapter Two explores unique 

deployments of music and sound to enact and represent the silencing subjective gendered voices 

in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964) and Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht (1991). Each 

film manages the relationship of a subjective female voice to a collective voice largely coded as 

male. Chapter Three focuses on the use of multi-voiced musical melodies in Frank Beyer’s 

Jakob der Lügner (1974) and Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben (1981) to translate 

complex, multi-voiced narration from novel to film. An epilogue examines some of the afterlives 

of the films and texts in this study to suggest some implications of this study beyond DEFA and 

Literaturverfilmungen.  

 	

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
Copyright by 
MELISSA ANNE ELLIOT 
2020 

 

 
 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 
 
 

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor and Doktormutter, Dr. Elizabeth 

Mittman. I cannot imagine a more encouraging, compassionate, or inspiring advisor to have 

guide me through this difficult but rewarding journey. Dr. Mittman’s expertise in GDR Studies 

combined with her background in music made her the perfect scholarly mentor, and without her 

insights, this dissertation would not be what it is today. I am deeply indebted to her and am 

incredibly grateful for the time she dedicated to my project (and, believe me, it was a lot) and for 

her friendship. Along with Dr. Mittman, I would like to thank the rest of my dissertation 

committee—Dr. Sonja Fritzsche, Dr. Matthew Handelman, and Dr. Lynn Wolff—for their 

support, thoughtful feedback on my dissertation. Each of them helped me to infuse aspects of 

their expertise into my project and it is all the better for it. I would also like to thank the German 

Studies program at MSU for their generous financial support through my studies and for creating 

an atmosphere where scholarly inquiry is filled with passion and compassion. Thank you also to 

the College of Arts and Letters and the Graduate School for supporting my conference travel 

time and again and for awarding me a Dissertation Completion Fellowship which allowed me to 

complete my dissertation in such a timely manner.  

 

To my parents, in-laws, siblings, and friends, thank you. Your constant words of 

affirmation and encouragement, your forbearance as I was distracted by my studies, and your 

unending support have been invaluable to me. Last and certainly not least, to my husband, Drew, 

and my son, Simon: Drew, you have loved and supported me in so many ways throughout this 

long journey. I will forever look back at this time in awe of your dedication to and ingenuity in 

helping me get things done when I was at the end of my rope. Without you, none of this could 

 

v 

 

have been possible. Simon, thank you for being your sweet and cheerful self and for always 

greeting me with an excited “mama” every time I took a break or got home from a day of 

writing. You made and make all of my days brighter, and for that I am eternally grateful. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

vi 

Everyone’s Favorite Couple: Paul and Paula 

The (Musical) Struggle for Gendered Subjectivity: Der geteilte Himmel 

Theoretical Underpinnings 

Subjectivity Considered 

Subjectivity in Question: Subjective Voice/Subjective Sound 
Subjectivity in the Crosshairs of Socialist Realism 

Sound over Image?  
Film over Literature? 
East German Cinema Over Western Cinema? 

Introduction 
      A Case for (Subjective) Film Music 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Chapter One 
 
 
  Music at the Mediated Level 
  Art, Politics, and Repressive Contexts: Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis 
 
 
Chapter Two 
  Musical Interruptions: The Silencing of Gendered Voice 
  Women in the World: Women’s Emancipation in the GDR 
  Women on Screen: Feminist Film Theory 
 
  Unrealized (Gendered) Promises: Volker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte and Frank 
  Beyer’s Der Verdacht 
 
Chapter Three 
  Multi-Voiced Narration: Multi-Voiced Music 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Epilogue: (Musical) Afterlives 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Lament as Narrative Strategy 
(Musical) Lament for an Author: Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben 
The Music of Suffering: Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner 

Pushing Narrative Boundaries with Multi-Voiced Subjective Authenticity 

Franziska Linkerhand 
Jakob der Lügner 

1 
1 
8 
8 
11 
 14 
15 

21 
21 
23 
24 
27 
42 

64 
64 
67 
70 
73 

85 

101 
101 
104 
105 
107 
110 
113 
125 

139 

145 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

vii 

 

 

 

 

Introduction 

A Case for (Subjective) Film Music 

It is difficult to conceive of a film without music. Just imagine Star Wars without John 

Williams’ iconic melodies or Psycho without its chilling scream and the accompanying stabbing 

violin screeches. Even films from the silent era were never truly as silent as their name would 

suggest, as live musical accompaniment was part and parcel of the early film-going experience.1 

The enduring prominence of music and sound in the filmic medium can perhaps be compared to 

the omnipresence of narrative voice in literature. Can you imagine a novel without its narrator? 

What would To Kill a Mockingbird be without Scout Finch’s skillful recounting of the past? Or 

Moby Dick without its evocative opening: “Call me Ishmael”? Drawing a connection between 

music and narrative voice raises many questions concerning cinema’s narrative strategies. What 

kinds of tools does film possess to represent the equivalent of a literary narrative voice, an 

invisible, auditory phenomenon beyond simply voiceover narration? Could it be that a film’s 

soundtrack, comprised of dialogue, sound effects, and music—a kind of omnipresent, acoustic 

“voice”—functions in the same was as literary narrative voice?  

While recent film scholarship has begun to address the complexity of music and sound in 

cinema, understanding of the role of non-verbal sound on the shape and form of the filmic 

narrative is still under-researched and consequently less clearly understood. Film music has 

traditionally been understood to have a purely mood-setting or underscoring function, most often 

thought of as an (orchestral) soundtrack playing in the background of a scene, virtually unheard. 

This inaudible quality of film music is explored by Claudia Gorbman in her seminal monograph, 

Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987). Despite its significance as one of the 

1 For a detailed history of music’s role in silent film, see Rick Altman’s Silent Film Sound (2004).  

 

 
1 

 

 

pioneering works in film music studies, her book nonetheless embodies a kind of dialectical 

tension that seems to plague the field. On the one hand, she touts the importance of film music, 

writing: “[t]he moment we recognize to what degree film music shapes our perception of a 

narrative, we can no longer consider it incidental or innocent” (11). This idea confronts 

traditional notions of filmic hierarchy that place film music very low in its importance in 

signifying the narrative. On the other hand, one can also conclude from Gorbman’s work that the 

discursive status of film music is largely supportive and thus subordinate to the image, in that it 

works to enforce one certain interpretation of the diegesis.2 In this study, I challenge this 

restrictive notion and take a more thoroughly intermedial approach to film that does not privilege 

one medium of signification above another, arguing that music is not only important for 

understanding the mood or tone of a film but is in fact essential for a complete understanding of 

both narrative voice and narrative structure. 

The intermedial approach of this study is driven by its core concern with the productive 

relationship between image and sound in film. The interaction of these two media in the 

signification of a filmic narrative makes film inherently intermedial and thus requires attention to 

be given to both media for a complete understanding of the film. Too often the standard 

approach to film analysis takes only one channel of communication into account (most often the 

image) and thus inevitably misses out on a complete understanding of the work. This is 

important, for, as Peter Zima argues, intermedial works present themselves to the perceiver in 

their entirety and thus demand to be understood as a whole (IX). This comprehensive 

understanding of film communication opens up new and interesting paths of inquiry and 

 

2 In Alan Durant’s review of Gorbman’s monograph, he states: “Starting from the observation … that film music has 
to remain unnoticed to be effective, Unheard Melodies outlines the ways in which music subserves a logic of the 
image, turning its own formal structures into truncated and constantly changing snippets to suit the duration of 
music cues determined by the visual action” (340). 

 
2 

 

 

exploration. With the tools of intermediality, this study engages with film in a way that accounts 

for all its signifying parts and places a particular emphasis on an aspect that is often 

overlooked—its aural mode of communication.  

Adding another complex layer to the discussion of intermediality in this project is that 

each film featured is linked to a literary text. In general, scholarship on film adaptations of 

literature (Literaturverfilmungen) centers on questions of fidelity, i.e. how closely a film adapts 

the content and/or tone of a literary work to film.3 This approach to adaptation necessarily 

privileges the written text, which results in the film (generally) being seen as a pale imitation of 

the original. While this has historically been the dominant view in adaptation studies, there are 

other ways to approach the process of adaptation. The Metzler Literatur Lexikon, for example, 

focuses on the mediality of adaptation in that it characterizes the adaptation process as a 

reworking of a literary text to fit the structural constraints of another medium and expects that 

the content of the original source be retained to some extent in the adaptation (3). Many 

theoretical questions arise from such a characterization, for example: How should an adaptation 

retain the content of the original source? To what extent should an adaptation retain source 

content? What elements of a narrative are most important to retain in an adaptation? In order to 

tackle questions of this nature, it will be helpful to consider Walter Benjamin’s understanding of 

translation that he addresses in his essay, “The Task of the Translator.” This seminal work has 

had much significance for subsequent theoretical reflections on translation. In the essay, 

Benjamin makes a case for understanding translation as a complex process of interpretation and 

specifies the translator’s task as “finding the particular intention toward the target language 

 

3 My choice to use the German term here partially reflects my affinity for the convenience of this term, despite its 
reflection of the (subordinate) status of film in German culture that gave rise to such a term. Despite these origins, I 
will continue to use Literaturverfilmung in hopes that my study will challenge the evaluative nature of this term. 

 
3 

 

 

which produces in that language the echo of the original” (258). Thus, following Benjamin, 

every translation is linked to the original and simultaneously a new creation that reflects the 

parameters of the other language or context.  

Applying Benjamin’s theory of translation to adaptation offers a unique framework for 

analyzing the adaptation process. The goal of adaptation can then be understood as identifying 

the particular message of a narrative suitable to be expressed in the adaptation and echoing that 

within the technical constraints of the new medium. Seen through this lens, one would be hard-

pressed to privilege the source over the adaptation, for each medial language is working with its 

own conventions and tools to best convey the narrative. Instead of mere imitation, the act of 

crossing medial boundaries results in the creation of new works or independent entities, each 

with its own unique system of signification. This is especially pertinent to narrative voice, which 

cannot be translated across medial borders without implementation of radically different means. 

A film’s method of retaining the source text’s narrative voice (or lack thereof) often results in 

harsh criticism of Literaturverfilmungen. As medial and time constraints do not allow for a one-

to-one translation of the full original text, film must direct the narrative through other means. As 

an inherently intermedial product, film has multiple ways of expressing voice, as image and 

sound are in most cases simultaneously participating in the expression of the narrative. In fact, 

the argument can be made that film possesses certain tools that more accurately represent 

“voice,” an invisible, sensory phenomenon, unavailable to print text. On the auditory level, the 

film’s soundtrack, comprised of dialogue, sound effects, and music, can express and embody the 

auditory qualities of voice in myriad ways. Beyond consideration of voice-over narration and 

dialogue, this nuanced view of the adaptation process gives rise to questions about the 

narratological functions of film music, and the relationship of film music specifically to narrative 

 
4 

 

 

voice. In this project, I investigate music’s role in this complex process of adaptation and argue 

that music creates a unique intermedial link between the literary and filmic texts by thematizing 

and, in some instances, functioning as narrative voice in the films under discussion. 

To explore these questions, this study focuses on film adaptations of the Deutsche Film 

AG (DEFA) of former East Germany.4 The social and political context of the socialist East 

German state creates a unique framework in which DEFA films must be situated and understood. 

The governing political party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), recognized film’s potential as a 

key means of educating society and it therefore held a privileged position in the GDR. The 

SED’s aim was to build a new East German socialist society founded upon the shared values of 

anti-fascism and collectivism, and therefore DEFA’s mission, as Marc Silberman and Henning 

Wrage put it, “was to produce films for mass consumption that would educate and inform the 

public about the evils of the past and address the viewer as the imaginary socialist citizen of the 

future” (3). The early DEFA films of the 1950s and 60s tended to support this aim by adhering to 

the SED’s prescribed socialist realistic aesthetic that portrayed GDR society on a linear path 

toward socialism. The films of this era were broadly referred to as Gegenwartsfilme (films of 

contemporary life). By the early 1970s, there was a shift in DEFA production from 

Gegenwartsfilme to Alltagsfilme—films that thematized the everyday life of the everyday citizen. 

Joshua Feinstein explains the reason for this thematic and ideological shift: “… as the GDR 

became older, its official self-understanding became increasingly conservative. The legitimacy of 

the social and political order depended less on the future promise of universal emancipation and 

more on the cultivation of a collective identity” (7). Cultivating this comprehensive, collective 

 

4 While the bulk of this dissertation focuses on film adaptations of novels, I will also be looking at one example of 
the process in reverse in Chapter One, where I analyze Heiner Carow’s film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula, and 
its corresponding novelization, Legende vom Glück ohne Ende by Ulrich Plenzdorf. 

 
5 

 

 

identity necessitated a shift in focus from the public to the private sphere—the realm in which 

many of the contradictions of everyday GDR life were concentrated. DEFA films reflected this 

broader political shift, thematizing topics such as gender, domesticity, and subjectivity in GDR 

society. 

Coming to terms with the contradictions between socialist reality and a wished-for 

socialist utopia is a core motif in much of GDR literature and film. Patricia A. Herminghouse 

argues that this was, in part, due to the absence of a free press in East Germany, and thus the role 

of societal critique was shifted to artistic means of production. Herminghouse delves into the 

idea of GDR artistic media (in particular literature) as an “Ersatzöffentlichkeit” in which “the 

space between the lines of books, plays and films came to be regarded as an arena for the 

negotiation of differences between the official discourse and the contradictory experiences of 

individual subjects” (87). However, the ways in which societal critique was expressed differed 

considerably across artistic media. The film industry, for example, practiced a great amount of 

external and self-censorship as it was so intimately tied to the state and thus subject to many 

levels of censorship—at times stricter and at times more permissive depending upon the political 

climate. This, however, opened up considerable space for artistic and aesthetic experimentation. 

While filmic image and dialogue, as media that show and tell, are more prone to explicit 

regulation, music—which is often seen as non-representational and thus more ambiguous—could 

pass through censorship more easily. As we will see, DEFA films contain great aural complexity 

and experimentation. This gives rise to questions such as: How does music function as a means 

of expression within the context of state censorship? Will an examination of film music and 

sound reveal more nuance and complexity to the thematization of controversial topics in DEFA 

film? Without suggesting that the musical soundtracks in DEFA films necessarily contain cryptic 

 
6 

 

 

or subversive messages, I argue that music’s subtle extra-linguistic quality is harder to regulate 

and can be utilized to open up new dimensions of a film that may be more difficult to express in 

a visual or linguistic manner. The dynamics of censorship make adaptations all the more 

fascinating, as it is possible to compare what was permissible and possible in literature versus 

film.  

As perhaps has become clear, this study is primarily concerned with the challenging of 

hierarchies—image over sound, literature over film. These long-established patterns of privilege 

have converged in a particularly problematic way regarding film music in DEFA 

Literaturverfilmungen, leaving them in an overlooked no man’s land. In fact, in the introduction 

to Séan Allan’s and Sebastian Heiduschke’s recent anthology on DEFA cinema, Re-Imagining 

DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Context (2016), the editors write 

that film music is “surely one of the most underexplored areas in DEFA scholarship” (13). This 

study begins to fill this significant gap in scholarship and functions, in part, as an apologetics for 

the “forgotten notes” of DEFA film music. Working through the questions I have posed so far 

will not only expand our understanding of DEFA film music, but also contribute to a more 

holistic understanding of DEFA film in general. In order to embark on this highly 

interdisciplinary journey, I rely on a rich pathway of different fields such as film studies, film 

music studies, adaptation studies, gender studies, and East German studies. In this next section, I 

will give an overview of these scholarly foundations and discuss how they are synthesized within 

the scope of this project.  

 

 

 

 
7 

 

Theoretical Underpinnings 

Sound Over Image?  

 

As mentioned previously, Unheard Melodies (1987), Claudia Gorbman’s seminal work 

on narrative film music, was the first to offer a systematic study of film music’s functions and 

served as an important beginning to serious inquiry into film music. Gorbman’s study was, in 

part, a reaction to film music’s secondary status within film and music scholarship. In general, 

musicologists did not consider film music a worthy object of study, considering it inferior to 

music meant for the concert hall.5 However, following Gorbman, a fairly robust body of 

literature on film music studies developed in the 1990s that made great strides in attempting to 

correct the long-standing filmic hierarchy of image over sound (Kalinak 1992; Flinn 1992; 

Brown 1994). Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen constitutes one of the most 

important contributions to the discourse on sound in film more broadly. By examining the 

reciprocal relationship of sound and image, Chion highlights the expressive and informative 

value (the “added-value”) that film music can add to image (5). Although his approach (again) 

tends to privilege image over sound—limiting music’s functions to the addition of specific 

emotions to a pre-existing image—his work represents a monumental leap forward in 

considering film intermedially.6 By the early 2000s, film music scholars began to highlight 

music’s importance not only for the narrative but for understanding the historical and cultural 

 

5 In Catherine Provenzano’s 2008 article, “Towards an Aesthetic of Film Music: Musicology Meets the Film 
Soundtrack,” she explains that “[f]ilm music is a virtually unexplored genre in the field of musicology, and certainly 
one that is considered marginal by the field at large” (79). She goes so far as to contend that “[i]t is without doubt 
that music composed for film has been stigmatized as a worthless genre; a lackluster hybrid of classical and pop that 
is not quite accessible enough for popular consumption and is certainly not serious enough for the self-respecting 
musician to study, or, worse even, notice” (80). 
6 Chion spells out ways film music can be used to create a specific emotion in relation to the filmic image, 
distinguishing between empathetic and anempathetic music. Empathetic music directly expresses the feeling of the 
images on screen and anempathetic music expresses a conspicuous indifference to the image. In other words, music 
can either support the filmic images or contradict them.  

 
8 

 

 

context in which a film is made (Kassabian 2001; Wojcik and Knight 2001). The influential 

volume, Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (2007) represents perhaps the 

most convincing contribution to the argument that music is not incidental but rather essential to 

film. The editors understand film music:  

… not as a scarcely noticed background or an interpolated entertainment that sometimes 

delivers ideological messages while creating mood or atmosphere, but as an agent, a 

force, and an object engaged in ongoing negotiations with image, narrative, and context 

(emphasis mine). So conceived, music operates very much on equal footing with its 

negotiating partners. Its relationship to them is fully dynamic and reciprocal, rooted in a 

complex interpretive relationship to the semiotics of cinema rather than a simple encoded 

one. (3)  

Studies such as these created a meta-discourse in film music studies and set the stage for new 

analyses such as mine that further question traditional concepts in film music analysis.  

The kinds of questions that currently drive the field of film music studies concern the 

traditional binary of diegetic and nondiegetic music. Diegetic music is any music that stems from 

a source within the filmic world, such as music playing from a radio on screen which ceases to 

play when a character turns it off. Non-diegetic music is understood as music that stems from a 

source outside of the events in the film and cannot be heard by the characters. This is often 

thought of as mood-setting music intended to support the filmic images and for the aesthetic 

experience of the viewer.7 Recent film music scholarship has been questioning these strict 

delineations and delving into the spaces between them. Robynn Stilwell (2007), for example, 

calls the moment(s) of transition between diegetic and nondiegetic music “the fantastical gap” 

7 The terms “diegetic” and “nondiegetic” were first used in connection with film music in Claudia Gorbman’s 
Unheard Melodies: Narrative and Film Music.  

 

 
9 

 

 

and explores the possible trajectories of music in this liminal space. Ben Winters (2010) does 

away with the classification of nondiegetic music altogether. He writes: “I want to explore the 

distinction between what lies inside and what lies outside the diegesis, concluding that branding 

music with the label 'non-diegetic' threatens to separate it from the space of the narrative, 

denying it an active role in shaping the course of onscreen events, and unduly restricting our 

readings of film” (224). Studies such as these push and test the boundaries of film music theory 

and, in doing so, expand our understanding of how music works and how it can influence our 

perception of film. However, the overwhelming emphasis on film music in Hollywood cinema 

has resulted in a limited scope of inquiry. In Kathryn Kalinak’s Film Music: A Very Short 

Introduction (2010), she notes this narrow view: “Film music scholarship has developed over the 

last twenty-five years into a formidable body of knowledge on the subject, but its blind spot has 

been nothing less than most of the world” (xiv). In her book, she attempts to right the ship by 

casting a much broader international net and exploring film music in cinematic traditions all over 

the world. My study participates in this project of expansion by investigating how music 

signifies in the GDR context. 

Sound and music studies have also been an area of growth within German Studies in 

recent years and feature a unique emphasis on music’s relation to ideology, culture, and national 

identity. Early studies include Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter’s co-edited volume, Music and 

German National Identity (2002), in which they argue that (classical) music holds a special 

status in German culture, specifically its central place in the formation of a national identity. 

Roger Hillman’s Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music, and Ideology (2005) focuses on the 

use of classical music in (West) German film as a cultural marker and explores its ties to cultural 

memory. Conceiving of sound more broadly, Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick’s co-edited 

 
10 

 

 

volume, Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004), 

dramatically foregrounds the role of sound in German culture. They place a particular emphasis 

on film music, for they argue that sound has had an acutely underprivileged status in German 

film studies:  

[T]he scholarly bent against the sonic has been perhaps most striking, and symptomatic, 

in the field of German film studies. Following the well-known rejection of the 

synchronized sound by intellectuals around 1930, postwar German film scholars by and 

large overlooked the pivotal role of film music and dialogue and instead focused entirely 

on the visual aspects of the filmic medium. (12) 

Here, Alter and Koepnick argue that sound and music have not merely been overlooked in 

German film studies, but have been actively ignored and resisted.8 More recently, Daniel Morat’s 

Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe (2014) seeks to 

demonstrate how the study of sound sheds new light on an understanding of history. My 

dissertation thus functions analogously to the aforementioned studies in that by turning an ear to 

the long over-heard notes of DEFA film, it helps to illuminate the cultural, historical, and 

ideological impulses and perspectives that music reveals in DEFA films.  

 

Film Over Literature? 

Questions of fidelity have driven the discourse in the field of adaptation studies. The 

traditional, hierarchical view of literary adaptations has privileged the source text (novel) over 

 

8 This perhaps reflects the difficulties in writing and theorizing about sound. Alter and Koepnick write: “Writing 
about this invisible medium, however, poses an unusual challenge. Though pervasive, and indeed at times invasive, 
sound is also by its very nature ultimately evasive. Unlike the visual, sound has been thought of as ephemeral, 
leaving no trace, to the extent that its early theoreticians lamented about the ‘ghastly impermanence of the medium’” 
(3-4).  

 
11 

 

 

the adaptation (film) and has resulted in adaptations being seen as inherently inferior products. 

George Bluestone’s influential work, Novels into Film (1957), is seen as the first scholarly study 

to challenge the evaluative nature of the literary adaptation. Bluestone considers film adaptations 

as unique and autonomous works which should be assessed according to their own medial and 

aesthetic parameters. He differentiates between verbal and visual modes of representation and 

discusses the advantages and limitations of both. By focusing on the mediality of adaptation as 

being of primary importance, he takes the first step in shattering the literature/film hierarchy. 

However, despite Bluestone’s early contribution to a reconceptualization of adaptation, the field 

continued to be plagued by this hierarchy and has been slow to challenge the primacy of fidelity. 

The more recent trend in adaptation studies is to question further the literature-film binary and to 

develop critical models and tools with which to create a more nuanced view of adaptation 

(McFarlane 1996; Stam and Raengo 2004). In Kamilla Elliott’s Rethinking the Novel/Film 

Debate (2003), for example, she takes up the case of the cinematic novel in order to demonstrate 

the reciprocal relationship between novel and film.  

Sound and music have been woefully ignored in adaptation studies. In her monograph, 

Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches (2006), Linda Costanzo Cahir claims: 

“All films share a fundamental anatomy created largely by the specific and defining ways in 

which the camera is employed. While sound may also be incorporated in a movie and while the 

various sound tracks (spoken words, music, and effects) may significantly enhance the film, 

sound is not an essential property of a movie” (44-45). Cahir’s statement on sound is indicative 

of its lowly status in adaptation studies. However, Phyllis Frus and Christy Williams’ volume, 

Beyond Adaptation: Essays on Radical Transformations of Original Works (2010), presents a 

new mode of conceiving adaptations as transformations, arguing that some “radical” adaptations 

 
12 

 

 

“move beyond mere adaptation and transform their source text into something new that works 

independently of its source” (3). This has opened up new scholarly trajectories and has allowed 

room for sound and music to be taken more seriously in the adaptation process. However, music 

still remains largely on the periphery.9 Jørgen Bruhn’s 2013 article on the film score in Martin 

Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)—an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s 2003 same-titled novel—is 

one of the few existing studies that takes a serious look at music’s role in adapting novel to film. 

In his article, he lays bare the status of music and sound in the field:  

Yet surprisingly, even in the study of the relation between literature and film, the musical 
aspect of the adaptation process is hardly registered at all. This gap is what I would like 

to encircle in this article. I will open up a new area of investigation, a field triangulated 

by word-and-music studies, novel-to-film adaptation studies, and the more general field 

of intermedial studies and media theory, and in particular I want to put pressure on a 

simplifying, functional understanding of music in adaptations that only sees music as 

support or framing for the main narrative messages being transported from literature to 

film. The question of music in film adaptation is more complicated than that. (322-23) 

As Bruhn makes clear, there is much room for growth concerning sound and music in the field of 

adaptation studies. My in-depth study on music’s role in adaptation is a major contribution to 

emphasizing music within the adaptation studies discourse. The connection between music and 

narrative voice reveals an underexplored (and underappreciated) sonic link between literary text 

and film that challenges a traditional understanding of the role of music in adaptation.  

 

 

9 For example, in Hutcheon and O’Flynn’s influential work, A Theory of Adaptation (2013), music’s role is largely 
limited to adaptations of sources in which music plays an obvious role such as operas, ballets, and musicals. 

 

 
13 

 

 

East German Cinema Over Western Cinema?  

As alluded to above, there is a significant gap in DEFA film scholarship concerning 

research on film music. This is partially due to the relative youth of the field of DEFA Studies. 

The first publications on DEFA after the fall of the Berlin Wall dealt head-on with issues 

regarding censorship and highlighted the important role that cinema played in the education of a 

GDR populace (Blunk and Jungnickel 1990; Schenk 1994). These studies were also concerned 

with preserving a cinematic tradition they saw to be quickly evaporating, in part due to the fact 

that very few DEFA films were known outside of the GDR. However, as DEFA cinema has 

become more widely available to researchers, scholarship on East German cinema has burgeoned 

into a rich and lively field.10 Seán Allan and John Sandford’s DEFA: East German Cinema, 

1946-1992 (1999), for example, traces the history of DEFA cinema and identifies key themes of 

socialist society, such as anti-fascism, censorship, and social-political critique (eg., such as 

women’s complex role in socialist society). DEFA cinema has also been viewed as a window 

into the socialist reality of East Germany (Feinstein 2002; Berghahn 2005; Pinkert 2008). 

Questions that now guide scholarship in DEFA Studies are concerned with the extent to which 

DEFA can be regarded as a national cinema in its own right and how it can be situated within 

broader German and transnational cinematic contexts (Trumpener 2002; Davidson and Hake 

2007; Allan and Heiduschke 2016).  

However, treatment of film music in scholarship on DEFA cinema has been cursory, at 

best. Stefan Soldovieri’s chapter in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International 

Film Culture (Silberman and Wrage 2014) traces the historical development of music films 

 

10 In 1993, Barton Byg founded the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst making DEFA 
films widely available to a North American audience in order to encourage popular and scholarly interest in East 
German film. In 1998, the DEFA-Stiftung in Berlin was established to preserve the films and make them more 
readily available in Europe. 

 
14 

 

 

within DEFA cinema. Sabine Hake’s chapter in Allan’s and Heiduschke’s anthology focuses on 

opera film in East German cinema and argues for a more nuanced view of music in relation to 

the image. However, as these two examples reveal, the bulk of scholarship on music in East 

German film focuses on what is considered “music film,” suggesting that music needs to be 

directly thematized in order for it to be meaningful. The scant amount of scholarship that even 

considers film music (not “music film”) tends to focus on developments in the type or genre of 

music used in DEFA films or understands film music’s functionality in support of socialist 

ideologies in film (Piel 2005; Powell 2016). My project builds upon these studies but is unique in 

that it understands music as essential in understanding narrative film, whether or not the music is 

directly thematized. This argument inserts my study into ongoing discussions in film (music) and 

adaptation studies and thus brings DEFA cinema into these broader, interdisciplinary 

discussions. 

 

Subjectivity Considered 

In this study, I use a narratological approach to understand music’s role in film’s 

communicative structure. Foundational to the field of narratology is the distinction between the 

“what” of the narrative (the story) and the “how” (the means through which that story is 

transmitted). French literary theorist Gérard Genette defined this delineation as the difference 

between histoire (the story) and discours (the means). Seymour Chatman’s seminal work, Story 

and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), brings the narratological 

approach into dialogue with film and adaptation studies. Chatman uses a structuralist approach to 

understand narrative structure and transmission in both literature and film, comparing the 

potentials and limitations of both media. Chatman’s model has great implications for adaptation 

 
15 

 

 

as he argues that the histoire is a structure independent of any medium and is therefore 

transposable between media (20). The question of import is then how the story is expressed (the 

discours) in each medium. Implicit in this question is how narrative voice, that which typically 

plays a central role in guiding and shaping narrative, is expressed in both literature and film. 

Chatman places narrative voice on the discursive level of narrative expression. Within the 

discursive level, he makes a distinction between the form and the substance of expression. The 

form structures narrative transmission, and the substance of expression is dependent upon the 

medium—verbal, cinematic, balletic, pantomimic, etc. Chatman places voices and sound on 

different levels of narrative expression— voice on the level of form and music and sound on the 

level of expression. The aural channel of film is thus part of the discours, indicating that it plays 

a vital role in the expression of narrative content. However, this categorization limits sound and 

music to their appearance within the medium and ignores their potential to structure the narrative 

form itself. In this study, I expand Chatman’s model and make the case that music is not only a 

substance in the expression of narrative, but can be a shaping form of narrative expression, 

especially when it functions as narrative voice.  

In a literary text, both the voice of the narrator and the narrative structure play an 

important role in creating character subjectivity (or lack thereof). For this reason, an overarching 

theme in my study is subjective voice within the context of the GDR and how it is thematized 

within different contexts, different narrative forms, and in different media. Each section of this 

study presents a unique mode of subjective literary narration and focuses on music’s role in 

translating the narrative voice across medial boundaries. I analyze two films in each section to 

illustrate this intermedial translation and pay particular attention to the way in which a film’s 

music changes the viewer’s understanding of the film and its narrative structure. In this study, 

 
16 

 

 

the films are organized thematically, but it is important to note that all but one of the films were 

produced after 1965. After the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, there was a newfound attitude 

of openness in the GDR, for its borders had been, in a sense, established and secured. This led to 

a brief period of experimentation in both literature and film that pushed the boundaries of the 

socialist realistic aesthetic. Robert Acker argues that the films of this period (1961-65) by and 

large thematized the personal and individual. He writes:   

Most of these films deal with the personal subjective sphere and the characters are no 

longer types—they are individualized and differentiated with their own strengths and 

weaknesses. This means that the solutions to the conflicts presented are usually discussed 

in terms of the individual and not in terms of society. This emphasis, of course, opened a 

Pandora's box in Marxist aesthetics because it set subject against object and the 

individual against society, and raised the question of whether the necessary harmony 

between both spheres had been achieved in the films. Thus several films were criticized 

for over-emphasizing the individual's alienation and for not indicating how integration 

with society is to be achieved. They were seen as too one-sided and undialectical. (171) 

This debate came to a head in 1965 at the 11th Plenary of the SED where twelve DEFA films 

were banned, criticized for their experimental tone and for too critically portraying issues within 

GDR society.11 This, in effect, squelched the euphoric feelings of artistic freedom of the early- 

and mid-1960s and devastated the film industry.  

It is within this context that five of the six films in this study were produced. The 

filmmakers knew the political stakes involved in thematizing issues of subjectivity and in 

critiquing the socialist state. While this did put constraints  on  did not prevent the thematization 

11 For more on the banned films, see chapter four in Daniela Berghahn’s Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of 
East Germany 

 

 
17 

 

 

of controversial themes, instead, as Frackman and Stewart claim—“… by the 1970s at the latest, 

East German spectators had grown accustomed to reading between the lines for social critique in 

films and television programming, meaning that today’s scholars must grapple with a 

proliferation of possible meanings for any single visual text” (3). While Frackman and Stewart 

focus on the visual level of film, their claim can (and should) be extended to the aural level, as 

the more ambiguous media of music and sound are particularly well-suited to allow for many 

plausible interpretations.  

Chapter One focuses on the use of music and sound to create character subjectivity in the 

filmic medium. We will encounter two larger than life characters—eccentric artist Francisco de 

Goya in Konrad Wolf’s epic biopic, Goya, oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (1971) and 

passionate, fun-loving Paula in Heiner Carow’s cult classic, Die Legende von Paul und Paula 

(1973). In both films, music at the so-called mediated level is used to create Goya’s and Paula’s 

sonic realities and to provide the viewer access to the characters’ subjective thoughts and 

emotions. While Wolf’s and Carow’s films do similar things with subjectivity, their two 

corresponding literary texts have far less in common. In Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1951 same-titled 

source novel for Wolf’s film, the narrator takes great care to express Goya’s inner, subjective 

reality. Ulrich Plenzdorf’s novelization, Legende vom Glück ohne Ende (1979), however, 

removes Paula’s inner subjective world and thus diminishes her subjectivity. As Feuchtwanger’s 

text was written in the United States and Plenzdorf’s in the GDR, it is possible to compare 

literary subjectivity in disparate contexts, and the DEFA films allow for a comparison between 

what was permissible in literature versus film. I will argue that both films use music and sound to 

creatively thematize the tensions between the artistic, free-thinking individual and GDR society.   

 
18 

 

 

Chapter Two focuses on the silencing of subjective, gendered voices within the context of 

a socialist collective largely coded as male. In this chapter, we meet Rita and Karin, two young 

GDR women who question how to navigate their place in a socialist society. Drawing on a rich 

body of feminist scholarship, I investigate how gender signifies in film theory, in GDR literature, 

and in DEFA film to expose the tensions between ideal and reality for women living in 

paternalistic GDR society. In both literary texts in this chapter—Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte 

Himmel (1963) and Volker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte (1977)—the difficult process of 

integrating the (female) individual into collective society is thematized through complex modes 

of narration that trouble the relationship of a gendered narrative voice to the collective. In the 

two corresponding DEFA film adaptations—Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964) and 

Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht (1991)—I argue that the role of gender is elevated through 

sophisticated employments of both film music and sound not only to trouble Rita’s and Karin’s 

voices but to silence them.  

In Chapter Three, I focus on subjective authorial voices in multi-voiced narration. In 

Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand (1974) and Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (1969), 

the voice of the author permeates the texts to create particularly complex modes of narration and 

to link the characters of Franziska and Jakob to their creators. Furthermore, both novels 

thematize a coming-to-terms with the past through creative employments of the linguistic 

elements of lament that point to the difficulties inherent in remembering and speaking about 

traumatic events. In the DEFA film adaptations—Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben (1981) 

and Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner (1975)—the complex multi-voiced narration is translated 

by multi-voiced musical melodies. Furthermore, I argue that these multi-voiced melodies are a 

sonic rendering of the tone of lament in the filmic medium.  

 
19 

 

 

In a brief epilogue, I move beyond the borders of East Germany and beyond the 

literature/film paradigm by exploring some of the various afterlives of the films and texts in this 

study. In iterations that range from Hollywood cinema to German opera, I highlight the role of 

music across genres in these subsequent reworkings of the source materials. Music’s enduring 

prominence in these narratives outside of the temporally and geographically delimited East 

German context highlights the implications of this study beyond DEFA and 

Literaturverfilmungen. Understanding music and sound as essential in the creation and shaping 

of narrative across multiple media opens up new ways to “hear” and understand narrative voice 

in film and beyond. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
20 

 

 

Chapter One 

 

Subjectivity in Question: Subjective Voice/Subjective Sound 

In Film Music: A Very Short Introduction, Kathryn Kalinak begins her short book with an 

 

analysis of a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) in which a psychotic killer, 

Mr. Blonde, tortures a policeman. During the brutal scene, the upbeat pop song “Stuck in the 

Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel plays prominently. As Kalinak notes, the song begins as 

diegetic music, stemming from a radio Mr. Blonde turns on when he begins his sadistic torture. 

However, the quality of the music changes over the course of the scene. Kalinak describes this 

sonic shift: 

Initially, it sounds as if “Stuck in the Middle With You” is coming over the airwaves in 

monophonic sound, preceded by crackling transmission noises consistent with the dated 

radio and its limited sound capacity. However, on the cut to the close-up of the anguished 

cop, quickly followed by the long shot of Mr. Blonde beginning to dance, the volume on 

the song has been turned up, way up, and the quality of the sound improves from the thin, 

monophonic sound of the radio to a fully stereophonic rendition. The music has been 

manipulated to intensify its joyfulness, and that we are not conscious of this manipulation 

increases our enjoyment. The manipulation of volume makes it easier to deal with Mr. 

Blonde and thus sets us up for the complicated responses we have to the sequence. (7). 

Kalinak argues that the music here is used to align the viewer with Mr. Blonde and has forced 

the audience “to identify with a sadistic criminal” (8). In this chapter, we will get to know two 

other characters that push at the bounds of acceptable human behavior by exploring how music is 

used to characterize these larger than life figures. 

 
21 

 

 

In Konrad Wolf’s Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis (1971), we meet Goya, the 

18th century Spanish painter, whose wild outbursts and psychological breakdowns are depicted in 

vibrant sound and color. In Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973), we meet 

Paula, an eccentric and vivacious woman whose pursuit of love and happiness situate her on the 

periphery of socialist society. Both Goya and Paula are characters who fight against—or simply 

do not conform to—social roles and pressures, but instead indulge in their own perceptions and 

ideas of reality. For each of the characters mentioned here—a crazy genius, an over-the-top 

pleasure seeker, and even a psychotic killer—music is used to characterize their unbridled 

personalities. Furthermore, for Goya and Paula, the film music and sound function as narrative 

voice to create sonic spaces of subjectivity in which the viewer has access to each character’s 

unique perception of reality.  

The two literary texts linked to the DEFA films in this chapter have far less in common 

with each other. Lion Feuchtwanger’s Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis was written in 

1951 by a German expatriate living in America and the text served as the source for Wolf’s film. 

Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Legende vom Glück ohne Ende was written in 1979 by a GDR author after 

Carow’s film. While both literary narratives thematize the tension between the individual and 

society within repressive contexts, each protagonist’s subjective perspective is treated much 

differently. In Feuchtwanger’s text, great care is taken to create subjectivity through unique 

modes of narration that grant access to Goya’s psychological interiority. In Plenzdorf’s 

novelization, however, the voice of the narrator works to subdue Paula’s subjectivity by shifting 

narrative perspective and control from Paula to Paul. In this chapter, I will compare and contrast 

the different manifestations of subjectivity across medial and political boundaries with a focus on 

music’s important role in the filmic medium.   

 
22 

 

 

Subjectivity in the Crosshairs of Socialist Realism 

 

The concept of subjectivity was hotly debated within GDR cultural discourse. Following 

the distinction made between Subjektivität and Subjektivismus by Marxist literary critic Georg 

Lukács in his essays on literary realism, cultural officials tepidly tolerated the concept of 

‘subjectivity’ while vehemently rejecting all hints of ‘subjectivism.’ Lukács recognizes that a 

certain amount of subjectivity is necessary for depicting reality in literature, but he cautions that 

this can easily slip into the subjectivism of modernist literature which, he argues, does not give 

due claim to the objective truth that is the inevitable social and historical progress toward 

communism. Furthermore, Lukács links the subjectivism of modernist literature to the rise of 

fascism—the antithesis of the East German socialist order.12 Within this context, GDR authors 

were encouraged, and, in many senses, required to adhere to the literary aesthetic of Socialist 

Realism, the dictates of which included the so-called objective representation of society’s 

progression toward socialism as told by an omniscient narrative voice.13 It is, in part, for this 

reason that GDR literature has historically been written off as pre-modern and formulaic kitsch.14 

However, this does not reflect the full picture, for GDR authors at times worked within these 

parameters to produce rich and highly regarded works, and at other times pushed beyond these 

aesthetic boundaries—Christa Wolf as East German author par excellence who enjoyed success 

 

12 Lukács believed that mid-nineteenth-century German authors tainted realism with a turn toward subjectivism 
within a “‘decadent’ bourgeois literature that paralyzed cultural development in other parts of Europe from the late 
nineteenth-century onward, then took its fateful grip on Germany during the Expressionist era. For Lukács there was 
then an indissoluble link between the ‘extreme[n]—an den Solipsismus grenzende[n]—Subjektivismus’ of 
Expressionism and the rise of fascism” (Tate 26). 
13 Wolfgang Emmerich claims that GDR literature is a prime example of “Planungsliteratur” in that “ausnahmslos 
alle Etappen im Leben eines Literaturwerks gelenkt und kontrolliert wurden (oder werden sollten): Entstehung, 
Drucklegung und Veröffentlichung, Vertrieb, Literaturkritik, endlich Lektüre und also Wirkung” (48). In other 
words, GDR literature was permeated with censorship at all levels, and as such the aesthetic and thematic wishes of 
the censors were enforced at many levels. 
14 From a West German (and even more generally a Western) perspective, there was a strong dichotomy seen 
between realism and modernism—the GDR as a premodern society and the BRD as a fully modernized society.  
In her monograph, Julia Hell, for example, discusses “the wholesale dismissal of East German literature as the 
literary expression of a premodern society” (10).  

 
23 

 

 

in both East and West Germany and whose unique literary aesthetic has characterized GDR 

literature.15  

The tension between the (subjective) individual and society was not limited to literature 

but existed across artistic media. As discussed in Chapter One, the film industry, in particular, 

felt the push to please the censors in the political wake of the 11th Plenary, which resulted in the 

Kahlschlag of DEFA film production.16 Joshua Feinstein argues that Frank Beyer’s Spur der 

Steine—perhaps the most famous of the banned films—was banned because “[b]y presenting 

multiple perspectives on a single problem—the moral conduct of an idealistic Party secretary at a 

construction site—this work fundamentally questioned the possibility of communion between 

individual and collective destiny predicated by socialism’s utopian goals” (14). The portrayal of 

the tension between the individual and the collective was far too critical for the SED. In this 

political context, subjective filmmaking in the GDR was an inherently risky business—the stakes 

quite high. Perhaps it was for this reason that Wolf and Carow turned to the sonic level—a 

medium more difficult to regulate—to depict the subjectivity of their free-thinking protagonists. 

 

Music at the Mediated Level 

While the literary texts in this chapter feature disparate narrative styles, they share a 

commonality in that they both grant access to a protagonist’s point of view in order to create 

character subjectivity—a kind of subjective narration. Adapting subjective narration from novel 

to film or from film to novel can be one of the most difficult aspects to translate between media. 

 

15 Christa Wolf’s aesthetic style will be treated in more detail in Chapter Three, and her novel, Der geteilte Himmel 
is one of the primary texts examined in Chapter Two.  
16 For comprehensive examinations of the so-called forbidden films, see Chapter Four in Daniela Berghahn’s 
Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany and Chapter Five in Joshua Feinstein’s Triumph of the 
Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989. 

 
24 

 

 

On the one hand, a novel has the ability to express the thoughts and emotions of characters 

through direct narration in a way that falls within the expectations and conventions of the literary 

genre. When translating novel to film, it can be difficult to capture the novel’s psychological 

interiority without being too verbose. On the other hand, when translating film to novel, authors 

must grapple with how to translate all the intermedial aspects of film to literary narration. This is 

particularly complex, for while the literary genre is a medium that tells, the filmic medium can 

both show and tell, and as such has different (arguably more) tools with which to convey the 

narrative and thus to convey subjectivity.   

In order to understand how music and sound can function to create character subjectivity 

in the filmic medium, it will be pertinent to explore and expand the film music binary of diegetic 

and nondiegetic music. Traditionally, diegetic music has been understood as creating the “real” 

in the storyworld and the nondiegetic music as setting the mood. This reductive view of film 

music has led to a limiting of its potential for influencing and shaping the narrative structure of 

film. Guido Heldt pushes against these limitations and expands the bounds of the 

diegetic/nondiegetic binary by looking more closely at the spaces between these levels. 

Borrowing from narratology, Heldt makes a distinction between the diegetic and nondiegetic 

levels to which he relates the diegesis and the narration respectively (50). He argues that 

nondiegetic music can function as a kind of commentary on the relationships between the 

narration and the diegesis. This happens when music is used in a way that calls attention to itself, 

in ways that Heldt calls “border violations.” Music “violates” the borders of the filmic 

storyworld when it slips from nondiegetic to diegetic music, and Heldt argues that audiences 

recognize this border crossing because they are intrinsically aware of these filmic musical 

boundaries (65). He compares this sonic call to attention to the literary technique of free indirect 

 
25 

 

 

discourse when an otherwise omniscient narrator speaks with or for the character, thus calling 

attention to the construction of the narrative.  

Heldt’s use of music as commenter on narrative is expanded in Sergio Miceli’s concept 

of music at the mediated level. Here, music that violates borders is tied to instances in which a 

character expresses him/herself musically. Miceli defines the mediated level as follows: 

By “mediated level”, I mean a situation in which the character in a film expresses himself 

or herself not only and not so much through verbal language but rather through the music. 

In such a case, the music is not thought of or imposed from outside through the type of 

artifice that is universally accepted as coming from the musical commentary; rather it 

belongs to the character, for some more or less explicit narrative reason. (102) 

The musical commentary to which he refers is typically thought of as nondiegetic music; 

however, through complex recording and mixing techniques, Miceli argues that mediated music 

falls at a level between diegetic and nondiegetic music. This music is used to create character 

subjectivity, for when we, as the perceivers, hear the music, we are getting a glimpse into the 

inner-world/thought-life of a character. As Miceli elegantly puts it, “[t]hus, in the manifestation 

of an episode with music ascribable to the mediated level, the spectator has the privilege of 

listening to the inner thoughts of the character. It is a procedure like that of the voice-over, with 

the difference that instead of listening to words, one listens to music” (102). As we shall see, the 

music used to depict Goya’s and Paula’s unbridled, inner realities, effectively aligns the viewer 

with both characters’ subjective experiences and creates alternate spaces of subjectivity in the 

filmic medium. 

 

 

 
26 

 

 

Art, Politics, and Repressive Contexts: Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis 

Both Feuchterwanger’s novel and Wolf’s film depict the life and work of 18th-century 

Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya, through the prism of art and politics in society. Goya lived 

in Madrid at the end of the 18th century when the Inquisition still had considerable political 

power in Spain and worked as court painter for the Catholic royals, Charles IV and Maria Luisa. 

Both literary and filmic narratives trace Goya’s gradual disillusionment with aristocratic society 

as he witnesses the ever-widening rift between the aristocratic and religious elites and the 

Spanish people. This ideological shift is reflected, in part, by the introduction of a critical and 

dark, (pre-) modernist aesthetic to Goya’s artwork that set him in great tension with the Spanish 

Inquisition. Goya’s collection of satirical sketches, Los Caprichos, for example, critiqued the 

superstition and irrationality of contemporary Spanish society, highlighting in particular the 

corruption of the Spanish elites. Along with his ideological shift, Goya also experienced a 

physical shift in how he perceived reality as he began to lose his hearing—eventually becoming 

deaf—and to suffer psychological torment resulting from his deafness.17 Both novel and film 

examine Goya’s personal and political development throughout his life by featuring his changing 

psychological state as a driving theme of the narrative.  

Lion Feuchtwanger wrote Goya as an expatriate German living in the United States in the 

1950s and as someone who had dealt with the tension between art and politics throughout his 

life. Feuchtwanger had been a prominent literary figure in Weimar Germany, who was forced to 

live in exile in neighboring France because of his overt criticism of the ever-strengthening Nazi 

party. After Germany invaded France in 1940, Feuchtwanger was imprisoned by the Nazis and 

then was smuggled out and taken as a refugee to America. As a left-wing intellectual 

17 For more on Goya’s biography, see Mary G. Winkler’s “Goya’s ‘Caprichos’ and Creativity at Midlife and 
Beyond.”  

 

 
27 

 

 

sympathetic to the communist cause, Feuchtwanger also experienced considerable tension 

between art and politics in his new home in America. Understood within this historical context, 

scholars argue that the novel was a way for Feuchtwanger to present social criticism in a veiled, 

distant form. Larson Powell and Frédéric Weinmann, for example, argue that Feuchtwanger 

wrote Goya in part as an allegorical response to the FBI surveillance of the McCarthyist 

‘Inquisition.’ Feuchtwanger desired less to present a biographical timeline of the painter’s life 

than to show the intricacies of Goya’s personal and political development throughout his life. 

The emphasis on process sheds light on the subtitle of the novel—der arge Weg der 

Erkenntnis—and clarifies the novel’s thematization of the psychological interiority of the great 

Spanish painter.18   

Goya’s personal and political development is expressed through his inner thoughts 

concerning his relationships with various members of the aristocracy and the tug he feels to 

create art that reflects the social and political ills of Spanish society. In order to express these 

inner struggles, the novel uses a third-person omniscient narrator. Through the employment of 

free indirect discourse—a literary technique that combines the subjective language of direct 

thought with the objective language of the narrator’s direct report—Goya’s subjective 

perspective drives the narration. The novel’s major emphasis on the transmission of Goya’s 

psychological interiority allows the reader to have access to information in ways that are unique 

to literature: “[w]hen the narrators of novels present direct to readers the contents of characters’ 

minds, they are doing what cannot be done in real life. We cannot look into the minds of other 

 

18 In Herlinghaus’ Goya, vom Roman zum Film, she includes a quote from Feuchtwanger himself explaining the 
impetus for his novel: “Der Glaube an das Gottesgnadentum des Königs und an die Helligkeit der Kirche stak tief in 
[Goya], und es bedurfte gewaltiger Stöße, seine reiche und tiefe Intelligenz zu erwecken und sie zum Widerstand 
gegen diese Mächte zu stacheln. Diesen argen und schmerzhaften Weg der Erkenntnis will mein Buch zeigen“ (5). 
Herlinghaus’ document was compiled and published simultaneously with Wolf’s film in 1971. It includes statements 
by Feuchtwanger, interviews with Konrad Wolf and the actors in the film, screenplay notes on the staging, music, 
and sound in the film, etc. 

 
28 

 

 

people in the actual world in the way that, as readers, we look into the minds of people in a 

fictional storyworld” (Palmer). In the over-600-page novel, the omniscient narrator is vitally 

important for peering into Goya’s mind to reveal the subtle shifts in thinking that ultimately lead 

to his personal and political development.  

The length of Feuchtwanger’s novel combined with the text’s high level of psychological 

interiority present great aesthetic challenges to a filmmaker who would choose to adapt the text 

to the filmic medium. This challenge was taken up by Konrad Wolf, who, as Marc Silberman 

puts it, “… takes [Goya] as an opportunity to investigate the historical and psychological limits 

of the creative personality, yielding an incredibly dense text that encompasses not only the Goya 

story but also echoes Feuchtwanger’s experience as an artist in political exile as well as [Wolf’s] 

own practical knowledge about the effect of constraints on imagination in the GDR” (184). The 

allegory of the tension between politics and artistic expression links the three figures—Goya, 

Feuchtwanger, and Wolf. Goya was the first film produced by Wolf after his fallout with the 

Party concerning Frank Beyer’s 1966 film, Spur der Steine. Wolf publicly defended Beyer’s film 

after it was banned at the 11th Plenary and he was therefore met with sharp criticism. After being 

asked to reconsider his position on Spur der Steine, Wolf wrote a letter rescinding his support of 

the film and asserting that his next artistic work would make amends for his transgression 

(Hollywood 157-58). However, despite his official proclamation, many scholars see Goya as a 

critique of the events of the 11th Plenum, interpreting the film as veiled criticism of censorship in 

the GDR.19 

 

19 In Séan Allan’s article on Konrad Wolf’s artist films, he argues that Goya focuses on the role of the artist in 
society in order to point out the problems inherent in artistic communication and the role of reason in opposing 
political oppression (171). 

 
29 

 

 

Goya was an East-Bloc co-production between the GDR, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, 

Poland, and Yugoslavia, and, as Marsha Siefert explains, represented an attempt “to make a film 

considered artistic in form, socialist in content, and yet still a commercial success” (89). Scholars 

and critics seem to agree that the attempt was successful. For example, H. Blumensath and K. 

Scherpe have called Goya a “socialist Gesamtkunstwerk” owing to its lush iconography, creative 

montage sequences, and its engagement with art history. Anthony S. Coulson considers the film 

intellectually engaging as it challenges its spectator to critical engagement through the rich 

interaction of dialogue and image. However, what these observations fail to account for is the 

music, a significant aspect of the film that, up until now, has been underexamined. The 

contribution of the film’s sonic landscape to the visual narrative and aesthetic shape overall is 

essential in understanding the character of Goya. Feuchtwanger’s Goya is exceedingly 

superstitious, prone to extreme emotions, and haunted by evil spirits. This tumultuous inner life 

is exacerbated by his bouts of deafness that send him spiraling emotionally and physically into 

his own inner world. Adapting Feuchtwanger’s careful and detailed account of Goya’s 

maturation process presented great challenges for Wolf, as most of Goya’s psychological and 

political development takes place in his thought life as narrated by the omniscient narrator.  

In his adaptation, Wolf did not choose to include a voice-over to narrate what Goya 

thinks or feels. Instead, he relies on other filmic devices to express these complex inner thoughts 

and emotions, namely, the music and sound working at the mediated level, as it soon becomes 

clear that Goya is the only character within the diegesis who is able to hear such music. This 

effect is accomplished through the use of various recording and mixing techniques to transgress 

boundaries and place Goya’s music into a separate sonic space apart from the diegetic music of 

the film. Furthermore, the music plays an important role in outlining Goya’s artistic and political 

 
30 

 

 

development. This is skillfully narrated in the film through a rich interaction of image and 

(mediated) melodies that trace Goya’s internal thought processes and reconcile the many 

conflicting realms of his life.  

In her chapter on Goya, Laura M. Sager Eidt compares the novel and film, focusing on 

the translation of Goya’s subjectivity and the tension between art and politics from page to 

screen. She argues that in Feuchtwanger’s novel, Goya’s socio-political awareness and his 

personal artistic growth are primarily depicted through literary ekphrasis. She considers the 

narrative’s central message of artistic and political awakening to be best expressed in Goya’s 

etching, “The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters” No. 43 from Los Caprichos. Eidt draws a 

parallel between the etching’s image of a man haunted by spirits to Goya’s own existence that is 

likewise plagued by monsters and evil spirits. Only through Goya’s personal, artistic, and 

political growth can these inner demons be tamed when Goya finally bans them as images to the 

page. Comparing the novel to the film, she argues that Wolf fails to adequately express Goya’s 

personal and artistic growth because of the limitations of cinematic ekphrasis that result in the 

film’s lack of psychological interiority. She supports her claim through analysis of multiple 

ekphrases of Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason’ etching in both the novel and film, differentiating 

them by the way in which they function to create character subjectivity or a lack thereof. Quoting 

Sager Eidt at length:  

Feuchtwanger’s subjective, intimate ekphrases, many of which represent Goya’s 

innermost thoughts or his pre-verbal perceptions about his works, often imply that the 

artist himself does not completely realize the scope and meaning of his art. Through the 

use of free indirect discourse, Feuchtwanger is able to contrast Goya’s internal thoughts 

and emotions and the narrator’s ironic voice. In so doing, Feuchtwanger provides the 

 
31 

 

 

reader both with immediate access to Goya’s thoughts and pre-verbal perceptions, as well 

as with an interpretive, analytical distance toward them. Cinematic ekphrasis, by contrast, 

cannot be subjective and intimate in a similar way (unless it resorts to the use of voice-

over, which is often awkward), but must either be verbalized in direct speech (descriptive 

or interpretive ekphrases), or visually enacted and dramatized (interpretive or dramatic 

ekphrases). (146) 

With the following analysis, I will challenge Sager Eidt’s assertion concerning the limitations of 

cinematic ekphrasis by arguing that, in the scenes she identifies, the film’s use of sound and 

music creates the subjectivity and intimacy which she perceives are lacking. This is 

accomplished through the deployment of music at the mediated level which steps in for the 

narrative voice to align the viewer with Goya and grant access to his subjective inner reality.  

Wolf’s film opens with a short credit roll written in white text against a black screen; a 

seemingly unremarkable beginning. However, punctuating the visual is a lively soundtrack 

featuring quick, rhythmic clapping that immediately grabs the attention of the viewer. A single 

strum of an acoustic guitar abruptly interrupts the percussive clapping as the film’s title, Goya, 

written in bold black type quickly fades to red against a white background. The background 

shifts to a painting of a medieval city and then fades to a camera shot of an actual city—the 

filmic world of Madrid. The camera then cuts to a religious procession comprised of crucifixes, 

religious icons, and self-flagellating men dressed in pointed white hats. This visually 

overwhelming montage is accompanied by the ringing of church bells, a boys’ choir singing a 

slightly underpitched “Ave Maria,” and the sounds of a loud, dissonant pipe organ. The stark 

imagery combined with the intriguing soundtrack evokes the Catholic Church and lends a 

distinct air of foreboding to this scene. However, the religious tone soon begins to shift, as a 

 
32 

 

 

melodic Spanish guitar cuts into the musical soundscape. The dissonant organ and the consonant 

guitar play simultaneously—a stark, disconcerting contrast—and alternate with the sounds of 

bells and the chorus of “Ave Maria” over the next three and a half minutes of the film. The 

juxtaposition of these disparate musical styles is perhaps the most striking element of this 

opening scene. The music calls attention to itself, demanding to be heard, and signaling to the 

viewer that s/he should pay attention.  

An investigation of Feuchtwanger’s text sheds light on Wolf’s aesthetic and acoustic 

decisions. On the surface level, the beginning of the novel is quite different than the film. The 

novel opens with a detailed description of the political and religious culture in Spain at the end of 

the 18th century. Feuchtwanger depicts Spain as fully entrenched in medieval mentalities despite 

the larger context of a flourishing European modernism. In Spain there was an inextricable bond 

of “Königtum und Kirche” that engendered a “wilden Glauben an Thron und Altar” 

(Feuchtwanger 9). However, while the Spanish people were firmly stuck in medieval structures, 

members of the aristocratic and religious classes were becoming increasingly separate from the 

people and increasingly undeserving of their admiration. This was true, in particular, for the 

Catholic Church because of its involvement in the Inquisition. In Feuchtwanger’s words: “Das 

Christentum selber verlor in Spanien seine Demut und seine Heiterkeit, es nahm ein wildes, 

düsteres, herrisches Gepräge an. Die Kirche wurde hochfahrend, kriegerisch, männlich, 

grausam” (10). The juxtaposition between the Spanish people and the religious and aristocratic 

social classes sets the scene for the rest of the novel in which Goya struggles to find his rightful 

place as an artist in Spanish society. In the film, this tension is depicted not mainly through 

words, but through a clever interaction of image and sound. The mingling of the Spanish guitar 

with the organ and the “Ave Maria” can be understood as foreshadowing the coming clash of the 

 
33 

 

 

two social classes and as setting the tone for the remainder of the film which features the tension 

between church and state, art and politics, madness and reality. Taking just this opening scene 

into account reveals the intricate and multimedial work of art that is Wolf’s film. When we pay 

attention to the sound, this opening scene adds significantly to its status as a “socialist 

Gesamtkunstwerk” but furthermore adds to an understanding of the film more generally. The 

music here acts, in a sense, as its own character, embodying the themes of church and folk, 

having a subjectivity of its own. This opening sequence also sets the precedent for how such 

musical themes will function for the remainder of the film—as mediated melodies to narrate 

Goya’s internal, artistic and political development 

Both the novel and film begin by depicting Goya as a vain, superficial man who is solely 

concerned about his reputation in the royal court and his various sexual conquests. Even his 

professional life as an artist has been dedicated to the desires of the aristocratic world. Soon, 

however, his priorities begin to shift as it becomes impossible for him to ignore the suffering of 

the Spanish people by the neglect of the royals and aristocrats and at the hands of the Inquisition. 

Driven by his peasant roots, he feels a pull to become a political artist. Early in the novel, there is 

a move toward finding a path between Goya’s two worlds: “Lächerlich ist, wer in einer Welt 

lebt, wie sie sollte sein, und nicht in der, die ist … Zwischen beiden Welten muß ein Weg sein, 

und ich will und wird‘ ihn finden. Glaub es mir, ich wird‘ ihn finden, Agustín. Nur hab Geduld, 

mein Lieber” (191). The rest of the novel illustrates Goya’s struggle to bridge the gap between 

many worlds—that of the aristocracy and the people, madness and reason, and art and politics.  

Sager Eidt argues that the filmic Goya cannot bridge the many gaps in his life because 

“[t]he artist’s ability in the novel to expel the demons and to combine fantasy and reason with his 

art is not an option for Goya of the film” (142). She claims that both the lack of interiority in the 

 
34 

 

 

depiction of Goya’s demons and the film’s missing subjective, aesthetic dimension result in the 

artist’s eventual defeat and helplessness in the face of oppressive politics (142). However, the 

film’s use of mediated music clearly addresses what Sager Eidt perceives as a lack of interiority 

and subjectivity. The tension between the opposing worlds in Goya’s life is reflected in two 

juxtaposed musical themes. The first theme is associated with Goya’s tormented spirit 

concerning the aristocracy, his affair with the Duchess of Alba, and the Inquisition. It consists of 

an unsettled, dissonant line played in a low register on the flute. The second theme is an iteration 

of the Spanish theme used in the opening sequence of the film. It is comprised of consonant 

strumming on a Spanish guitar and has been aligned with the Spanish “Volk,” or the peasant life 

from which Goya came. Both of these musical themes are at the mediated level, in that they are 

interior to Goya and function to narrate the working through of his internal struggles. 

Near the end of the story, Goya is fully deaf and is torn between the world from which he 

came—the world of the peasants and farmers—and the royal and aristocratic world in which he 

now lives. Goya has travelled to his hometown of Saragossa to find clarity in his fraught 

circumstances and to seek comfort from his aging mother. The sequence begins with Goya 

sitting alone in a room in his childhood home, bent over his etchings of monsters and demons. 

Immediately, the dissonant flute melody begins to play. In contrast to earlier iterations of this 

theme, this time it is interrupted by the theme played on the Spanish guitar. The music in this 

scene switches back and forth between the strumming guitar and dissonant flute music, creating 

not only a disjointed melody, but setting a disjointed tone for the scene. Goya’s mother then 

enters the room, examines his etchings, and asks if these demons are tormenting him. After Goya 

ponders her question and gazes at his etchings, he says that the demons that haunt him and 

inhabit his art are the same ones that are tormenting Spain. The frivolous aristocracy and 

 
35 

 

 

oppressive Inquisition manifest themselves as evil spirits and Ungeheuer in his etchings, 

signifying Goya’s repressed desire to address the sufferings of the Spanish people in his art. As 

we will see, the tension between his two worlds is best expressed through the music in this scene. 

As Goya and his mother continue to observe his etchings, the two musical melodies that 

were once separate and disjointed blend together. The strumming and plucking of the guitar play 

simultaneously with the dissonant flute theme. In this instance, the music that has been 

associated with Goya’s tormented spirit concerning his relationship to the aristocracy converges 

with the music associated with the Spanish people and his political convictions. The convergence 

of the themes illustrates an epiphany in Goya’s personal and political development and functions 

as mediated melody, giving the viewer access to Goya’s thought process that led him there. Goya 

realizes he can bridge the two worlds in which he lives by bringing his demons into dialogue 

with reality through his art. Allan puts it this way: “It is at this point—the point at which Goya 

has returned to his origins—that the film establishes its final connection between reason and 

enlightenment on the one hand, and art on the other” (179).  

In the novel, Goya’s inner epiphany is expressed through the narrtor: 

Mit furchtbarer Anstrengung riß er sich zusammen, griff zum Stift. Warf sie aufs Papier, 

die bösen Geister. Da waren sie. Und da er sie auf dem Papier sah, wurde er ruhiger … 

Wenn sie übers Papier krochen und flogen, waren sie nicht mehr gefährlich … Er schloß 

nicht die Augen vor den Dämonen, warf sich nicht über den Tisch, um den Kopf vor 

ihnen zu verbergen. Er schaute ihnen in die Gesichter, hielt sie fest, bis sie sich ihm ganz 

offenbart hatten, zwang sie und seine Angst und seinen Wahn aufs Papier. (436-37) 

 In the act of banning his demons to the page, Goya can harness them as art that critiques the 

society in which he lives. In both novel and film, this is a turning point in the narrative. After 

 
36 

 

 

Goya leaves his mother, he returns to Madrid and grows bolder to display his art filled with 

ghosts and demons and to create works that address his increasingly oppressive political and 

religious context. Through the mediated melodies, the music in this scene takes the place of the 

narrative voice and thematizes Goya’s transformation into a political artist—successfully 

combining art and politics. 

In order to more fully demonstrate how the film uses music to drive the progression of 

the filmic narrative and to create spaces of subjectivity, let us turn to a scene emblematic for how 

the film creates Goya’s inner reality. In this scene, Goya is dealing with the pull between artistic 

means of expression and political pressures and expectations—the tension between the two 

causing him intense, inner turmoil. The sequence begins with a visit from the poet and political 

activist, Don Gaspar Jovellanos, who has come to evaluate Goya’s most recent royal portrait. 

Criticizing the modernist tendencies of his work and the artist’s lack of political engagement, 

Jovellanos bluntly dismisses the painter and his painting. His fragile ego bruised, Goya turns to 

his friend and apprentice, Agustín, for comfort, but it is to no avail as Agustín agrees with 

Jovellanos’ offensive assessment. It is at this point that Goya spirals out of control and his 

descent into deafness and madness begins. In the novel, the voice of the omniscient narrator 

provides the reader access to what next takes place internal to Goya: “Das letzte, was Goya 

gehört hatte, war: ‘Qué vergüenza.’ Dann hatte ihn eine dunkelrote Wolke von Wut eingehüllt 

und war ihm in die Ohren geschlagen und ins Hirn, daß er nicht mehr hörte” (85). The literary 

scene ends with Goya completely submerged in his own world of madness, speaking nonsense to 

his own paintings.  

While the filmic scene, too, is marked by depictions of Goya’s inner reality, they occur 

primarily on the aural level through the film’s use of sound. After Agustín’s apparent betrayal, 

 
37 

 

 

Goya screams: “Raus! Ich will dich nicht mehr sehen! Raus!” Overtaken by all-consuming rage, 

he stumbles about and then suddenly clutches at his ears, his face contorted into a panicked 

grimace. As he throws his head down onto his desk, the camera cuts to an overhead shot of Goya 

face-down, surrounded by sketches of strange animals and distorted human figures. The camera 

pauses for a second on this striking image and then cuts to show Agustín rushing to the side of 

the tortured artist. He pulls Goya’s head from the desk, grabs a glass of water, and, lifting it to 

his lips, tries to calm him with words of comfort. This is, however, to no avail, for Goya cannot 

hear what Agustín is saying. As Goya falls into his fit of rage, Agustín’s voice becomes 

increasingly muffled until it becomes completely unintelligible. Dissonant string music then 

emerges from the background to take the place of his voice and of all other diegetic sounds—the 

music filling the entire sonic space. The strings are played in a high register with notes 

constantly ascending that work to lend a tense and disconcerting atmosphere to the scene. 

Eventually, the music begins to decrescendo and the man’s muffled voice again becomes clearer. 

Recovering from his fall into madness, Goya, exhausted and overwhelmed, gazes beyond the 

camera and resignedly proclaims to Agustín: “Geh. Und für immer.” 

This iconic scene has been noted by scholars such as Seán Allan, who identifies here the 

emergence of themes that will run throughout the film. Focusing on the visual level, he remarks: 

“That Goya recognizes the essential truth of his friend’s remarks is underscored visually in the 

way he puts his hands to his ears—thereby linking his reluctance to hear the truth about himself 

with the theme of deafness running throughout the film generally” (174). Sager Eidt considers 

this scene to be the first filmic ekphrasis of Goya’s etching ‘The Sleep of Reason.’ She argues 

that the film postures Goya as the disgruntled man in the famous etching. After the filmic Goya 

throws his head in exasperation onto his desk, the camera cuts to a shot of the desk from above, 

 
38 

 

 

the sketches of demons—the Caprichos—surrounding Goya’s head, mirroring the way the 

demons in the original etching encroach on the sleeping man. Sager Eidt criticizes this scene for 

its lack of psychological interiority, claiming that the viewer cannot entirely adopt Goya’s point 

of view as the viewer remains on the outside looking at him and has no access to what is going 

on internally. However, what Allan and Sager Eidt have overlooked is a major element in this 

scene: namely, the sound. Allan’s identification of the motif of Goya putting his hands to his ears 

is not only a link between Goya’s unwillingness to hear the truth and his deafness, but also a 

signal to the audience that he is slipping into his inner world haunted by the demons of his many 

opposing realities. Through the slow muffling of all diegetic sounds and the takeover of the 

dissonant music, the soundtrack violates diegetic boundaries and slips into Miceli’s mediated 

level. At this point, the viewer auditorily adopts Goya’s subjective position in that the soundtrack 

is comprised only of that which Goya can hear. The viewer is thereby granted access to Goya’s 

rich internal reality through the dissonant and cacophonous music at the mediated level, thus 

adding a complex layer to the film. 

Psychological breakdowns such as these characterize the literary and filmic Goya, many 

of which are due to Goya’s tumultuous affair with the Duchess of Alba, Doña Cayetana. Out of 

his class and out of his league, Goya lies, schemes, and violates the bounds of marriage in order 

to be with this enticing woman. Eventually, Goya succeeds in his pursuit and the two engage in a 

passionate love affair. Knowing this context is essential for understanding the next filmic 

depiction of Goya’s madness which has a considerably darker and more superstitious tone. After 

a deadly epidemic sweeping through Madrid claims the life of Goya’s young daughter, he 

descends into a self-loathing depression. In the literary account, it is clear that he believes his 

daughter’s death to be divine punishment for his dishonesty and affair with the Duchess of Alba, 

 
39 

 

 

for “nun die Teufel seine Lüge wahrgemacht hätten” (256). It was his immoral behavior that 

angered and provoked the evil spirits to take revenge, and it was Goya himself who had 

“frevlerisch das Kind den finstern Mächten geopfert” (255). Overcome by anger and guilt, Goya 

fights to remain rational despite the madness threatening to overtake him. His troubled 

psychological state is expressed by the omniscient narrator: “Vom Totenbett der Kleinen lief 

[Goya] in sein Atelier, verfluchte die Heiligen, die nicht geholfen hatten, verfluchte sich, 

verfluchte sie, die an allem schuld war, die Hexe, die Hure und Herzogin, die aus hochmütiger 

Laune und Lust ihn gezwungen hatte, sein liebstes Kind zu opfern” (257). Here, the narrator’s 

use of free indirect discourse effectively aligns the reader with Goya’s subjective perspective and 

exposes his line of thinking concerning where he places blame for the death of his child. 

Abandoned by the saints, seduced by Cayetana, and punished by demons, Goya’s own feelings 

of guilt are eclipsed by his inability to fully accept responsibility for his actions. At this point, 

Goya spirals into another bout of madness.  

In the film, this sequence begins in Goya’s studio where he sits atop a flight of stairs, 

head in hands, mourning the death of his daughter. Again, his apprentice Agustín is there to offer 

words of comfort. Goya replies: “Nein. Ich bin schuld. Glaube mir. Ich alleine. Ich habe meine 

Tochter hingeopfert. Sie hat mir die Lüge angegeben. Diese Frau hat mir die Lüge angegeben ... 

und jetzt werde ich dafür bestraft. Die Teufel haben meine Lüge wahrgemacht. Hexe! Sie ist eine 

dreimal verfluchte Hexe.” While these lines are taken almost word for word from 

Feuchtwanger’s novel, it is not through them primarily that Goya’s internally troubled and 

tortured state is expressed. Directly following Goya’s lines, the Duchess of Alba enters the room, 

and Goya is sent into a fit of rage at just the sight of her. While spitting insults and advancing to 

strike her, Goya is overtaken by his second bout of deafness and madness. Again, the viewer’s 

 
40 

 

 

first clue that something is amiss is Goya’s hands moving to cover his ears as he stumbles and 

falls to the floor. At this instance, the music that delineates Goya’s subjective world of 

madness—his mediated music—begins to play and slowly crescendos to take over the sonic 

space. The music features organ, brass, and heavy strings playing sustained dissonant notes, 

becoming increasingly louder, and followed by quick downward glissandos. All other diegetic 

sounds are eventually drowned out by this music, signaling that Goya is no longer hearing the 

way others do, and that he has slipping into his mad, inner world filled with his political ghosts 

and demons. Differentiating the music from that in the scene described above is the addition of 

whispers, loud breathing, hisses, and other distorted sounds. The evil spirits who torment Goya’s 

thought life in the novel are personified on the aural level in the film. This becomes even clearer 

when considering the sound and image working together in tandem. Goya looks up and focuses 

first on a crucifix and then on an icon of the holy virgin of Pilar. Both icons are shot in tight 

close-ups and the camera lens fluctuates in and out of focus, mimicking how Goya’s own 

perspective shifts in and out of focus as his madness takes over. The rich religious imagery 

accompanied by the disturbing sounds of evil spirits gives the viewer access to Goya’s subjective 

experience. Not only does the viewer see from his perspective, there is a doubling of sensory 

input as the viewer also hears the spirits and demons that create Goya’s superstitious, tormented 

reality. The fear of the Inquisition that has gripped Spain has gripped Goya, too, and his personal 

experiences cannot be divorced from the political and cultural context in which he lives and 

works.  

As has become clear, Goya’s deafness in the film is anything but silent. His bouts of 

madness and deafness are characterized by loud music, incessant hissing, and the screeching of 

the soundtrack. This parallels the novel in that while Goya is physically deaf, his inner thoughts 

 
41 

 

 

are loud as he laments his silent fate and ponders his role as an artist in Spanish society. About 

halfway through the story, Goya experiences his most traumatic psychological breakdown and 

subsequently loses his hearing completely. In the novel, Goya ponders his new reality:  

“Als es gegen Morgen ging und erste Helle kam, stürzte das Bewußtsein seiner Taubheit in 

seinem ganzen Entsetzen über ihn her. Ihm war, als stülpte sich eine riesige Glocke über ihn, ihn 

für immer einzusperren. Es war nicht zu ertragen, daß er, der seine Freunde und seinen Schmerz 

den andern heraussagen mußte, fortan von den Menschen sollte abgesperrt sein” (379). When the 

filmic Goya falls permanently into deafness, the music steps in to illustrate his accompanying 

psychological crash. In the film, Goya lays prostrate on the ground in a room filled with 

shattered glass, and the soundtrack features a sustained dissonant interval on woodwind 

instruments. As the dissonant chord slowly decrescendos and the camera cuts to the next scene, a 

sudden, percussive crash resounds in the soundscape. Understanding music as narrative voice 

used to express Goya’s subjective experience allows us to read the loud crashes as the aural 

manifestation of the huge bell that traps Goya and causes him to retreat into his own world of 

madness. The film ends with a fully deaf Goya in conflict with Church and state, but no longer in 

conflict with himself. In combining art and politics, he has found a way to ease his loud, internal 

demons. 

 

Everyone’s Favorite Couple: Paul and Paula  
 
 

In this next section, we transition our focus from the dark and stormy figure of Goya to 

the light-hearted and exuberant figure of Paula. Separated by time, space, gender, and social 

class, the two protagonists seem to have little in common. However, both characters live at the 

edges of acceptable behavior and as such experience reality in distinctive ways. In both Wolf’s 

 
42 

 

 

and Carow’s films, Goya and Paula have unique relationships to sound and music. Both filmic 

narratives outline how each figure lives with their internal music at various nodal points of 

happiness, despair, and/or trauma—the placing of hands over ears being an overlapping motif. 

The aural level of the films gives “voice” to Goya’s and Paula’s subjective thoughts and 

emotions, signaled by the use of mediated music. 

The story of Paul and Paula is a comedic albeit tragic love story between a single mother 

named Paula and an unhappily married bureaucrat named Paul. The two could not be more 

different. Paula is an attractive young woman, who, despite a less than ideal economic situation, 

lives her life solely concerned with finding love and happiness in the private sphere. Paul, on the 

other hand, is a well-respected official in the Party and finds his identity in his social status, 

going to great lengths to appear successful within the public sphere. On all accounts, Paul is 

firmly implanted in GDR society—until he meets Paula, that is.  

In both the novel and film versions, the main arc of the narrative is Paul’s transformation 

from entrenched bureaucrat to fantastical lover. However, how this narrative is transmitted and 

from whose perspective it issues varies considerably between film and novel. In the film, Paula 

is the focus as she guides Paul’s transformation by bringing him into spaces where erotic love 

rules and fantasies of life detached from the public sphere abound. These spaces exist in Paula’s 

subjective world of fantasy that is created by mediated music which guides and shapes the filmic 

narrative. In the novel, however, Paula’s inner, subjective reality is stripped away and, as a 

result, she is no longer the guiding force in the narrative.  

Heiner Carow’s film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula, was produced in 1973 and drew 

over three million viewers to the box office, making it the most popular film to ever be produced 

 
43 

 

 

in DEFA.20 In 1979, Ulrich Plenzdorf, the film’s script writer, capitalized on the success of the 

film and published Legende vom Glück ohne Ende, a combination of film novelization and 

sequel. Twenty years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and amid a wave of Ostalgie, Die 

Legende von Paul und Paula was re-released and its cult-film status solidified.21 While there 

were many factors that contributed to its popularity, many scholars attribute the film’s success to 

its welcome departure from the “traditional” DEFA film aesthetic. According to Berghahn:  

The formula for [the film’s] success included two ingredients: the creation of a heroine 

who was a far cry from the ideal of the socialist personality, a ‘real person’ with whom 

the audience could identify; and the transgression of the by then customary gritty 

documentary realism through fantasy, which the narrative form of the legend afforded. 

(Hollywood 197) 

The less-than-perfect Paula and the genre of fantasy allowed the audience to imagine an alternate 

GDR reality for themselves.  

The film’s catchy soundtrack is arguably the most famous of any DEFA film, comprised 

of seven pop songs performed by the East German rock band, Die Puhdys.22 After being featured 

in Die Legende von Paul und Paula, the band’s popularity skyrocketed.23 While the film was 

extremely important for Die Puhdys’ success, I contend that their contribution to Die Legende 

von Paul und Paula was equally as important for the success of the film. In virtually every 

review or article about the film, mention is made of the soundtrack. Wolfgang Mühl-

 

20 Die Legende von Paul und Paula was seen by 1,749,145 viewers in the year of its release, and by 1985, it had 
been viewed by 3.1 million people (Mühl-Benninghaus 175). 
21 Carow’s film was re-released in 1993 to celebrate its twentieth anniversary. The term “Ostalgie” is a portmanteau 
of the words “Ost” and “Nostalgie,” and can be translated as “nostalgia for the East.” The term was coined in 1992 
by comedian Uwe Steimle in response to a wave of interest in and nostalgia for former East Germany.  
22 Die Puhdys was founded in 1969 and is considered the most popular band from the GDR, performing long after 
reunification.  
23 John Littlejohn writes, “[o]ne should not underestimate the importance of this film for the band” (85). 

 
44 

 

 

Benninghaus, for example, claims that “[i]t was the blend of exceptional acting, memorable 

music and the penetrating interpretation of early 1970s reality that made [Die Legende von Paul 

und Paula] the most popular DEFA film of all time” (175). Berghahn contends that the 

prominence of the song “Geh zu ihr” in one of the film’s most iconic scenes contributed greatly 

to the film’s cult status (Hollywood 200).  

While the film music has been acknowledged to have played an important role in 

contributing to the success of the film, there has been little research done on how the music 

functions or its role in shaping the filmic narrative. Mühl-Benninghaus comes closest to 

identifying music’s function:  

Paula, enchantingly portrayed by Angelica Domröse, is the psychologically most 

complex role of the film. Her temperament, sensuousness and ability to cope successfully 

with everyday life point to a strong, differentiated personality, which embodied the 

longing for independence, inner freedom and self-determination like no other character in 

a DEFA film up to that time. Paula as a character was a provocation, just as much as the 

representation of the world which Paula inhabited, heightened even more by the film's 

music (emphasis mine). (171-72) 

The linking of Paula’s psychological complexity with the film’s music points to the soundtrack’s 

narratological role in the film. In a few key scenes, the film music functions at the mediated level 

in order to create an alternate reality where Paula can control the story and indulge in her 

fantasies of love, happiness, and self-determination. The use of mediated music to grant access to 

Paula’s inner thoughts and fantasies allows the viewer to identify with Paula and, together with 

the image, creates the film’s aesthetic of fantasy. The world to which Paula retreats is one in 

which the physical laws of reality do not apply and where she and Paul are free to express their 

 
45 

 

 

love to one another. Throughout the film, there are moments, however brief, during which Paul, 

too, has access to this world signaled by his ability to hear Paula’s internal music.24 Paula’s 

mediated space of subjectivity is vitally important for the narrative structure, as Paul’s exposure 

to this mediated world is that which allows Paula to guide Paul’s transformation from staunch 

bureaucrat to eccentric lover.  

Plenzdorf’s Legende vom Glück ohne Ende achieved some popular success among 

readers in the GDR, however there has been very little scholarly attention paid to the 

novelization of Carow’s beloved film. Among the few reviews, the consensus seems to be that 

the novel is a pale imitation of the source film. E. Krispyn, for example, contends: “The 

adaptation of the Legende to the epic genre is consequently quite problematical, as direct 

representation is replaced by narration” (429). In Krispyn’s estimation, the immediacy of the 

filmic medium is better suited to tell Paul and Paula’s love story than is the narrator in the novel. 

While no specific rationale is given for this assessment, I will assert that Krispyn’s 

disappointment is rooted in the novel’s shift in focus from Paula to Paul. Paula is no longer the 

character with whom the viewer/reader identifies, and her fantasies no longer shape and guide 

the narrative.  

Paula in part loses her centrality in the story because of in the novel’s continuation of 

Paul’s story after Paula’s death. The first 166 pages of the novel are devoted to depicting the epic 

love story from the film, and the second half picks up where the film ends. Reeling from Paula’s 

death, here the narrator introduces the figure of Laura who functions as a foil to Paula. Laura is 

her spitting image, so much so that everyone is convinced she is Paula reincarnate. However, it 

 

24 Paula, as a character, is not only marked by internal music but by musical outpourings of emotion. For example, 
the day after Paula’s first night with Paul, the viewer sees her at her job as a cashier at the local HO 
(Handelsorganisation). She is so happy that she cannot help but sing at the top of her lungs, all of the customers 
joining in with her in song. 

 
46 

 

 

soon becomes clear this is not the case. Laura’s temperament could not be more different than 

Paula’s, as she subscribes to bourgeois notions of marriage, work, and fashion. Paul, however, 

cannot resist Laura because of her physical resemblance to Paula, and sacrifices everything to be 

with her. Their relationship results in Paul’s reluctant return to societal order and a growing 

sense of resentment directed at Laura. Unlike Paul and Paula, Paul and Laura have little impact 

on the community around them. Ilse Winter explains: “It is no wonder that not a single legend is 

told about Paul and Laura. Their relationship is the norm rather than the exception; it lacks the 

uniqueness and radically new perspective of the Paul and Paula union” (236). With the lack of 

rumors and legends surrounding this love story, the collective perspective is diminished, and the 

narrator begins to include increasingly more direct quotes from Paul. The novel concludes 

focused fully on Paul, tracing his gradual withdrawal from Laura which reaches its apex in 

Paul’s unexplained disappearance with which the novel comes to a screeching halt.25  

Gisela Shaw attributes the novel’s shift away from Paula to the text’s narrative voice: “In 

the novel, Legende vom Glück ohne Ende, Paula’s realistic properties have faded away. She has 

lost much of her appeal as a lively individual (largely because of the introduction of an elderly 

narrator) and has come fully to impersonate the forces of love and beauty” (88). The elderly 

narrator to whom Shaw refers has been classified as an auctorial or omniscient narrator (Krispyn 

429). This is, however, a too limited description, as the novel’s narration does not fall neatly into 

one category. Antonia Holdegel describes the novel’s narrative transmission as “mehr oder 

weniger aus dritter Hand” (11). The “more or less” refers to the narrator’s sporadic use of first-

 

25 Near the end of the novel, Paul has an accident which leaves him paralyzed from the waist down. Unable to take 
care of himself, he becomes completely dependent upon Laura and sinks into a depression. However, during a visit 
to his ex-wife, he gets an erection and is able to sleep with her. This is enough to rip Paul out of his depression and 
fills him with hope that he will be able to rehabilitate his legs so that he can leave Laura. By the end of the novel, 
Paul has secretly gained enough strength to walk around with crutches or on his knees and ends up disappearing one 
night, leaving Laura and the whole community stunned.  

 
47 

 

 

person pronouns such as uns Alte or wir alten Leute, placing the narrator within the narrated 

world and indicating a collective element to the narrative voice, and the narrator’s occasional 

reference to meine Person, the unnamed, third-hand source for some of the narrator’s story. The 

narrative is also interspersed with direct quotations from characters that function to elaborate on 

the information provided by the quasi-omniscient narrator. As soon becomes clear in the novel, 

wir alten Leute are the residents of Paula’s apartment building who were witnesses to the 

legendary story of Paul and Paula’s love. Through the switch in narrative perspective from film 

to novel, Paula is no longer the central, guiding force in the narrative, and, as a result, the story 

no longer belongs to her. Plenzdorf does away with Paula’s perspective and thus with her 

subjectivity. Why he does this cannot be said for certain, but the difference is noteworthy and 

will be explored by comparing and contrasting the novelization to the film.  

Throughout the film, mediated music is used to characterize Paula, shaping her 

personality and setting the tone for her behavior throughout the film. The first instance of 

mediated music occurs one night when Paula and her girlfriends are out at a carnival on the hunt 

for excitement and romance. Beguiled by a good-looking carnival worker named Collie, Paula 

and her friends rush to his ride hoping to attract the handsome man’s attention. Taking a seat in 

one of the cars, Paula gazes intently at Collie with a large smile across her face. The camera pans 

from Paula’s smiling face to Collie who turns to look at Paula. In this instance, there is an abrupt 

change in the sonic landscape, shifting from diegetic sounds of a carnival to a passionate rock 

ballad which plays alone in the sonic space. With this sudden shift, the scene morphs from that 

of lighthearted fun to a scene filled with romance. Together the abrupt change in soundscape and 

the camera’s quick cut to focus on Paula’s face function to link the music to her subjective 

experience. In fact, careful attention paid to the soundtrack reveals that Paula is the only 

 
48 

 

 

character within the diegesis who hears the music in this manner. As the ride moves up and down 

and circles round, Paula attempts to hold Collie’s gaze. Collie, however, seems utterly 

uninterested, only glancing at her as she passes by. Realizing this, a look of disappointment 

flashes across Paula’s face and at this moment, the diegetic sounds of happy children’s voices cut 

through the mediated music. Paula’s head sinks to her chest, looking as if she were sick from the 

spinning of the ride, as additional diegetic sounds interrupt the mediated music. On the surface 

level, Paula’s look of distress could be ascribed to motion sickness, highlighted by unsteady 

camera shots. However, turning an ear to the music, another level in the narration is revealed. 

Paula is inviting Collie to join her world of fantasy where love rules above all else. As the music 

slips into the mediated level, the viewer gets access into Paula’s subjective experience. Collie’s 

snub threatens the integrity of Paula’s alternate reality and the diegetic interruptions indicate 

breaches of her fantasy. Although Collie does eventually notice Paula, the scene ends sonically 

with a mixture of diegetic sound and mediated music.  

After spending a night together in Collie’s trailer, the next time we see Paula is at the 

hospital just after giving birth to a baby boy. When Paula returns home, she finds Collie making 

out with a half-naked woman in their apartment. Flying into a rage, she kicks Collie out and 

resumes life as a single mother. The combination of domestic duties and unfulfilling work turn 

Paula’s life into monotonous drudgery, and she soon looks to better her situation by turning to a 

wealthy admirer named Herr Saft, a kind older gentleman who can offer her security and 

financial stability. Although the thought of marrying him makes her miserable, Paula sees no 

other way out. After resigning herself to accept Herr Saft’s proposal, Paula resolves to go out 

with a bang and to have one last night indulging in fantasies of love, happiness, and self-

determination.  

 
49 

 

 

Parallel to Paula, Paul comes home from military duty to find his wife in bed with 

another man. Paul, disillusioned with the societal role he has worked so hard to uphold, and 

Paula, resigned to a boring life within societal expectations, both go to a dance bar to escape 

their respective realities. The following scene marks the beginning of Paul and Paula’s epic love 

story. As the novel’s narrator puts it—“Paul ist in derselben Nacht in derselben Bar gewesen, 

und damit hat endgültig alles angefangen mit Paulundpaula“ (25). The bar is filled with people 

dancing to the raucous music of a live band. The band playing in the background is, in fact, the 

Puhdys—a short cameo in the film. At this point, the scene is fairly unremarkable—a typical bar 

scene—but that all changes the moment when Paul and Paula touch each other for the first time. 

Paula has walked up to the bar and haphazardly leaned up against Paul’s shoulder. Noticing the 

physical intrusion, Paul turns to look at Paula and the two lock eyes, ushering in a complete 

change of the style and tone of the scene.  

At this point, the music violates sonic boundaries and slips suddenly from background 

diegetic sound to the foreground. All other noises stemming from the diegesis are drowned out 

and the song, “Manchmal im Schlaf,” begins to play. The camera cuts to a shot of Paul dancing 

with an attractive blonde woman but instead of focusing on her, he is looking up and gazing at 

Paula. She, too, is dancing with another man but it is clear that in this moment she belongs only 

to Paul. In one long, continuous shot, the camera pans in close-up between Paul and Paula, the 

gaze between the two never faltering. The music in this scene belongs to a separate sonic space, 

the mediated space of Paula’s fantastical world. The lyrics of the song, which speak of dreaming, 

being lost in thought, and understanding that which was previously unknowable, shape the 

parameters of Paula’s alternative world. In this world, love and happiness can be achieved, if 

only in one’s own thoughts or dreams. In this scene, Paula invites Paul into this world and, 

 
50 

 

 

unlike Collie, he accepts. Contrasting sharply with the carnival scene described above, both the 

camera shot and the mediated music remain uninterrupted, ushering in the legendary story of 

Paul and Paula’s love.  

Paula’s position of subject in this scene is mitigated in the novel. While in the film, Paul 

and Paula experience a sonic union through Paula’s mediated music, in the novel, their bond 

occurs mutually on the psychological level:  

Da passierte es bei Paula. Sie ließ den Schauspieler zwar weiter an sich rumfingern, aber 

Augen hatte sie plötzlich nur noch für Paul. Sie fing an darüber nachzudenken, wie es 

Paul ergangen war, und da sind ihr die Augen aufgegangen. Die schöne dumme Frau, der 

verzogene Junge, die schlimmen Schwiegereltern, Pauls Dienstwagen, Pauls Hut und das 

Köfferchen. “eIch hab da nie genau hingesehen”, hat Paula gesagt. Aber plötzlich hat sie 

erkannt, daß sie doch alles gesehen hatte und genau wußte, wie es Paul ging …  

Auch Paul ist plötzlich wieder alles eingefallen (emphasis mine). Auch er wußte plötzlich 

alles über Paula. Reifen-Saft, sein Auto, die beiden Kinder, und sie tat ihm auch sehr leid. 

Und Paul tat sich selbst leid und Paula sich auch. Beider erste Idee ist gewesen: sofort 

zueinander hin. (28) 

Each character has direct access to the internal reality of the other, their awareness functioning 

on a level apart from that of normal reality. The narrator grants Paul and Paula mutual access to 

each other’s histories—the narrative equivalent of the sonic union. The film’s focus on Paula’s 

subjective perspective is dispersed here to both Paula and Paul, thus beginning the shift in 

narrative perspective early on in the novel.   

From here on, the film traces the varying levels of Paul’s willingness to retreat from the 

public sphere and Paula’s intense desire for him to join in the pursuit of self-determined 

 
51 

 

 

happiness apart from societal expectations. However, this narrative line would be difficult to 

understand taking only the dialogue into account. H. Sander and R. Schlesier point out that much 

of the film’s narrative thrust happens not so much verbally but instead on the level of fantasy. 

They write:  

[Paulas] Wunsch nach mehr Kontakt zu Paul, Zärtlichkeit und Intimität könnte 

beispielsweise auch verbal geäußert werden. Paula könnte in einer realistischen Szene die 

Dinge benennen, die ihre Kommunikation behindern—z.B. Pauls selbstauferlegten 

Zwang, das Verhältnis geheimzuhalten. Da in diesem Film aber nicht gesprochen wird—

was ihn deswegen nicht filmischer macht—sondern die Sprachlosigkeit (emphasis mine) 

zum Programm erhoben wird und Konflikte nur masochistisch oder sadistisch erlebt 

werden, muß der Wunsch nach einer anderen Basis des Verhältnisses in die Fantasie 

gelegt werden. (30) 

Sander and Schlesier argue that the film is marked by a certain “speechlessness” and must rely 

on the film’s fantastical elements to propel the narrative of Paul and Paula’s love forward. For 

Sander and Schlesier, these elements are found on the visual level in the film, seen in its use of 

unrealistic settings and costumes (24). They consider scenes with such visual elements to be 

subjective scenes in that: “[d]iese Szenen unterscheiden sich von den realistischen dadurch, daß 

die Personen in ungewöhnlichen Kostümen oder einer fiktiven Umgebung gezeigt werden und 

zwar innerhalb einer realistischen Szene, um deren Aussagekraft noch zu erhöhen. Sie haben die 

Funktion, Gedanken oder Emotionen einer Person visuell auszudrücken“ (29). In other words, 

they argue that subjectivity in the film is expressed on a level other than the verbal, namely the 

visual. Their observation that such scenes create subjectivity is apt, but what Sander and 

Schlesier fail to recognize is the music’s role in this subjectivity creation. The next scene in this 

 
52 

 

 

analysis is one that they highlight as an example of an “assoziativ-subjektive Szene” that is 

marked by fantastical elements rather than by words.   

The scene takes place at an outdoor classical concert to which Paul has brought Paula 

despite her protests that it will be boring. The sequence in the film begins with a close-up of a 

violinist standing at the front of an orchestra playing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major. 

The camera pans across the audience to Paula who, contrary to her fears of boredom, is shown 

intently listening to the music. The scene is quite long. In fact, the viewer hears five 

uninterrupted minutes of the concerto as the camera cuts between shots of the orchestra, close 

ups of the soloist, and shots of Paula. The camera finally comes to rest pointed directly at Paula, 

slowly zooming in to show a grin on her face with a faraway look in her eyes, completely 

enraptured by the music.  

 

At this point, the camera cuts to Paul who sits listening with a look of concentration on 

his face. Paula looks over at him and, as Sander and Schlesier put it, “für Paula vermischt sich 

Realität und Traum” (30). As Paula gazes at Paul, his suit jacket is stripped away, his shirt 

becomes unbuttoned, and a locket containing a picture of Paula appears on his chest. This 

fantastical sequence could only be occurring in Paula’s mind, for Paul does not seem to notice 

his sudden change of attire and only reacts when Paula leans over, wraps her arms around him, 

and puts her head upon his chest. Embarrassed by this sudden display of affection, Paul responds 

with a harsh, “nicht hier” and pushes her aside. I understand this so-called “Traum” to be instead 

a prime example of Paula’s inner, subjective reality delineated by music’s position in the sonic 

space.  

The first hint that the music the viewer hears could be at the mediated level is when one 

considers the setting of the concert. As the camera pans around the setting during the long scene, 

 
53 

 

 

the viewer sees wind blowing through people’s hair, birds flying overhead, and the busy street 

just below the stage. What the viewer sees, however, stands in contrast to what s/he hears, 

namely a version of the concerto without any extraneous noise and with a slight but distinct echo 

that could have only been produced inside the walls of a concert hall. This modified audio is 

signaling that Paula is hearing the music differently than the others. The breech of filmic 

boundaries coupled with the camera’s continual return to focus on Paula’s face suggests that 

what we are is seeing and how we are hearing is from Paula’s perspective. This hypothesis is 

confirmed soon after Paul harshly reprimands Paula.  

Paul’s reprimand is, in essence, a rejection of Paula and a refusal to participate in her 

world of fantasy. Wanting to appease Paul, Paula struggles to come back to reality by placing her 

hands over her ears in an attempt to shut out the music. When Paula covers her ears, the 

soundtrack becomes absolutely silent, jarring in comparison to the music the viewer hears 

directly before. The silence here is evidence that how Paula hears is not how the others hear. In 

reality, if one were to put one’s hands over one’s ears, the music would still be slightly audible. 

For Paula, every single sound is drowned out and all that can be heard is her breathing. As she 

attempts to control her mediated world, she moves her hands to and from her ears, the 

juxtaposition of sound and silence corresponding. Her attempt is ultimately unsuccessful for the 

final time she covers her ears, the music pierces through the silence, unable to be shut out. Paula 

slowly lowers her hands from her ears, the music swells, tears well up in her eyes, and she gives 

in fully to her version of the beautiful music.  

In Sander’s and Schlesier’s analysis of this scene, they describe Paula’s experience of the 

music in dismissive terms—“[Paula] legt sich an [Pauls] Brust, aber nachdem er sie hart 

zurechtweist … steigert sie sich nur noch onanistisch in die Musik hinein” (30). Without 

 
54 

 

 

understanding music to be that which creates Paula’s subjective spaces, her over-the-top 

reactions are difficult to understand. However, recognizing music’s role clarifies Paula’s 

response to the music—to her music. Giving in fully to her sonic, subjective world, the scene 

ends with Paula standing and clapping emphatically during the pause between movements, tears 

flowing down her cheeks. The act of defying conventional norms of concert attendance parallels 

Paula’s personal defiance against Paul’s unwillingness to join in her world, thereby ending this 

scene with a brazen demonstration of her own agency. 

In the novel, the description of this scene comes from Paul’s perspective and, compared 

with the filmic account, is considerably shorter. At this point in the story, Paul is battling 

between his desire to be with Paula and his desire to remain in good societal standing. Having 

decided he cannot justify his romantic relationship with Paula, he sees this concert as an 

opportunity to continue a platonic relationship with her by considering it part of a project to 

shape Paula into a more acceptable version of a GDR citizen. Here, the omniscient narrator 

allows Paul to voice his intent directly:  

Paul: “in meinem Kopf war schon ein ganzer Bildungs- und Erziehungsplan für Paula 

fertig. Angefangen mit guter Musik wär‘ es weiter gegangen mit Museen, Oper, 

Volkshochschule, Russisch … Ich hätte aus Paula im Laufe der Zeit eine richtige, 

anständige, gebildete Konformistin gemacht, wäre immer mit ihr in Kontakt gewesen, 

und Paulas Erziehung wäre sogar noch eine gute Tat gewesen”. (41) 

Here, this pivotal scene in the film is glossed over in Plenzdorf’s text and the music becomes 

merely a means by which Paul can educate Paula, contrasting sharply with its importance in the 

filmic account. Furthermore, the concert scene is one of very few from the film that is not 

described in painstaking detail and to which is only alluded in the novel: “Über alles das ist an 

 
55 

 

 

jenem Abend im Friedrichshain nicht geredet worden. Da ist überhaupt nicht viel geredet 

worden. Paula war stumm aus Protest gegen Beethoven, und Paul hat nichts geredet aus 

Ehrfurcht vor Beethoven. Paula hat mit der Zeit langsam ihren Protest aufgegeben. Was tut man 

nicht alles aus Liebe” (44). The silent nature of this scene—the lack of verbal communication—

parallels Sander and Schlesier’s characterization of the filmic narrative as “sprachlos,” creating a 

unique link between novel and film. The extremely sparse dialogue in the filmic account 

parallels the “nicht viel geredet worden” of the literary text. In doing so, however, the novel 

ignores Paula’s music, stripping away any sense of her agency and giving the narrative control to 

Paul.  

Although Paul refuses Paula outright after the concert, his determination to stay away 

from her is short-lived. Soon after, Paul shows up at Paula’s apartment and steps directly into her 

fantasies, signified most directly by the music. Paula, dressed in a negligée sewn with flowers, 

invites Paul, who is dressed in his military uniform, into her bedroom—embodiments of whimsy 

and conformity standing across from one another. The bedroom is filled with flowers and 

candles, looking as it if had been decorated for a wedding night. Paula has prepared a festive 

meal for them, and the two lovers feast in bed atop the sheets—Paul having removed his jacket 

and military hat and Paula replacing the latter with a crown of flowers. The mise-en-scène is 

enough to raise suspicions that this scene is different from any before. Shortly after finishing 

dinner, Paul disrobes and, in this instance, reality begins to shift. Paul looks over to the corner of 

the room with a dazed expression in his eyes, and, out of nowhere, two of Paul’s colleagues 

appear on the couch in Paula’s room. They immediately begin playing the drums, flute, and 

violin—their music bizarre and fragmented. Paul squints and stares at the band, asking “Sind wir 

alleine, Paula?” She responds smiling broadly, “Völlig. Die Kinder schlafen.” Paul: “Und die 

 
56 

 

 

Musiker da?” Responding to this question, Paula is at first confused, but after quickly glancing 

over to the men, her expression changes. Paula: “Welche Mu…ah, die. Die sehen doch nichts.” 

Paula seems to know exactly to whom Paul is referring and has control over them. The next shot 

is of the men with black blindfolds across their eyes, continuing to play the off-kilter music. The 

only explanation for this sudden shift in reality is when Paul asks, “Was war das für ein 

Zeug…der Schnaps?” Paula: “Kennst du nicht? Birnenschnaps. Aber das war nicht der 

Schnaps.” After this proclamation, the music grows louder and takes over the sonic landscape. 

This scene has confused scholars, and explanations for it vary. Kareen Asmus, for 

example, is perplexed by this scene and can only explain it by stating that “Paul, apparently in a 

state of hyper-suggestibility, sees a band that is not really there playing music that does not really 

make much sense” (88). Berghahn considers the band to be a figment of Paul’s imagination:  

When, intoxicated by wine, Paul hallucinates that two of his 

colleagues, in Mafiosi suits, have intruded and are spying upon 

him, Paula reassures him that they cannot see because they are 

blindfolded. Whereupon, in a highly surreal scene, Paul’s two 

colleagues from the ministry are transformed into a blindfolded 

musical band accompanying Paul’s love-making with dissonant 

percussion. (Hollywood 199-200) 

Neither of these explanations fully accounts for the events of the scene and neither acknowledges 

Paula’s complicity in the events. Understanding music’s role in delineating Paula’s alternate 

reality demystifies this sequence and reveals its importance. For the first time, Paul’s sense of 

duty to societal expectations has been stripped away, seen literally in the stripping away of his 

uniform, and figuratively as represented by Paul’s newfound ability to see and hear Paula’s inner 

 
57 

 

 

world. Throughout the narrative, Paul has been the one to control the parameters of their 

relationship, but in this scene, Paula takes the reins. As the band begins to play in earnest, the 

lovers are transported to Paula’s world; a scene unparalleled in fantastical quality and utterly 

decontextualized.  

The viewer sees a boat with a large, bright red sail with the name ‘Paula’ written on it in 

white block letters sailing through a hazy harbor. Aboard the boat, Paul and Paula are dressed in 

makeshift wedding clothes and are sitting in Paula’s bed with its iconic half headboard. The 

camera then cuts back to Paula’s bedroom where she and Paul lie in a passionate embrace. The 

camera’s tight focus on Paula’s face as she smiles and shuts her eyes in ecstasy emphasizes that 

the scene on the boat takes place in her subjective fantasies. Back aboard the boat, Paula gazes 

directly at the camera as she stands to get out of bed and slowly removes her wedding veil, using 

it to cover her naked body. She motions to a confused and hesitant Paul signaling that he, too, 

should stand. Still maintaining a consistent gaze directed at the camera, Paul and Paula bend 

forward into a deep bow. The camera then cuts to a large group of people comprised of children 

and the elderly people who live in Paula’s building. The group bows in return, and the motley 

crew joins with Paula in a raucous celebration honoring Paul and Paula’s union. Paula dances on 

tables set with candles, wine, and food, as the wedding guests grab at her legs and then lift her 

onto the hull of the boat. Paula sits there with exposed breasts, surrounded by the old women of 

the group who knit as Paula smiles down at Paul. Another group of women then lift Paul up and 

drag him to the other end of the boat as he thrashes about, eyes closed with an absent smile on 

his face. Another cut of the camera brings the viewer back to Paula’s bedroom with a closeup of 

her face in Paul’s passionate embrace.  

 
58 

 

 

The entire sequence is accompanied by the song “Geh zu ihr” by die Puhdys. As with the 

other scenes described above, this music drowns out all other diegetic sounds and functions at 

the mediated level. The music of the band in Paula’s bedroom transports the two lovers to 

Paula’s world and the lyrics of “Geh zu ihr” narrate Paula’s desire for Paul to dominate her 

sexually. The music is loud and has a driving beat that features the drums and electric guitar. 

Dieter Birr sings the lyrics and his voice is notably masculinized in this song. Contrasting with 

the other Puhdys songs featured in the film, Birr’s voice is gravely, forced, and sung in a lower 

register. The lyrics read as follows: “Geh zu ihr und lass Deinen Drachen steigen. Geh zu ihr, 

denn Du lebst ja nicht vom Moos allein. Augen zu, dann siehst Du nur diese eine! Halt sie fest 

und lass Deinen Drachen steigen”. While “lass Deinen Drachen steigen” is translated as “fly 

your kite,” there is clear sexual innuendo when understood in relation to the image and to Birr’s 

highly stylized, masculine voice. This scene signals Paul’s full immersion into Paula’s fantastical 

world guided and directed by the music. In this space, Paula imagines that they can enact their 

love in public, in front of the people in her building, with absolutely no regard for societal 

constraints or pressures.  

Despite the prominence given to this scene in the film, it does not appear in Plenzdorf’s 

novelization. Despite their tendency to divulge all the juicy details of their relationship, Paul and 

Paula have decided not to share the events of that night with anyone else:   

In dieser Nacht haben sich Paulundpaula geliebt wie noch nie, darin waren beide einer 

Meinung. Paul hat gesagt: “Es war schöner, als man es sich vorstellen kann.” Und Paula: 

“Es war schöner, als man sagen kann.” Mehr haben beide nie über diese Nacht erzählt, 

obwohl es sonst ihre Art war, jedermann, dem sie vertrauten, alles über sich zu sagen. 

Auch sehr intime Dinge. Es machte ihnen Spaß oder sie konnten nicht anders oder sie 

 
59 

 

 

dachten sich nichts dabei. Und sie vertrauten fast jedem, jedenfalls jedem aus dem Haus, 

von meiner Person ganz zu schweigen. Sie träumten in dieser Nacht beide den gleichen 

Traum. (55)  

Just as with the concert scene described above, the events of this scene aboard the boat are left 

out of the literary record. Reference to the scene is reduced to two sentences and the narrator 

refers to it merely as a dream. These glossed-over scenes are those that most clearly and 

explicitly depict Paula’s world in the film and those in which she has the most agency. 

Throughout most of the film, Paula’s actions are determined either by circumstance or by the 

men in her life. Only in her imaginary, subjective spaces can she control her fate and live out her 

individualistic fantasies without consequence. The film’s use of mediated music creates space for 

Paula’s agency and the music’s prominence in the film makes Paula the central figure. In the 

translation to the novel, however, the direct narration of events shifts the emphasis from Paula to 

Paul. 

The control Paula has over Paul in the filmic episode aboard the boat is short lived and 

does not survive the transition from her mediated world back to reality. The next morning, Paul 

again is confronted with his responsibilities to family and state and subsequently ends his 

relationship with Paula. The next shot of Paula is at home with her children in a state of domestic 

despair—a scene as ordinary as the previous was one fantastical. Attempting to get respite from 

her demanding children, Paula sends them alone to the movies. On the way, tragedy strikes as 

Paula’s son gets hit by a car and dies. Here, the soundtrack goes silent. The next few times we 

encounter Paula, her inner world is quiet, signified by the absolute silence of the soundtrack. In 

fact, from here until the very end of the film, there is a cessation of all music. Paula’s hope for a 

life of love and happiness is dead. Having heard the news of the boy’s death, Paul comes to 

 
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comfort Paula. She refuses to see him and, unable to cope, retreats from life in general. It takes 

her withdrawal for Paul to realize how much he loves Paula and that he must give up everything 

to be with her. In order to win her back, Paul becomes a kind of caricature of a fairy tale prince. 

He foregoes all responsibilities at work, dresses in ridiculous clothing, and throws himself at 

Paula’s mercy—living outside her door until she agrees to take him back. In fact, in order to free 

the princess from her self-made captivity, Paul, donned in prince-like clothing, breaks down her 

door with an axe and forcibly rescues her. Watching all of these events unfold are the residents 

of Paula’s building, the elderly people from the boat in Paula’s fantastical world. Paul’s over-the-

top actions, his frivolous clothing, and the public nature of his rescue signal that Paul has made 

the full transformation to fantastical lover utterly unconcerned about his appearance in society.  

The tone of this scene is similar to those depicting Paula’s inner reality. However, instead 

of taking place in a separate mediated space, this scene is set within the bounds of reality in the 

filmic world. This is signaled by the music, or to be precise, the lack thereof. In Paul’s larger-

than-life demonstration of love, Paula’s desires have come to fruition. He has finally joined in 

the pursuit of love and happiness apart from any social or societal constraints and, in doing so, 

merges the fantastical realm with reality. This collision of worlds is signaled by the lack of music 

in this scene. The music that has, up until this point, been used to delineate Paula’s reality is no 

longer necessary, as Paula’s fantasy has been realized by Paul. However, the euphoria of this 

moment is soon curbed, as the film takes an unexpected turn. The final scenes depict Paula 

pregnant with Paul’s baby, having decided to keep the child despite doctor’s warnings that she 

would not survive the birth. Directly after this conversation with her doctor, the viewer sees 

Paula running down the stairs to the subway with a large smile across her face. As she disappears 

into the dark tunnel, a voice emerges with the abrupt proclamation, “Paula hat die Geburt des 

 
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Kindes nicht überlebt.” Here, the Puhdys’ music returns that had been conspicuously missing in 

the previous 35 minutes of the film. Paula’s fantasy of self-determined happiness cannot survive 

in reality and leads to her ultimate ruin in death. In order for Paul and Paula’s love story to 

survive, it must again be placed into an alternate realm, into the realm of legend as signified by 

the resumption of music.  

 

 

 Both films in this chapter are exemplary in demonstrating how music at the mediated 

level can be used to create alternate, sonic spaces of subjectivity. In these mediated spaces, Goya 

and Paula experience their own versions of reality, and the viewer gets a glimpse into the inner 

workings of each character. The way in which Goya and Paula interact with their internal music 

is similar in that external forces affect their (in)ability to hear the music. Goya’s rejection by 

friends and lovers causes him to retreat into spaces of madness where he cannot escape his inner 

turmoil concerning the tension between politics and art. Paula’s sonic world is controlled by 

Paul’s (un)willingness to participate in her fantasies of life and love apart from the public sphere. 

Through the music, both films highlight the tensions between a free-thinking, unencumbered 

personality with larger society, critiquing systems of oppression which hinder individual 

expression.  

What differs between the two films, however, is the levels of success each protagonist 

has in coming to terms with their internal music. Goya ends the film in exile in conflict with the 

state and Church, but has found a way to ease his loud, internal demons by becoming a political 

artist—combining art and politics. Paula, on the other hand, cannot successfully combine her 

musical world of fantasy with reality and ends up dying in the attempt, forcing her story into the 

realm of legend. In the translation of her story to novel, Paula loses her place of subjectivity to 

 
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Paul. Irene Dölling argues that Paula is a symbol for a utopian idea of individualism—

specifically coded as female—that, however, cannot ultimately be realized: “The working 

woman’s expectations for a happy life independent of the generally accepted (male) code of 

behavior is displaced into a utopian space that is literally ‘not a place’ at all” (90). Paula, 

although a likeable and sympathetic character, is ultimately seen as a potential threat to the 

socialist (masculine) order, and her story is consequently displaced into an alternate space of 

fantasy and illusion apart from reality. What Dölling understands as “not a place” is the mediated 

space created by the film’s music. In the next chapter, I will investigate further ways in which 

music can be employed to thematize and critique gendered subjectivity in the GDR.  

 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
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Chapter Two 

Musical Interruptions: The Silencing of Gendered Voices  

In Chapter One, I demonstrated how film music can be used to create spaces of 

subjectivity by functioning as subjective narrative voice. In this chapter, I turn the lens to 

music’s role in thematizing the limiting of subjectivity through an investigation of gendered 

voice in GDR society. I will examine the stories of two female protagonists—Rita in Christa 

Wolf’s novel, Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and Karin in Volker Braun’s novella, Unvollendete 

Geschichte (1977). Both Rita and Karin are young women coming of age in East Germany, who 

explore questions concerning how to navigate one’s place in a socialist society. For each woman, 

a love story is the catalyst to either move her toward integration with the collective or to reject it 

completely. In both texts, complex modes of narration work to trouble the relationship of a 

gendered narrative voice to the dominant socialist society. In the translation of Rita’s and Karin’s 

stories to the filmic medium, the gendered nature of the subjective voice is intensified through 

the soundtrack in both DEFA feature films—Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1964) and 

Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht (1991). Whether spoken, sung, or represented by a particular 

instrument, feminine voices in the films are silenced by explicitly masculine voices or by other 

forms of (masculine) music. A particularly illustrative example of this musical silencing occurs 

early in Rita’s story in Der geteilte Himmel and exemplifies the difficult process of her 

integration into collective, masculine-coded GDR society.   

At this point in the story, Rita has moved from her hometown in the isolated countryside 

to the bustling city, has begun studying at the university, and, in the spirit of the Bitterfeld Path, 

has begun working in a factory building train cars.26 The scene takes place at a bar after work, 

26 The Bitterfeld movement of the early 1960s encouraged writers and artists to engage in socialist culture by 
participating in production. The aim of this movement was, as Hunter Bivens puts it, to overcome “the separation of 

 

 
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where Rita sits at a table with her (all male) factory colleagues. Two men next to her begin to 

whisper to each other:  

‘Das ist überhaupt nichts’, sagte Franz Melcher leise zu seinem Nebenmann. ‘Paris, na 

schön. Aber hast du schon mal Beduinenfrauen gesehen, wenn sie sich waschen, 

frühmorgens an der Quelle, und du mit dem Fernglas nahebei…’ Er merkte auf einmal, 

daß er allein noch sprach und alle ihm zuhörten, er warf einen schnellen Blick auf Rita 

und verstummte. ‘Ein Lied!’ schrie einer vom anderen Tischende. ‘Drei, vier!’ Von den 

Bergen rauscht ein Wahasser… (63)  

On the surface, this short episode seems fairly innocuous. On the level of gender, however, this 

conversation depicts a voyeuristic and intrusive male gaze upon the female body. Furthermore, 

Franz Melcher’s quick glance at Rita, here, is an indictment of her gender, as she is the only 

female in the group of men—a kind of intruder. In this same scene in the film, gender dynamics 

gain much immediacy through a focus on the female body and voice (or lack thereof).  

As the only woman sitting at the table full of men, Rita sticks out like a sore thumb. It 

soon becomes apparent the group is celebrating, as the men begin to sing “hoch soll er leben.” 

The beer is served and an older man, clearly the leader of the group, lifts his glass and proposes a 

toast. The camera then cuts to a shot of the two men swapping stories, allegedly about a woman 

named Marie. As one man whispers the juicy details in the other’s ear, the man on the receiving 

end smiles and chuckles knowingly. The camera cuts to Rita who subtly looks over at the two 

men gossiping next to her. One of them glares back at her, shoves off his compatriot, and looks 

utterly annoyed at the inconvenience of having a woman in his midst. The camera then cuts to a 

 

art from work through a radical extension of literary communication” (142). Writers and artists were not only 
encouraged to work in production but were urged to support factory workers in their own literary and artistic 
pursuits. Rita’s move to the city parallels Christa Wolf’s own Bitterfeld move to Halle in 1959, where she, too, 
worked in a factory brigade producing train cars. 

 
65 

 

 

close shot of Rita, who takes a drink from her beer glass, which dwarfs her face, making her look 

even smaller and more childlike in contrast to the men around her. The men at the table proceed 

to sing the same folk song mentioned in the novel, at first in unison and then in harmony. The 

lush tone of male voices fills the sonic landscape and the viewer is reminded that a woman in this 

context is not only physically but also sonically other. 

The man’s choice of song with which to cover his conversation is noteworthy. The folk 

song “Von den Bergen rauscht ein Wasser” is about a man who must leave his home and his 

lover. The male singing subject repeatedly laments his fate and declares his love for the woman 

who stays behind. In fact, gendered notions of space are returned to again and again. Verse five, 

for example, reads: “Scheiden ist ein hartes Wort, Du bleibst hier und ich muss fort. Du bleibst 

hier und ich muss fort, weiß noch, weiß noch nicht an welchen Ort”. These lyrics affirm 

traditional male/female relationships and invoke a patriarchal societal order in which women 

belong in the domestic sphere. With the use of this folk song, the film’s sonic channel of 

communication sets a striking tone for this scene. Rita’s intrusion into the brigade and the pub, 

spaces traditionally marked by masculinity, is combatted by the film’s use of this song sung by 

men to reassert masculine dominance and gender hierarchy.  

As has become clear, an intermedial examination provides a more nuanced and 

differentiated understanding of gender’s role in this scene. Visually, the film presents a 

juxtaposition between Rita’s female body with the sea of male bodies surrounding her—all of 

her colleagues are male, the waiter is male, the bartender is male. Sonically, there is a complete 

absence of the female voice—Rita never utters a single word. The soundtrack is dominated by a 

cacophony of masculine voices (speaking and singing), challenging Rita’s intrusion and leaving 

no space for her feminine voice. As this scene is integral in depicting the process of Rita’s 

 
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integration into the brigade (and into the larger socialist collective), it has great implications for 

her subjective, female voice within masculine spaces, namely, it must remain silent. In what 

follows in this chapter, I will investigate gender dynamics in the context of the GDR, feminist 

film theory, and DEFA cinema, and finally turn to both DEFA films to examine how the films 

use sound to stage the narration and how, in doing so, gendered voices are silenced.  

 

wome: Women’s Emancipation in the GDR  

While the silencing of women’s voices is anything but unique to the GDR, the social and 

political context of the socialist East German state creates a unique framework in which to 

explore issues of gender and subjectivity. From its founding, the SED employed gender politics 

to define itself and its citizens. For example, in Donna Harsch’s important work, Revenge of the 

Domestic, she argues that the early German Communist party (the party that would eventually 

construct East Germany’s SED) ignored the private, domestic sphere, (incorrectly) assuming that 

its unskilled, unpaid, and unproductive labor would not contribute to the building of a new 

socialist future. In ignoring matters of the private and personal, the Communist party was, in 

effect, ignoring women who tended to be the default caregivers and maintainers of the domestic 

sphere. Furthermore, there was little political incentive to consider the private realm, as the Party 

tended to be comprised of men and focused largely on attracting more potential male comrades. 

Harsch argues: 

The ideological justification for ignoring family structures was linked to political interest. 

A program of private transformation might have alienated male proletarians, the social 

base of Communism. The German Communist party (KPD) consistently advocated 

women’s rights in the 1920s. Yet the KPD remained a predominantly male organization 

 
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that celebrated the ideal Communist worker as brawny, tough, and devoted to ‘masculine’ 

organized activities such as soccer, strikes, and street-fighting. (4) 

This masculine politics of power carried over to the founding of the GDR and resulted in the 

implicit exclusion of women from full participation in the brotherhood of socialist society. 

However, this stood in stark contrast to the SED’s explicit claim that they had achieved women’s 

emancipation by formally granting them political and economic equal rights in the East German 

constitution. The idea of equal rights, however, was very much a top-down idea, stemming from 

the (virtually all male) power elites.27 Anna Kaminsky rightly highlights the implications this 

top-down, male-led system had for GDR women:  

Trotz aller Verbesserungen, die Frauen in der DDR erlebten—etwa bei der Gleichstellung 

in Ehe und Familie, bei der Förderung ihrer Berufstätigkeit oder der Wahlfreiheit beim 

Kinderkriegen—war und blieb das Konzept der SED ein paternalistisches. Männer 

entschieden für Frauen, was gut für sie war. Frauen sollten Männern—insbesondere 

denen in der Parteiführung—vertrauen, dass diese schon wüssten, was gut für sie sei, und 

ihre Entscheidungen akzeptieren. (19)  

The SED’s official discourse and policies that proclaimed women’s equality functioned to 

silence (women’s) voices that would contradict this official message. Women were expected to 

blindly follow Party leadership on decisions concerning their emancipation, in effect silencing 

voices that would affect change in matters pertaining to them.  

One of the SED’s main political interests concerning women was their successful 

integration into productive GDR society. However, the push to achieve high numbers of women 

in the workplace was made without sufficient consideration given to the effect this would have 

27 Anna Kaminsky notes that throughout the existence of the GDR, not even one woman ever made it into the 
Politburo, the GDR’s innermost circle of power (44).  

 

 
68 

 

 

on the domestic sphere. As socialist society still relied heavily on women’s domestic labor, the 

task of successfully balancing the responsibilities of both public and private spheres was left 

solely to women, and thus, as Kaminsky points out, created a particularly stark example of the 

so-called Doppelbelastung:  

Obwohl der Staat immer wieder die Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf beschwor und 

versuchte, entsprechende Angebote und Strukturen zu bieten, erlebten viele Frauen 

täglich die große Kluft zwischen Anspruch und Wirklichkeit. Der Spagat zwischen 

Familie und Arbeitsleben brachte eine immense Mehrfachbelastung mit sich. Vor allem 

die Organisation des Alltags, die langen Arbeits- und Wegezeiten und die Bewältigung 

der Hausarbeit lasteten insbesondere auf den Frauen. (17-18)  

The gaping hole between expectations and reality was felt acutely by many GDR women and, as 

Harsch argues, had negative effects on the GDR society and economy, as the weight loaded onto 

women began to drag against the SED’s production and reproduction goals (6). Therefore, it 

became politically detrimental for the SED to continue to ignore issues concerning the domestic 

realm. By the beginning of the Honecker era, there was a shift in the public interest toward the 

private, domestic spheres, which was mirrored in the realm of artistic expression, perhaps most 

clearly seen in DEFA cinema. 

Joshua Feinstein outlines the shift in DEFA filmmaking from the Gegenwartsfilme (films 

addressing contemporary life) of the 1950s and 60s to Alltagsfilme (films about everyday life) 

that characterizes the 1970s. The shift was thematic in that the Gegenwartsfilme portrayed a 

GDR on the move toward the realization of socialism and the Alltagsfilme portrayed a more 

static version of society focused on issues of everyday life (6). The focus on the domestic sphere 

resulted in a proliferation of female protagonists and the portrayal of a uniquely feminine 

 
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perspective, for, as Feinstein argues, it was “[p]recisely because of its conventional exclusion 

from political discourse, [that] a feminine perspective was highly suited for addressing ellipses 

and gaps in collective self-understanding” (119). By focusing on women, DEFA cinema was 

able to reflect and better come to terms with the concerns of the domestic and private spheres.  

 

Women on Screen: Feminist Film Theory 

While the social and political context of East Germany makes the figure of woman a 

unique and important place for critique, it is not new to understand woman as a symbolic figure 

in cinema more broadly. Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman, both pioneers in feminist film 

theory, focus on exposing the way sexual difference has been used (and abused) in 

psychoanalytic film theory to center the male subject and to “other” the figure of the female. To 

do so, both Doane and Silverman interrogate the phenomenon of castration anxiety that figures 

prominently in psychoanalytic film theory. Speaking in terms borrowed from Freud and Lacan, 

this theory asserts that cinema is haunted by lack as the viewer is always cut off from the 

foreclosed real and the concealed site of cinematic production.28 This perceived lack threatens 

the coherence of the viewer’s experience analogous to the threat of castration that threatens the 

coherence of a male subject. Building upon this, feminist film theory asserts that in order to 

compensate for this lack, the cinema puts sexual difference in place as a defense against the 

trauma of castration. This is accomplished by representing the female body as lacking and thus 

functioning to conceal cinema’s other lacks. Furthermore, the inherently gendered vocabulary of 

 

28 Psychoanalytic film theory talks about lack in cinema (the lack of the foreclosed real, the lack of the concealed 
site of production, lack as seen in the female body) and describes this lack in terms of surgical incision. 
Theoreticians such as Hugo Münsterberg, André Bazin, and Christian Metz are considered the theoreticians of 
suture and use terms as castration, disavowal, fetishism which are adopted directly from psychoanalysis. 

 
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psychoanalytic theory (castration, phallus, etc.) reasserts sexual difference to demarcate the 

default viewing subject as male.  

In her groundbreaking study on the female voice, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female 

Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Silverman turns from the visual to the acoustic realm and 

argues that the woman in cinema assumes a double burden of lack as she not only physically 

lacks the phallus, she also lacks any discursive agency or power: 

[T]he difficulty which must somehow be resolved is the male subject’s discursive 

impotence—his exclusion from the point of textual origin. And here … the solution turns 

upon displacement and reenactment: upon the transfer of enunciative power and authority 

from the site of production to a fictional male voice, and upon a hyperdramatization of 

woman’s symbolic castration. Otherwise stated, the male subject is protected from 

unpleasurable self-knowledge through a fictional redrawing of the diegetic boundaries, a 

redrawing which situates him in a position of apparent proximity to the cinematic 

apparatus, while firmly reiterating the isolation of the female voice from all productivity. 

This opposition expresses itself through the close identification of the female voice with 

spectacle and the body, and a certain aspiration of the male voice to invisibility and 

anonymity. At its most crudely dichotomous, Hollywood pits the disembodied male voice 

against the synchronized female voice. (39) 

In this way, the male subject attacks woman’s discursive agency and power, forcing her to act as 

a scapegoat for threatened male subjectivity. In narratological terms, the woman on screen is 

relegated to being internal to the narrative (part of the histoire) but does not and cannot control it 

(as part of the discours). In order to preserve the coherence of the male subject, any threat to the 

patriarchal order is swiftly and completely eliminated on both the visual and aural levels. 

 
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While Silverman focuses on Hollywood’s treatment of the female figure, Jennifer Creech 

focuses on women in the social and political context of East Germany in her study on DEFA 

Frauenfilme (women’s films). Creech sees “the feminine as a site of critique” (7) to point out the 

failures of and discrepancies in East German state policies concerning women, and as a place in 

which to explore a larger critique of GDR society as a whole. Contrasting East German women’s 

films with western feminist film, Creech argues that: 

… the women’s films of DEFA did not have to assert the primacy of sociopolitical 

changes for women’s emancipation since those changes had seemingly already occurred 

and had, in fact, not alleviated women’s social alienation. Instead, for DEFA filmmakers 

the need was to assert the primacy of self-determination, especially if that meant 

constructing a successful, albeit covert, critique of the dominant socialist ideology of 

collectivism through the female protagonist. (7) 

Self-determination (especially for women) was a fraught topic as it was at odds with the SED’s 

promotion of collective interest over that of the individual. Understanding the female protagonist 

as criticizing collectivism is particularly fitting as her gender points to the problematic 

conception of the collective as an implicitly masculine space. In order for women to be 

integrated into the collective, there must be some kind of negotiation of identity in order for the 

integration to be successful.  

The figures of Rita and Karin in the two text/film pairs featured in this chapter can be 

understood as embodying threats to the patriarchal order who must engage in negotiations of 

gender in order to integrate (or not) into GDR society. Rita, on the one hand, attempts to insert 

herself into traditionally masculine spaces such as the city, the factory, the bar, etc. Karin, on the 

other hand, attempts to liberate herself from the socialist, patriarchal order and thus represents a 

 
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threat to the system’s stability. The threats these women pose are mitigated differently in the 

literary and filmic media. Each source text innovatively breaks literary molds by employing 

unique narrative modalities to explore what is and is not sayable within socialism. In Der geteilte 

Himmel, the novel’s narrative voice thematizes a struggle with gendered subjectivity by 

unexplained vacillations between first- and third-person narration. Braun’s Unvollendete 

Geschichte is characterized by tensions in language—a marked inability of Karin to speak in her 

own voice juxtaposed with an all-pervasive language associated with the state. In the translation 

from page to screen, issues concerning gender in both texts are highlighted by cinema’s multiple 

modes of communication. We can see Rita’s and Karin’s physical bodies and hear their physical 

voices, thus making their gender more immediate and coding the tension between the individual 

and society as more explicitly gendered. In this chapter, I argue that, in both films, Rita’s and 

Karin’s gendered threats to the patriarchal order are negated by direct attacks on their discursive 

agency through the use of music and sound to silence their voices. Understood in this way, the 

films become new texts that provide for a more nuanced understanding of each narrative and its 

specific dimensions of gender.   

 

The (Musical) Struggle for Gendered Subjectivity: Der geteilte Himmel  

Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel originally appeared in 1963 in preprint in the journal 

Forum and was published as a book that same year. The novel is unique in Wolf’s oeuvre as it 

has been understood to be a nodal point in the evolution of her literary style—not fitting neatly 

into either her early socialist realist style or her later aesthetic of subjektive Authentizität.29 The 

main plot of Der geteilte Himmel traces the integration of Rita Seidel into GDR collective 

29 Christa Wolf’s subjektive Authentizität will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three.  

 

 
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society. On the surface, the story seems to line up unproblematically with the socialist realist 

formula—a linear progression toward socialism guided by an objective, singular narrative 

perspective. Rita does in fact successfully integrate and ends the story with a commitment to 

socialism. However, this categorization breaks down on the formal level. First, Rita’s process of 

integration is in no way linear. After a brief prologue, the story begins with Rita lying in a 

hospital bed, as she recovers from a psychological breakdown prompted by the loss of a lover 

and her attempt to integrate into GDR society. From here, the narrative line is marked by 

temporal leaps back and forth from past to present as a weak and confused Rita attempts to piece 

together the events that led to her hospitalization. The second formal break in literary style is the 

voice of the narrator. Guiding the reader through these temporal leaps is what at first seems to be 

a third-person omniscient narrator. However, this categorization is soon complicated by curious 

and unexplained oscillations between first- and third-person pronouns that blur the lines 

regarding who is telling the story. These subtle but important breaks with the literary style of 

socialist realism are inklings of Wolf’s emerging subjektive Authentizität and, as Wolfgang 

Emmerich argues, indicate a broader shift in GDR literature away from (socialist) realism toward 

modernism (196). 

Konrad Wolf’s same-titled film adaptation premiered on September 3rd, 1964, just one 

year after the publication of Christa Wolf’s novel. Despite being one of the most well-known and 

celebrated films produced by DEFA, it ran contrary to the official realist film aesthetic mandated 

by the SED. Wolf’s film was strongly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) 

that emerged in the 1950s and 60s. According to Feinstein: “In many ways, [Der geteilte 

Himmel]’s aesthetic conception conflicts with its normative message. [The film] clearly reflected 

the rich stylistic currents that characterized European filmmaking in the early sixties” (118). He 

 
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likens the film’s aesthetic to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and West German 

Herbert Veseley’s Das Brot der frühen Jahre (1960) in its inclusion of quasi-documentary 

footage, elliptical editing techniques, and freeze-frame photography—all characteristic of the 

Nouvelle Vague style. In Der geteilte Himmel, the discreet thematization of the newly built 

Berlin Wall, the choppy montage, and the disjointed narrative line all work to push the 

boundaries of GDR socialist realism and to link with aesthetic trends in Western Europe. The 

same holds true for Hans-Dieter Hosalla’s film score which is also characterized by similar 

aesthetic experimentation. The soundtrack is comprised of a mix of pre-existing melodies and 

music composed for the film juxtaposed by abrupt and unexpected musical cuts back and forth 

between the eclectic musical selections.  

In both novel and film, gender, more specifically, gendered voice is not thematized 

overtly in either literary text or filmic dialogue but rather is thematized through symbolic and 

covert means. In the text, the formal narrative elements, such as the unsettled narrative voice, 

point to the complicated relationship of subjective women’s voices to GDR collective society. In 

the film, the limiting and silencing of female voices happens on the sonic level through the use of 

music. In this next section, I will show how both the novel and film address issues of gender and 

argue that the film elevates this fraught gender thematic through a clever use of music.  

To illustrate how the text works to comment upon gendered voice, I will draw heavily 

upon Julia Hell’s analysis of voice in Der geteilte Himmel which is found in her influential 

study, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany. 

Hell argues that a constant in Christa Wolf’s oeuvre is a call for the right to speak in one’s own 

voice, and that Der geteilte Himmel represents Wolf’s fledgling attempt to emancipate the voice 

from the collective. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that in her work those voices who claim to say 

 
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“I” are female ones. In this way, Der geteilte Himmel also represents the partial entry of the 

female narrator onto the East German literary scene.30 However, this entry is only “partial” 

because of the continual switching of the narrative voice in the novel between an omniscient, 

third person and a subjective, first-person “I” without ever settling into one mode or the other. 

Hell’s explanation of this split voice in Der geteilte Himmel hinges on a gendered reading of the 

text. Rita’s femaleness becomes the root of her problems concerning integration with the 

collective, and the formal narrative elements in Wolf’s novel contribute, albeit covertly, to a 

larger grappling with female subjectivity and agency in GDR society. 

To illustrate how gender works to expose contradictions in Rita’s path toward integration, 

let us turn to an example in the text. Rita has just awakened from a dream in the hospital in 

which she had returned from the city to her childhood home. In her dream, she is surprised to 

find herself at home not with Manfred, her lover, but with Ernst Wendland, the director of the 

factory where she works. Upon waking, Rita immediately begins to forget the dream, but her 

sense of surprise remains: “Die Verwunderung bleibt. Sie läßt sich nur mit dem Staunen des 

Kindes vergleichen, das zum erstenmal denkt: ICH. Rita ist ganz erfüllt vom Staunen des 

Erwachsenen. Es hat keinen Sinn mehr, krank zu sein, und es ist auch nicht mehr nötig” (125). 

This is the first time Rita thinks or refers to herself with a subjective “I” and is a turning point in 

the narrative, for after this dream, Rita’s perception of the world drastically changes. This change 

is described at the sensory level. For example, Rita can now see colors in a new way: “Rita steht 

da und sieht zum erstenmal in ihrem Leben Farben. Nicht das Rot und Grün und Blau der 

Kinderbilderbücher. Aber die zwanzig verschiedenen Grautöne des Bodens oder die unzähligen 

 

30 This argument is not unique to Hell, but is first posited by Myra Love’s article,“Christa Wolf and Feminism: 
Breaking the Patriarchal Connection.” In it, she argues that Wolf’s work, in particular Nachdenken über Christa T. 
(1968), outlines the emergence of a (female) first-person narrator and explicates the implications this has for 
understanding the notion of a female (and non-patriarchal) sensibility in GDR literature (32).  

 
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Spielarten von Braun an den Bäumen” (126). This differentiated understanding of colors and 

vision extends, too, to Rita’s other senses. “An diesem Morgen ist man einverstanden, daß man 

alles zu schmecken bekommt: Herbes, Bitteres, Angenehmes, Süßes … Sie hat Lust alles 

anzufassen” (126). However, within this new reality, Rita experiences an uncanny feeling of 

loss: “Sie zahlt, da es nicht anders geht, dieses neue Selbstgefühl mit Verlust” (126). In the text, 

there is no explanation to indicate what exactly Rita has lost, however, Hell’s reading of Rita’s 

dream clarifies the cryptic language of the text and, I will argue, sets the stage for what is 

happening on the sonic level of the film.  

According to Hell, the presence of Wendland in Rita’s dream is paramount for 

understanding the gendered nature of Rita’s split voice and the presence of a subjective “I” at the 

moment of her awakening. To reiterate, what is at stake in the narrative is Rita’s successful 

integration into the GDR collective. However, as discussed above, GDR society was specifically 

coded as a brotherhood with the paternalistic SED at the helm. This inherently masculine 

conception of society rings true in the text as can clearly be seen in the novel’s constellation of 

(nearly all) male figures (Manfred, Wendland, Meternagel, Schwarzenbach, etc.). Within this 

context, Hell understands Rita as a symbol for the problematic integration of the daughter into 

the paternal GDR narrative. She argues that the “I” in the passage above signifies Rita’s 

symbolic identification with Wendland in her dream that thus transforms her into “what the 

symbolic order prefers her to be—the son, not the daughter” (180). Up until Rita’s dream, 

Wendland and Rita have been coded as brother and sister, painted as kindred spirits and having 

appeared previously together in the domestic realm. When Wendland appears in Rita’s dream 

instead of Manfred, Hell contends that the dream signifies: 

 
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… a narcissistic desire to be Wendland. The ‘I’ at the end of the dream is the subject 

constituted in the image of the other. However, it’s not the mother who functions as 

mirror in this dream, but Rita’s ‘brother’—the one whose presence seems so incongruous 

and yet is so tightly linked to everything that represents childhood: the house, Rita’s 

‘girl’s room,’ the astonishment of the child first saying ‘I.’ … Later on in this passage, 

Rita’s voice disintegrates again into I, she, one. The subject of this narrative is thus 

indeed split—into ‘I’ as Wendland and ‘she’ as Rita—into, I would argue, the daughter 

as son. (180) 

In this way, a masculine voice replaces Rita’s feminine one at the moment of transformation and 

recovery. In identifying with Wendland, she thus forfeits her uniquely female voice in order to 

be fully accepted into GDR society. Taking Hell’s argument one step further, I contend that it is 

not only a singular, brotherly masculine voice that replaces Rita’s but a collective, paternal one. 

Important to note here is that Hell understands the figure of Wendland to be the novel’s main 

representative for the SED ruling authorities: “It is Wendland, the Party representative in charge 

of economic planning and production, who engages [Rita] in serious discussions concerning the 

future of their country. (And, in the novel’s productivist logic, this future ultimately depends on 

producing an ever-greater output, making Wendland the central Party representative)” (181). 

When Rita identifies as Wendland—his subjective voice replacing hers—she is also identifying 

with the Party. Thus, Rita’s subjective “I” is being subsumed by the masculine-coded, socialist 

collective that will only accept her in her symbolic identification as male. 

As Hell’s and my readings make clear, the novel’s struggle with gendered voice exists as 

a complex undercurrent of the narrative. In the translation to film, this covert narrative line 

becomes more visible and audible by Rita’s physical embodiment on screen. The elevation of 

 
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gender difference in the filmic medium works to accentuate the gender disparities of the 

narrative. The text’s highly symbolic and covert thematization of gendered voice is perhaps most 

similarly expressed in the music—a medium considered be highly ambiguous in its expression. 

Through a close reading of (or close listening to) the music, it becomes clear that Rita’s 

integration into the collective is predicated on the silencing of her specifically gendered voice. 

The film does this with a bifurcated approach—both by the literal silencing of female voices in 

the soundtrack and by the symbolic sublimation of the female voice through the use of jazz 

music.  

In Larson Powell’s chapter on the evolution of DEFA film music, he includes a brief 

analysis of the music in Der geteilte Himmel.31 Powell identifies two main musical themes—a 

fast-paced jazz theme played on trombone and a slower, more mellow theme played on electric 

guitar. Both themes he identifies will be integral in our understanding of how the film thematizes 

gendered voice. Let us start with the jazz theme by taking a close look at the instrumentation of 

the theme and by examining the broader cultural connotations of jazz. The main musical line of 

the jazz theme is syncopated, ascending, and played in a major key on the trombone. Punctuating 

the up-beat trombone line is a jazz trumpet playing a piercing descending arpeggio. According to 

Krin Gabbard, the jazz trumpet is a particularly phallic instrument. Its phallicism lies, in part, in 

the pitch, speed, and emotional intensity of the instrument, but also in the manner in which it is 

played. Its spikes into the upper register, fast runs, and exaggerated feel for climaxes makes it 

laden with symbolic sexuality (45). Gabbard further argues that the jazz trumpet has historically 

 

31 Powell’s chapter appears in Re-imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Context 
and traces the development of DEFA film music. He does not presume to write a comprehensive history but aims to 
prove that an investigation of film music helps to better understand DEFA film history in general. Powell argues the 
jazz theme is “a musical embodiment of presence and immediacy” (48), functioning to capture the Zeitgeist of the 
historical moment in which the film was made—East Germany directly after the building of the Berlin Wall. 

 
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been used to express phallic masculinity and sexual innuendo in particular in contexts where 

masculinity is being threatened.32 He then equates the state of threatened masculinity to the 

psychoanalytic state of castration anxiety that threatens (masculine) subjecthood. In order to 

protect against this threat, Gabbard understands the jazz trumpet as “a compensatory, even 

hysterical mechanism to ward off castration” (45). While his argument is specific to the trumpet, 

it is logical to extend it, so to speak, to the trombone, for its phallic shape and the manner in 

which it is played contribute to its phallicism. In the context of Der geteilte Himmel, Rita’s 

integration into traditionally masculine spaces (city, factory, bar, etc.) can be seen as threatening 

established gender hierarchies and the jazz theme can be understood as an attempt to ward off 

this threat and impose masculinity upon the intruder, in our case, Rita.  

This interpretation is confirmed by the placement of the jazz theme in the filmic 

structure—framing the narrative, playing at both the beginning and end of the film. The first 

image on screen is a montage of the city of Halle and is accompanied by the jazz theme. The 

music then becomes more complex as the sounds of the city are mixed into the soundtrack, 

almost as if the city sounds become part of the jazz theme itself. Linking jazz and city, the site of 

the factory and productive GDR society, thus links the city with an inherent masculinity 

suggesting that it is a masculine collective into which Rita must integrate. Understanding jazz 

this way explains the very next thing we see in the film—Rita walking on railroad tracks where 

she, seemingly overwhelmed, promptly collapses onto the ground. At this point, Rita’s 

breakdown is unexplained and, as such, the frantic and punctuated music of the (masculine) 

 

32 While Gabbard’s case study on the phallicism of the jazz trumpet focuses on the performance practices of African 
American jazz musicians, in particular that of Louis Armstrong, he notes that “sexual innuendo … was already an 
essential element of jazz performance” and that phallicism holds significance for masculinity of jazz trumpet-players 
across race. (44) 

 
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collective can be read to have committed symbolic violence upon Rita, working together with the 

rest of the soundtrack to silence her subjective, female voice.  

Within this masculine framing, however, the narrative is focalized on and filtered through 

Rita. Yet, the thrust and contours of her story, along with most of the evaluative perspectives on 

work and life in the GDR, come from the men. As Hell puts it: “Rita … lives in the city with 

Manfred, works in the factory where she meets Meternagel, and studies at the institute where she 

is taught by Schwarzenbach … the two mentor figures assuming paternal roles in different 

domains, production and politics” (176). This male-dominated and male-determined narrative 

line strengthens Hell’s argument that Rita lacks agency and is a “mere object” of forces outside 

her control (168). An apt example of this (masculine) determinism is near the beginning of the 

narrative when Rita’s decides to leave her small-town home to attend university in Halle—a 

decision which preempts the rest of the story tracing Rita’s integration into the city, the 

university, and the factory working brigade. In the film, the determined nature of Rita’s decision 

is most clearly understood on the aural level. Rita sits at her desk in a long, narrow office, 

dutifully performing her secretarial tasks. As she works, her boss, Erwin Schwarzenbach, 

discusses this coming year’s cohort of teaching students at the local university. He says it is a 

sizeable group comprised of 20 students. “19, Herr Schwarzenbach”, Rita retorts. However, 

Schwarzenbach walks toward her with a piece of paper, offers it to her, and repeats “20.” As Rita 

takes the paper and walks to the window to read it, the subdued atmosphere is interrupted by a 

sharp intrusion into the sonic space. Staccato notes fluttering about are played loudly on bells 

and piccolo in their upper registers—music completely unbefitting an office. The camera cuts to 

a view of the paper in Rita’s hands to reveal a certificate of matriculation—her named already 

 
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written in block letters at the top. She looks up toward the camera and with a concerned look on 

her face proclaims, “Ich kann das nicht…Ich habe Angst.”  

On the surface, this scene may seem innocuous—a young woman encouraged to attend 

university by a well-meaning father figure—however, turning an ear to the sonic level of the film 

reveals a more critical understanding. The scene in the office ends with Rita expressing doubt 

about her ability to be a student at the university. This proclamation of doubt occurs alongside 

the music which, at this point, is almost louder than Rita’s voice itself. Here, music creates the 

tone for Rita’s voice, which is portrayed as young and unstable. The high-pitched musical motif 

that seems to tremble in the upper reach of the musical scale corresponds with Rita’s use of 

“ich”; as able to be tossed to and fro by the influences in her life as the musical notes in their 

unstable register. 

This sonic instability parallels Wolf’s unstable use of a subjective “ich” in the novel—

continually shifting back to a third-person, omniscient perspective. In the film, the narrative 

instability is reflected in the use of juxtaposed musical melodies. Directly following the scene at 

the office, the camera cuts to a flash forward of a serene image of a bridge rising high above the 

ground with tall trees below and a modest house in the foreground. The soundtrack here is 

comprised of a melody played on a mellow, reverberant electric guitar played in a medium 

register and stands in sharp contrast to the bells and piccolo of the previous scene. The music 

played on the guitar is initially the only sound in the sonic landscape, more prominent even than 

the music in the office. The guitar theme is played in a minor key, the notes starting hesitantly 

and then quickly ascending and descending to produce a hauntingly beautiful melody. The image 

of the bridge together with the haunting guitar music coincides with a switch in physical location 

and with a temporal shift between two different presents that parallels the novel. Rita now 

 
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appears convalescing in bed, staring off into the distance. Her mother comes in to check on her 

and as she leaves the room, Rita slowly sits up and the camera cuts to a close-up of her face, 

stoic and sober.  

As demonstrated in this sequence, the shifts from one scene and one musical theme to the 

next tend to be abrupt and jarring. The cut from the office to the bridge occurs simultaneously 

with the switch from the bells and piccolo to the theme played on the electric guitar. If the 

unstable bells and piccolo correspond with the use of Rita’s subjective voice, the guitar theme’s 

interruption functions analogously to the voice of the third-person narrator who interrupts and 

cuts off the subjective use of “I” in the novel. This interpretation is supported by Powell’s 

understanding of the guitar theme. He argues that the guitar music is Rita’s memory-leitmotif in 

that it signals temporal shifts and thematizes Rita’s coming to terms with the events that led to 

her traumatic collapse. Powell further argues that this musical leitmotif points to Rita’s 

successful integration with the GDR collective:  

If it is the task of the film to lead Rita out of her traumatic past into a positive (socialist) 

present and future, the music must also participate in this process. It does so by 

expanding the solo guitar into ensemble writing, which is by its nature collective. 

‘Polyphonic music says “us”’, as Adorno observes, and this is true for film music as well 

as autonomous concert music. Thus Hosalla’s score again and again extends the guitar’s 

memory-leitmotif into dialogue with other instruments, as Rita remembers her past, and 

her own ‘banal story’ is interwoven with that of other characters. (49) 

As the omniscient narrative voice in the novel shapes and guides Rita’s recovery and integration 

into GDR society, the evolving guitar theme shapes and guides the filmic Rita. However, while 

Powell understands the expansion into polyphonic music to be positive for Rita’s integration, on 

 
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the level of gender, it signals a loss. In order to integrate into the collective, Rita’s subjective, 

feminine voice is cut off and lost in the sea of the collective, which, as we have seen, is marked 

as exclusively male.  

A major turning point in the story occurs when Manfred decides to leave his life in the 

East for a new one in the West. His decision is predicated on his struggles with the bourgeois 

attitudes of his family and his work’s disappointing rejection of his newly developed chemical 

process. Manfred’s decision weighs heavily upon Rita who feels simultaneously abandoned— 

yearning to be reunited with her lover—and also conflicted because she has no desire to live in 

the West. The story concludes with Rita’s decision to stay in East Germany to participate in the 

building of the new East German state. However, as we have seen, her integration comes at a 

high cost. In order to successfully integrate with the collective and with the men in the film, she 

must forfeit her subjective female voice. The film ends with a montage of shots of the city and 

close ups of Rita. Feinstein interprets this final sequence positively: “In contrast to the opening 

images, the streets are populated, and Rita is seen actively moving through the crowds. Her story 

has merged with those of others and has become that of the new society” (113). However, what 

Feinstein does not account for is the music. The final montage is accompanied by the final 

iteration of the jazz theme—trombone and trumpet playing with piercing sforzandos quite 

prominent in the sonic mix. While Rita has successfully integrated, her voice has been 

compromised, having been taken over by the masculine collective as symbolized in the jazz 

theme. After the final image of the city fades from the screen, the music, interestingly, switches 

to the guitar theme. However, this final iteration is not polyphonic, but rather played again as a 

solo. The solo voice harkens back to the iterations of this theme heard early in the film, before 

Rita’s integration. At the end of the film, the solo guitar plays the theme differently—the tempo 

 
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is slow, the notes are descending, and the music’s volume quickly decrescendos to finally 

disappear altogether. The last vestiges of Rita’s singular voice are heard here, and the 

proclamation is grim. Her subjective, feminine voice could not be retained in the process of 

integration and here it speaks its last. 

 

Unrealized (Gendered) Promises: Volker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte and Frank 

Beyer’s Der Verdacht 

In this section, we turn to Karin, who, in stark contrast to Rita, begins her story embedded 

firmly into socialist society. Instead of tracing a process of integration, Karin’s story reveals a 

process of disintegration through questioning, conflict, and a unique thematization of (gendered) 

subjective voice. Volker Braun’s novella first appeared in the prominent East German literary 

journal Sinn und Form in 1975. It was then published in book form in West Germany in 1977 but 

was not permitted to be published as such in East Germany until 1988. This prohibition was 

largely due to the novella’s overt critique of GDR society and its controversial thematization of 

suicide (Emmerich 295). Despite the SED’s critical stance concerning Braun’s novella, 

Wolfgang Emmerich sees it as part of the broader turn in 1970s GDR literature away from so-

called Ankunftsliteratur for it became clear that “ein bruchloses ‘Ankommen’ im ‘realen 

Sozialismus’ ist schon eher die Ausnahme” (294).33 Emmerich argues that texts in the 70s—

Unvollendete Geschichte as prime example—tended to portray a more realistic picture of the 

individual in conflict with the collective and embodied the dialectical tension between the 

 

33 Ankunftsliteratur was named after Brigitte Reimann’s novel, Ankunft im Alltag (1961). Literature in this genre 
tended to emphasize themes such as personal development and the industrial workplace in real existing Socialism. 
(Emmerich 176) 

 
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“already but not yet” that characterized East German Marxist thought.34 In Emmerich’s words: 

“Vielmehr stand die DDR-Literatur … deutlich im Zeichen des Prinzips Hoffnung. Sie glaubte, 

ganz im Sinne Erst Blochs, an die verändernde Kraft eines Denkens dessen, was noch nicht ist, 

aber sein soll: ein lebendiger, menschlicher Sozialismus” (276). Within this context, Emmerich 

argues that Unvollendete Geschichte does not so much represent a dismissal of GDR society 

altogether, but rather a critique cradled in great hope for reform. This interpretation aligns with a 

rich tradition of scholarship on Braun’s novella. Benjamin Robinson, for example, argues that 

Unvollendete Geschichte is a criticism of the latent inequalities existing in GDR collective 

society: 

But while Braun never makes principled liberal criticism of the GDR social order, his 

text focuses explicitly on the crucial problems presented by a communitarian framework, 

recognizing that the good which guarantees the moral order of the GDR is far from being 

fully realized. Its hierarchical distribution of authority, for example, is a betrayal of the 

promise of equality and undermines the community’s claim to legitimacy. (182) 

Important to note here is that the “good”—the promise of equality—is portrayed as yet within 

grasp in Braun’s text. Robinson argues further that the novel ends with an “implicit call to 

complete its unfinished narration: the good depends on each part of society being able to 

articulate its narrative integrity in concord with that of the whole” (182). Here, Braun’s critique 

of society is a call for completion, a call for the successful integration of individuals into 

collective GDR society. Florian Vassen’s analysis of the novella focuses yet more intensely on 

issues of individualism and subjectivity in GDR society and argues that the text systematically 

 

34 Central to the ideas of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch is the awareness of future possibilities for attaining 
utopia. In this way, there is hope in a “not yet” of future utopia. For more on Bloch’s philosophy, see Wayne 
Hudson’s The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (1982). 

 
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exposes a binary thought process in the system of the East German state, namely “daß die 

Individuen entweder nur politisch denken oder nur an sich denken” (208). There is no middle 

ground. To be concerned about one’s private life is to forsake fully the public sphere. In the text, 

this tension is exhibited in the main problematic of the narrative—Karin must choose between 

loyalty to her parents and the state or loyalty to her boyfriend, Frank, who is portrayed as a threat 

to the socialist order.   

Interestingly, the working out of these tensions in the novella lies primarily on the level 

of language. Karin’s internal confusions and anxieties concerning the choice she must make are 

expressed primarily through the voice of an omniscient narrator. While it is not Karin who tells 

her story, Ute Brandes and Ann Clark Fehn have pointed out that the omniscient narrative voice 

“stays close to his protagonist, describing her in a language that both copies and characterizes her 

patterns of thought and speech” (609) and, intriguingly, depict a marked inability of Karin to 

speak in her own voice. Brandes and Fehn further explain that “Karin falls into speechless 

isolation because she finds no one willing to listen to her—and because the language she has 

always trusted begins to reveal contradictions and double meanings” (614). In Ute Brandes’s 

Zitat und Montage in der neueren DDR-Prosa (1983), she contends that the language of double 

meanings and contradictions in Unvollendete Geschichte is expressed throughout the text by 

certain keys words and phrases conspicuously written in majuscule—e.g. WESTLICHE 

GEREDE, VON DRÜBEN, MUSSTEN ÜBERZEUGT WERDEN. Jakob Norberg argues that 

these phrases create the socialist landscape of the GDR and shape Karin’s place within it: “The 

unified language of Karin's environment—the blend of party slogans, traditional proverbs, and 

common euphemisms—reveals itself as the possession of the authorities. The entity that then 

speaks through her parents, and that also speaks in her, is, as we shall see, the State” (181). As 

 
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such, the state holds captive Karin’s own subjective thoughts and voice, as is reflected in her 

literal inability to speak or make sense of her unexpected circumstances through language. The 

result of this verbal impotence is Karin’s withdrawal from familial and political life in an attempt 

to emancipate herself and formulate her own identity.  

However, it is important to note that in all of these analyses, Karin’s gender does not play 

a significant role. The crisis in language and voice in the novella is conceived of in universal 

terms. The fact that a woman’s voice is being silenced and that the figure of Karin is struggling 

with her relationship to the collective tends to be overlooked. As with Der geteilte Himmel, in 

the translation to film, Karin’s femaleness is made more apparent in that Karin has a visible 

woman’s body and speaks with an audible woman’s voice. This aspect alone codes the struggle 

with subjectivity and voice within a collectivistic society as implicitly gendered. However, I will 

argue that the film adaption further thematizes gender by using music to trace Karin’s 

disintegration from GDR society and to thematize the silencing of her voice. 

Frank Beyer’s Der Verdacht was released in 1991 as a co-production of DEFA and the 

Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln. At this point, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the GDR as such 

ceased to exist. The film’s thematization of societal critique was then, in contrast to the novella, 

looking backwards instead of forwards. Instead of embodying an optimistic hope for reform, the 

film is plagued by a sense of hopelessness and pessimism. Barton Byg argues that this holds true 

for the 40 or so DEFA films produced after November 1989, as they tended to look backwards 

and focused on missed opportunities. “One common trait of all these films is a certain 

melancholy and nostalgic quality, even where they attempt a confrontation with historical 

wrongs in the GDR. The DEFA legacy of avoiding contemporary controversy deprives the films 

of both vehemence in their settling of past accounts and a vision of a future” (79). For this 

 
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reason, these films lacked immediacy to their viewers and, as a result, as Byg puts it, “[t]he films 

were almost universally ignored and received lukewarm reviews at best” (81). This fate held true 

for Der Verdacht, for while the novella has and continues to garner much scholarly attention, 

scholarship on the film is near none.  

Comparing the novella and film, the general storyline is similar, but the tone and message 

differ drastically. In other words, the same histoire is accompanied by a very different discours. 

The very first sequence in the film offers a striking example of the difference between novella 

and film. The film opens with an establishing shot of a beautiful countryside—snow-covered, 

forest-lined hills. However, at eye level with the camera, the picturesque landscape is bifurcated 

by a metal fence cutting directly through the tree line, making room for a narrow road that runs 

alongside. In the distance, a station wagon with a fir tree affixed to the top drives toward the 

camera. As the camera slowly pans to follow the vehicle along the road, the viewer soon sees 

armed men in uniform and a tall watch tower overlooking this seemingly innocuous landscape. 

The direct reference to the inner-German boundary along with the militaristic imagery conveys a 

distinctly ominous atmosphere. However, just as the camera starts to pan, the song “Morgen, 

Kinder, wird’s was geben” begins to play. The well-known Christmas song is sung by a man 

accompanied by the voices of children, sounding light-hearted and jubilant in contrast with the 

establishing images of the film.  

On the surface, the song seems to be setting a light-hearted atmosphere for the opening 

sequence, but a close reading of (or listening to) the music reveals a significantly more complex 

message. The well-known Christmas song is sung by a man accompanied by the voices of 

children. The first verse of the song and what we hear in the film is as follows:  

Morgen, Kinder, wird’s was geben 

 
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Morgen werden wir uns freun; 

Welch ein Jubel, welch ein Leben 

Wird in unserm Hause sein! 

Einmal werden wir noch wach, 

Heisa, dann ist Weihnachtstag! 

 Both film and song begin on Christmas Eve looking forward to morgen when Christmas Day 

will finally be here. While for the children in the song, Christmas will bring joy to their homes, 

the East German viewer would know that for Karin this will be quite the opposite. It is on 

Christmas that Karin’s home will be transformed from a place of refuge to a place of 

estrangement and strife. Further, the lyrics Einmal werden wir noch wach are particularly 

suggestive here, as they can be understood in two senses. In the song, the children must only 

wake once more and then it will be Christmas Day. For Karin, it is on Christmas Day that she is 

metaphorically awakened to a new reality in which her life does not satisfy either her parents’ 

expectations or, as we will see, the state’s. This aligns Karin with the children in the song and 

thus aligns her symbolically with innocence and collectivity.  

Karin’s alignment with the children is confirmed in the next scene in the film where the 

viewer sees Karin at home with her mother and father on Christmas Eve. She sits atop the stairs 

waiting for her parents to prepare her gifts and light the candles on the Christmas tree. After 

everything is prepared, her father turns on the stereo and “O Tannenbaum” begins to play. The 

music is Karin’s cue that she may now come downstairs, and she comes bounding down with a 

large grin on her face. Although Karin is eighteen, this sequence depicts her in a very childlike 

manner—even more apparent if one pays attention to the music. The song “O Tannenbaum” is 

performed by a children’s choir. This music not only lends a carefree, childish air to the scene, 

 
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but it has been directly linked to Karin—her signal that she may come join the festivities. The 

linkage of Karin to the children’s voices in “O Tannenbaum” points to her innocence and 

naiveté. 

Directly following this is a cut to the much-anticipated Christmas Day. Karin’s mother 

bastes a turkey roasting in the oven while saying to her husband in a pestering tone, “Du musst 

mit ihr reden.” In the background, a Christmas special plays on the television. The theme is 

Fröhliche Weihnachten überall and an adult choir sings the familiar Christmas tune. Karin again 

comes bounding down the stairs about to leave to go to the theater with her boyfriend, Frank. 

Again, the choral music here points to her feeling of harmonious integration with her family. 

However, this scene is where Karin’s reality changes. This is also where the film begins to 

parallel the novella. The opening sequence described above juxtaposes starkly with the opening 

pages of the text and would cause an informed viewer to take pause—the intended audience for 

this film would most likely have been East Germans who would have been familiar with Braun’s 

novella. In contrast to the film, the novella opens with a decisively troubled tone:  

Am Tag vor Heiligabend eröffnete der Ratsvorsitzende des Kreises K. seiner 

achtzehnjährigen Tochter, nachdem er sich einige Stunden unruhig durch die Wohnung 

gedrückt hatte, er müsse sie über gewisse Dinge informieren (er sage informieren), von 

denen er Kenntnis erhalten, woher ginge sie nichts an, die aber vieles oder, im 

schlimmsten Fall, alles ich ihrem Leben ändern könnten. (7). 

Karin’s father—identified solely by his position in the Party—avoids providing Karin with 

details or rationale and demands that she end her relationship with Frank, as “er habe irgendwas 

vor” (8). This cryptic language soon evolves into language that can be tied directly to the state: 

“Ihr Vater war INFORMIERT worden, das war klar, und es mußte etwas Wahres daran sein. 

 
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Aber woran denn” (9)? The term “informieren” is an example of one of Brandes’s phrases 

written in majuscule with doubled and contradictory meanings. As the word “informieren” 

carries strong political overtones, there is no question where Karin’s father’s loyalty lies and 

with whose voice he is speaking. Karin is pressured to blindly obey her parents whose highest 

concerns are the integrity of their family and the preservation of the socialist state to which they 

belong. 

In the film, Karin sits looking confoundedly at her father after hearing the devastating 

news. At this moment, her mother walks over to the television that has been playing all the while 

and turns it off. In doing so, she shuts off the music and thereby sobers the entire tone of the 

scene. Furthermore, the cessation of the music indicates an abrupt rift in Karin’s life. In the text, 

this is expressed through Karin’s inner thoughts and feelings: “Es war ihr für Augenblicke, als 

wär sie an einen fremden Ort versetzt, wo alle Gegenstände anders heißen und zu was anderem 

verwendet werden. Sie paßte nicht mehr dazu” (8-9). In the film, the music plays the role of this 

internal narrative. As her mother literally shuts off the music, she symbolically puts an end to her 

daughter’s innocence and challenges Karin’s feelings of congruence with her family and the 

state.  

While the novella begins at the moment of disturbance, the film begins with a glimpse of 

Karin’s life before receiving the devastating news. Furthermore, an intermedial examination of 

the film’s opening sequence reveals an emphasis on Karin’s role as a happy, child-like daughter 

who is well-integrated into public and private life. The differences between the two media are 

significant. Through her physical and aural embodiment on screen, the gendered nature of 

Karin’s impending crisis is emphasized. Through her linkage with the collective children’s 

music, Karin, like Rita, is coded as the daughter in the paternal narrative of the GDR—the 

 
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musical arrangement of lead male vocal with collective children’s voices in “Morgen, Kinder, 

wird’s was geben” particularly evocative of the paternalistic relationship of the GDR leadership 

to the collective. Furthermore, the SED—as embodied in her literal father figure—tells her what 

she can and cannot do without providing any explanation why, indicating that father and state 

know best. 

The scene on Christmas Day is the last time the viewer hears such harmonious, collective 

music associated with Karin. From here on out, there are two musical lines that make up the 

majority of the sonic landscape. One is a jazz theme linked to Karin’s agency, in particular when 

she makes decisions regarding Frank. The other musical line is played on the synthesizer and is 

linked to Karin’s relationship to her parents and the state. Throughout the film, the synthesizer 

theme is used to question and silence Karin when she attempts to assert her own agency. As we 

shall see, by the end of the film, the jazz theme has all but been silenced and when it last sounds, 

it does so with a marked sense of pessimism.  

The first time the viewer hears the two main musical lines occurs in a brief scene at the 

end of the film’s opening sequence. Directly following the station wagon’s drive through the 

Christmas-readied town, the viewer sees Karin and her mother busy decorating the outside of 

their home. It is at this moment, the first time the viewer sees Karin, that the jazz theme played 

on solo saxophone begins, thus linking it to Karin. The saxophone continues to play and then the 

camera pans to the right to show the station wagon approaching the house. Here, the musical line 

on the synthesizer enters the sonic mix, harmoniously overlapping with the jazz theme. In the 

station wagon, we see two men drinking from a bottle of schnapps—Karin’s father on the left 

and a SED state official on the right. The entrance of the synthesizer at the precise moment the 

station wagon appears on screen links the musical line with the two authoritative figures in the 

 
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film—the father and the state. The seamless integration of the two musical themes is emblematic 

of the characters and their relationships in this scene. Both the figures of Karin and of authority 

along with their musical representations appear together in this scene, existing in apparent accord 

with one another.  

However, the harmonious integration of the two musical themes ends here, for after 

Karin’s father tells her she must break up with Frank, the viewer never again hears the themes 

combined in such a congruous way. The next iteration of the musical themes occurs when Karin 

retreats to her bedroom, being forced to write Frank a letter in order to break up with him. As she 

writes, a variation of the jazz theme begins playing on the piano, figuring very prominently in the 

soundtrack. However, underscoring the piano is the synthesizer. In this iteration, the synthesizer 

is extremely distorted and unsettling in that it slowly modulates up a half step and then back 

down, again and again. Here, Karin’s relationship with Frank and her agency in their relationship 

are being threatened. The half-step modulations in the synthesizer do not integrate congruously 

with the jazz theme, but instead introduce dissonance to a consonant melody, working to trouble 

and distort it. After multiple attempts to write the letter, Karin crumples up the paper and stares 

blankly at her typewriter. This scene in Braun’s novella highlights Karin’s inner thoughts and 

confusions: “Silvester schrieb Karin einen Brief an Frank. Sie versuchte, ihm etwas zu erklären. 

Aber sie sah gleich: es ging nicht. Sie konnte sich nichts denken, sie wußte nicht was war … Sie 

schrieb den Abend durch; es war zwecklos” (11). Karin cannot find words to express her 

unexpected circumstance, as her thought patterns are so inundated by the voice of her parents 

and the state. The film music in this scene illustrates an internal process described in the novella 

which is absent from the visual record of the film. In the scene described above, the synthesizer 

 
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musically troubles the solo piano and symbolically troubles Karin’s subjective voice as she 

questions what she can and cannot say to Frank.  

Soon after receiving the devastating news about Frank and after breaking up with him, 

Karin moves in with her sister in the city to begin her volunteer position at the regional SED 

newspaper. Moving out of her parents’ house, however, provides Karin with a new sense of 

freedom, and she decides to resume her relationship with Frank who lives in the city, too. Each 

time Karin acts to defy her parents’ demands, the jazz theme plays, underscoring her agency. 

However, her decisions are often met with parental reprimands which are all accompanied by the 

agitating synthesizer. Karin’s rocking to and fro between self-assertion and reproach reaches its 

apex when her parents find out she has moved in with Frank, and again they demand that she 

must leave him. In an act of desperation and defiance, the two lovers sneak down to the cellar of 

her sister’s apartment to have sex. The cellar is so dimly lit that we cannot see the two of them, 

but instead we can only hear the sounds of their lovemaking. The camera cuts to a dark shot of 

an empty cellar room, the outline of the brick walls the only thing discernable. A bland mise-en-

scène is punctuated by Karin’s voice in the throes of passion: “Wir lieben uns doch. Bitte. Alles 

andere ist doch egal. Es wird sich alles aufklären. Später lachen wir darüber.” The isolation of 

Karin’s voice proclaiming that love will ultimately triumph is particularly important, as this is 

one of very few instances in which she directly uses her voice to liberate herself and reject her 

parents’ and the state’s ideals and demands.  

While the filmic account emphasizes the auditory level—singling out Karin’s voice—the 

novella emphasizes the corporeal aspects of this scene: [Karin] schloß die Augen und biß die 

Zähne zusammen und schlug auf seinen Nacken: nichts sehen, nichts! Dann war ihr alles wieder 

klar. Sie war ganz erschöpft. Er hielt sie noch, sie war wie aufgelöst, fielen auf eine große Kiste 

 
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neben der Mauer. Sie ließ ihn sofort in sich, und klammerte sich an ihn, es war ihr gleich wie 

ihm das vorkam. Sie dachte nur: jetzt muß es schön werden (33-34). Theo Reucher understands 

this scene in the novella as a juxtaposition between the objectivity of the state and subjective 

experiences: 

Der Objektivität von Staat und Partei … tritt hier die subjektive Erfahrung entgegen, die 

sich aus der jeweils gegebenen Situation ständig erneuert. Und so liegt die eigentliche 

Wahrnehmung nicht in der Objektivität, sondern in der Subjektivität der Erfahrung, und 

Staat und Partei müssen sich daran messen lassen, ob sie in ihrer Funktionalität der 

subjektiven Erfahrung ein Lebensrecht lassen. Das große Beispiel aber für die Wahrheit 

der subjektiven Erfahrung ist die Liebe, die hier ganz fleischlich verstanden wird. (161-

62) 

Reucher explains the dichotomy between objectivity (state) and subjectivity (experience) in 

physical terms. In the novel, Karin’s subjective act pits her against the state and occurs on an 

internal, physical level—within her own body. The film’s removal of the visual elements and 

elevation of the auditory level shifts the emphasis from Karin’s body to her voice. In this scene, 

then, Karin’s subjective act becomes audible in the raising of her subjective (female) voice to 

question the state’s control over her circumstance.  

Karin’s verbal act of defiance and self-assertion is, however, not left unchecked. The 

camera cuts from the dark cellar to Karin working at her office at the regional newspaper. She is 

summoned to a conference room where two men await her. One of the men, Comrade Schäfer, 

would like to know how Karin likes her new job and if everything is meeting her expectations. 

Karin responds in the affirmative, but this answer does not satisfy her questioner. He wants to 

know: “Wie du so darüber denkst.” Confused as to what this might mean, Karin hesitates and 

 
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Comrade Schäfer proceeds: “Ich meine, man kann über alles reden, gerade mit uns. Mit uns 

sollte man über alles reden, als Genossin.” Still looking confused, Schäfer clarifies things for 

Karin: “Erzähl doch mal den ganzen Lehrgang der Sache. Seit wann kennst du ihn? Diesen 

Frank?” At the mention of Frank’s name, the tone changes, and Karin launches into the longest 

uninterrupted speech she has in the entire film—lasting one minute. She justifies Frank’s sordid 

past and explains to the men how he has rehabilitated. In this scene, she speaks articulately and 

appears composed and confident.  

This is markedly different than the parallel scene in Braun’s novella. In the text, Karin 

does not utter a single word concerning Frank. Instead she sits and listens in shock after the man 

brings up their relationship. “[E]r rate ihr dringend, diese Beziehung abzubrechen, so schnell wie 

möglich, heute, also sofort!—Sie war geschockt. Sie schüttelte den Kopf. Sie hörte noch, und 

hörte nur halb … Sie sah auf und sah den Sekretär an, und lächelte bis ihr bewußt war, daß ers 

war, der es sagte” (34). Instead of the self-confident Karin of the film, the Karin in the text can 

barely grasp what is happening, having a seemingly loose grip on reality. She responds with 

physical shock and confusion. In the film, the physicality of the literary scene again turns aural. 

When Frank is mentioned, Karin responds with a flood of extremely cognizant speech. However, 

underscoring her words is the threatening tone of the synthesizer, which links the parallel scenes 

in novella and film. The synthesizer music functions as narrative dissonance, contrasting sharply 

with Karin’s confident demeanor on screen and thematizing Karin’s inner reality portrayed in the 

novella. The music here also undermines Karin’s use of her voice to contradict the state’s 

assumptions concerning Frank and points to the negative outcome in the scene that follows.  

The camera cuts from the conference room to a close-up of Karin in an elevator after she 

has left the meeting. The synthesizer theme plays in the background as a man steps into the 

 
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elevator and, after leaning in close, whispers to Karin: “Was ich dir sagen kann, trenn dich von 

dem Jungen…was ich dir sagen kann.” His canned and repeated speech mirrors the party 

euphemisms that are written in majuscule in Braun’s novella. When the man speaks, the 

synthesizer theme is punctuated by notes played on the piano that cut sharply through the mix— 

a kind of sonic assault on Karin. The next scene shows Frank running through the streets of the 

city to the train station where he finds Karin standing on the platform. In the soundtrack, there is 

an abrupt switch to a loud, distorted synthesizer taking up most of the sonic space. Frank 

frantically runs up to Karin and asks why she never met him for a date they had planned. As 

Karin shrugs and boards the train, he yells, “Sag mir jetzt was ist’s!” Karin replies, “Ich kann 

nicht.” “Warum nicht?” says Frank. “Weiß ich doch nicht,” exclaims Karin, and then the 

sequence ends with the train pulling away from the station. Here, Karin literally cannot speak 

with Frank because her discursive agency has been attacked. The symbolic sonic assault of the 

piano coupled with the increase in volume of the synthesizer theme indicate a tipping point for 

the state’s influence on Karin. In the novella, this is a turning point as well, for after leaving 

Frank at the train station Karin thinks to herself, “Sie wußte auf einmal, was kommen würde. 

Jetzt war es aus” (37). 

After this interaction in both the novella and film, Frank sinks into a deep depression and 

attempts to kill himself by a combination of sleeping pills and asphyxiation. After Frank is 

brought to the hospital in a coma, Karin spends every day by his side, neglecting her position at 

the newspaper and disregarding her parents’ wishes. By choosing loyalty to Frank over family 

and state, Karin symbolically chooses private over public life, resulting in her dismissal from the 

prominent state newspaper. Karin must now find another place of employment, and to 

complicate matters further, we find out that she is pregnant with Frank’s child. In the novella, 

 
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Karin’s pregnancy is an important factor in her eventual disintegration from society, as it her 

makes it very difficult for her to find a job: “Karin versuchte, Arbeit zu finden. Sie erwartete ein 

Kind, sie mußte es ernähren … Sie wollte nur ARBEIT haben. Arbeit war das halbe Leben … 

Ihr wurde überall sofort zugesagt. Aber sowie sie erzählte, daß sie im vierten Monat sei, besann 

man sich, die Sache wär zu schwer, das können Sie nicht, oder nicht mehr lange” (89-90). Again, 

in the novella, there is an emphasis on corporeal realities—what Karin can and cannot do 

because of her pregnancy. However, in the film, Karin’s pregnancy plays a much less important 

role, as it is only mentioned twice—once when she reveals to her family that she is pregnant and 

once in a conversation with her sister, as a mere side comment. Karin’s exclusion from society is 

rather portrayed on the discursive level with an emphasis on gendered voice. As I have argued, 

Karin’s subjective voice is questioned and silenced in the film through the use of music and 

sound, which, as we will see, is further confirmed in the final scene.  

Both the novella and film end when Frank—weak and confused—wakes up from his 

coma and reunites with Karin—the two lovers deciding to start a new future together. In the 

novella, the closing lines of the text indicate an unsure but hopeful future: “Hier begannen, 

während die eine nicht zuende war, andere Geschichten” (92). Upon first glance, it may seem 

that the film concludes similarly to the novella, ending on a fairly optimistic note. However, 

Daniela Berghahn argues that Der Verdacht looks back at the GDR in anger and that the ending 

is much more pessimistic. Referring to the film’s conclusion:  

What at face value looks like a happy end, when Karin collects Frank at the hospital and 

the couple walk down a straight, tree-lined avenue in a tender embrace, actually glosses 

over the secret and quiet annihilation of these young lives. As a result of the long coma, 

Frank has lost his memory and cannot recall why he attempted suicide in the first place—

 
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and Karin is not going to remind him. As the couple slowly walks off into the distance, 

they are not facing a bright and happy future but a life of marginalization and social 

exclusion in which their love is unlikely to survive. This cynical ending is devoid of hope 

and compassion. (“Remembering” 331)   

While I agree with Berghahn, she overlooks an aspect of this scene that further corroborates and 

intensifies her interpretation, namely, the music. Accompanying what we see on screen is the 

film’s final iteration of the jazz and synthesizer themes. Just as in the opening sequence of the 

film, the music begins with the jazz theme played prominently on the saxophone. Contrastingly, 

when the synthesizer theme enters it does not seamlessly integrate with the saxophone line. The 

synthesizer attempts to play part of the jazz line but is out of tempo and out of tune. Then, as the 

couple walks away from the camera, the synthesizer departs from any theme established in the 

film to play a descending scale in a minor mode, disrupting the melodic line of the saxophone 

and ending with the two themes in marked dissonance. Here, the music makes audible the 

silencing of Karin’s voice. In silencing Karin—a woman who dared to assert her own voice in 

GDR society—Der Verdacht looks back pessimistically at the unrealized promise of women’s 

successful integration into collective (masculine) GDR society. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter Three  

Multi-Voiced Narration: Multi-Voiced Music 

In Chapters One and Two, my focus was on the voices of characters within the 

storyworld—concerned with how their subjectivity is expressed (or limited) in both the literary 

and filmic medium. In Chapter Three, I expand my view beyond the limits of the storyworld to 

the liminal space between reality and narrative by looking at (and listening to) the voice of the 

author in semi-autobiographical narration. This literary style features multiple narrative voices 

that interweave to create a particularly complex kind of subjective narration. In this chapter, I 

will examine the role of subjective authorial voices in this emerging GDR literary aesthetic and 

explore how this complex narrative style can be sonically translated from novel to film. In order 

to understand the theoretical roots of this semi-autobiographical, multi-voiced narration, I will 

turn to the work of Christa Wolf.  

Wolf’s earliest prose works reflected the official GDR literary style of Socialist 

Realism—her short novel Moskauer Novelle (1961) as prime example.35 However, Wolf’s 

literary style soon began to shift—the beginnings of this shift clearly seen in the unstable 

narrative perspective in Der geteilte Himmel as discussed in Chapter Two. By 1968, Wolf had 

clearly broken with her earlier socialist realist style as can be seen in Nachdenken über Christa 

T., which experiments with the line between biography and autobiography.36 In her landmark 

essay, “Lesen und Schreiben” (1972), Wolf lays out her new literary aesthetic which she explains 

 

35 In Jennifer R. Hosek’s and Sonja E. Klocke’s volume, Christa Wolf: A Companion (2018), Anna H. Kuhn writes 
that Moskauer Novelle is „imbued with the telos of socialism’s inevitable triumph. Consonant with the Party’s 
mandate that communal needs be given precedence over those of the individual, it presents readers with the 
straightforward linear narrative of an exemplary heroine willing to renounce personal happiness for the good of the 
socialist cause” (66).  
36 Anna Nunan, for example, explains that “[d]uring the writing of Nachdenken über Christa T., Wolf questions the 
validity of biographical writing. She begins by seeming to aim at the story of Christa T.'s life, but becomes acutely 
aware of confronting herself and ultimately representing herself in her biographical/autobiographical narrative” (3). 
 

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is concerned with the insertion of a first person “I” into her work. Here, the “I” is inextricably 

linked to the experience of the author and thus fuses subjective experience with narrative 

transmission. According to Wolf, this style creates a genre that is distinct from conventional 

fiction; a genre she calls Prosa. Dennis Tate explains: “What distinguishes [Prosa] from 

conventional fiction and the products of other media is its fourth dimension … which takes it 

outside the conventional boundaries of its invented world fusing the narrator’s depth of 

experience into the fictional construct” (22-23). In other words, unlike fiction, the writing of 

Prosa cannot and should not be separated from the experience of the author and thus creates a 

kind of hybrid autobiographical mode.  

Wolf coined her new style as subjektive Authentizität (subjective authenticity) and argued 

that, with this new aesthetic, reality can be more accurately and “truthfully” depicted in 

literature. According to Julia Hell, with this notion of subjective authenticity “Wolf postulated 

the ‘truth’ of the author’s subjective experience against the objective knowledge of (socialist) 

realism’s third-person narrator, making the author’s/narrator’s ‘presence’ in her/her writing the 

precondition of what she called ‘modern prose’” (14). Although this reflexive style and its shift 

toward modernism broke with the objectivity of Socialist Realism, Wolf did not regard it as 

breaking with socialism. In fact, she conceptualized her new aesthetic as a necessarily socialist 

one, as it placed the subjective “I” into the “we” of historical, socialist community. Tate 

elaborates: “Above all [Wolf] sees fits to argue that the intense dialogue between the author and 

the reader that “Prosa” promotes will contribute to the achievement of a quality of personal 

identity … which, she suggests, is only possible in a developed socialist society” (24). This shift 

toward the autobiographical mode put Wolf in line with a broader, modernist literary trend in the 

West and had ripple effects on the GDR literary community. 

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This chapter explores two texts that fall into this broader literary tradition—Brigitte 

Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand (1974) and Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (1969). Both 

novels indirectly thematize the author’s personal trauma stemming from World War II—the 

trauma of war and liberation from the perspective of a child, and a Jewish survivor’s experience 

in a Nazi ghetto—and lament the difficulty in narrating and remembering traumatic events. Each 

author addresses the tension between what is and what is sayable by pushing the boundaries of 

language through the creative employment of multi-voiced narration. In both texts, a first-person 

voice is inserted into third-person narration in order to directly address the reader and, by 

highlighting inconsistencies or implausibilities in the text, bring attention to the constructed 

nature of his/her storytelling. Written in this semi-autobiographical modality, both texts enact a 

kind of working through of identity crises in the post-war period through experiments with 

language by employing, what I will argue, are the linguistic elements of lament.  

Both texts were adapted to film by DEFA—Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben 

(1981) and Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner (1975). In adapting these narratives, both 

filmmakers had to make decisions on how (or how not) to conceptualize the novels’ unique 

narrative modalities. In this chapter, I explore how multi-voiced narration can be sonically 

translated from novel to film. I argue that music is a particularly well-suited medium to address 

this complex mode of narration for two main reasons. First, instances of multi-voiced narration 

are effectively addressed by music’s polyphonic potential. For example, interweaving narrative 

voices can be reflected in interweaving melodies or in the musical dialogue between the different 

“voices” of musical instruments. Second, I will argue that music is a way for filmmakers to 

address issues regarding the limits of language. In the adaptation of these narratives from novel 

to film, the use of music avoids what would be a difficult translation of multi-voiced language, 

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e.g. through voiceover, and further points to that which lies beyond linguistic expression. In what 

follows, I will focus on the function of multiple voices in narration, explore the language of 

lament and how it can be used as a narrative strategy, and finally turn to both DEFA films to 

examine how multi-voiced narration is translated to the filmic medium.  

 

Pushing Narrative Boundaries with Multi-Voiced Subjective Authenticity 

As discussed in the Introduction, Seymour Chatman distinguishes between two main 

components of narrative—the story and the discourse—defining the people, places, and events 

within the storyworld as the story, and the way in which the narrative is transmitted as the 

discourse. Wolf’s insertion of a first-person, authorial voice into a third-person narration 

challenges this strict delineation of narrative levels, as the voice transgresses the boundaries 

between story and discourse. The act of storytelling then becomes part of the story told and thus 

creates a reflexive, self-conscious textual mode. In narrative theory, this is called reflexivity and 

it has great implications for readers who “are forced to acknowledge the artifice of what they are 

reading, while at the same time becoming active co-creators of the meaning of the work. Indeed, 

reflexive narratives make overt demands for intellectual and affective engagement comparable in 

scope and intensity to any other in life” (Hutcheon). In this way, the use of multiple voices 

creates a kind of textual or subjective authenticity as the complexity of the text mirrors the 

complex nature of life lived. The next sections will contextualize both Reimann’s and Becker’s 

novels and investigate their multi-voiced narrative modes in order to open up questions 

concerning the subjectivity of the authorial voice and its significance in GDR literature.  

 

 

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Franziska Linkerhand 

 

Brigitte Reimann began writing Franziska Linkerhand in 1963 and continued working on 

it until her untimely death from cancer in 1973. For this reason, the novel remains unfinished 

despite its length of over 600 pages. Reimann first gained recognition in the GDR with her novel 

Ankunft im Alltag, which was hailed as a masterpiece of Socialist Realism and came to represent 

the GDR’s literary subgenre of Ankunftsliteratur. Franziska Linkerhand, however, marked a 

major turn away from her more traditional socialist realist aesthetic toward a GDR modernism. 

The novel features Franziska Linkerhand, a young, freshly minted architect who moves from 

East Berlin to the smaller city of Neustadt with the idealistic desire to design a perfect socialist 

city. However, when she arrives in Neustadt, she is soon confronted with the economic realities 

that make such city building near impossible. The novel’s direct critique of the failures of the 

GDR’s urban development policy makes this story unique within the context of East Germany.  

Many parallels have been drawn between Brigitte Reimann and her character, Franziska, 

as Franziska’s disillusionment with the empty promise of new city planning and socialist 

architecture parallels Reimann’s own experience in the city of Hoyerswerda.37 Faced with the 

tension between ideal and reality, both Reimann and Franziska grapple with existential questions 

such as ‘who am I?’, ‘what do I believe?’ and ‘where do I belong?’ Shaping and guiding this 

narrative about personal and ideological crisis is a complex employment of multi-voiced 

narration. Helen L. Jones argues that the narrative complexity is that which gives the novel its 

self-reflexive potential and makes it unique. She divides the narrative perspectives into three 

distinct voices: first-person, third-person, and a third-person, omniscient author-narrator (384). 

 

37 Reimann’s move to the industrial town of Hoyerswerda was prompted by the Bitterfeld movement. Her 
commitment to the movement was unique among GDR writers, as can be seen in her eight-year stint living in 
Hoyerswerda and working in the Schwarze Pumpe power station.  

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Both the third- and first-person voices can be attributed to Franziska as she looks back on her 

life. The first-person account provides the framework of the story in a lament addressed to a 

lover named “Ben.” The voice of the third-person, omniscient author-narrator is the corrective 

voice in the text that helps to construct the self-reflexive tone of the novel. This voice is 

primarily concerned with the authenticity of Franziska’s storytelling and jumps in when she 

believes that Franziska is failing to write honestly:38 

Solche Wendungen—Reger hätte, Reger würde, bei Reger wäre—werden sich im 

Fortgang unserer Geschichte wiederholen, häufig, bis zur Plage, und wir bitten im voraus 

um Nachsicht für Franziska, unsere ganz unheldische Heldin, wenn sie die Zeit bei 

Reger, eine verlängerte Studentenzeit, durch Erinnerung vergoldet, die Jahre in ihrer 

Heimatstadt, die Menschen … mit trügerischem Schmelz überzieht. (139) 

The narrative voice here appeals directly to the reader, excusing Franziska’s over-eager syntax, 

and reminding the reader of the constructed nature of Franziska’s storytelling. Franziska’s story 

is, indeed, constructed and re-constructed over the course of the novel. The self-reflexive tone of 

the ever-shifting narrative voices creates a mode of self-exploration in which Franziska can come 

to terms with her traumatic past which is comprised of unresolved crises—a war-torn childhood, 

coming of age as a woman, domestic violence, a failed marriage, rape, workplace discrimination. 

Franziska’s process of maturation is expressed through multiple levels of narration that Karin 

McPherson argues are necessary to depict complex psychological development: 

The need for this additional level of narrative reflection arises from the development 

towards a more mature ideological outlook which Franziska experiences in the course of 

 

38 While the third-person omniscient narrator’s gender is never specified in the text, I will be using feminine 
pronouns when referring to this voice because of the obvious connection between author and narrator. In the 
sections on Becker’s text, I will use masculine pronouns for the same reason.  

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the novel, and which cannot be expressed merely through plot … Through these 

reflections she achieves a critical distance from herself and her own past, which is part of 

the process if [sic] maturing, of forming a more definite ideological outlook. (15) 

Here, McPherson points to the limitations of traditional uses of language in tracing such 

ideological developments. Through the multi-voiced narration, Reimann reaches beyond a 

chronological, singular narrative perspective to address Franziska’s trauma, narrate her past, and 

explore herself.  

 

Jakob der Lügner 

Becker’s tragicomic novel, Jakob der Lügner, is about Jakob Heym, a Jewish man living 

in a ghetto during World War II who lies about owning a contraband radio. The structure of the 

novel is marked by humorous episodes concerning Heym’s clunky attempt to spread hope to his 

fellow inmates by supplying them with “news” about the Soviet Army’s progress in the war. 

Becker’s novel stands out in GDR literature for several reasons. For example, the use of humor 

as a trope in a narrative about the Holocaust was unprecedented. Furthermore, the novel deviates 

significantly from the standard GDR discourse concerning the Holocaust that glorified and even 

exaggerated communist resistance to fascism—Jakob der Lügner does not contain any organized 

resistance at all.39 Becker’s novel is written from the perspective of a Jewish survivor and deals 

with the difficulty in remembering and recounting the Holocaust. The perspective stems from the 

semi-autobiographical nature of the novel—Becker himself was Jewish and, as a child, survived 

the Łódź ghetto and the Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Since Becker 

was so young during his time in the ghetto, he claimed to not have clear personal memories from 

39 For counterexamples, see Bruno Apitz’s Nackt unter Wölfen and Anna Segher’s Das siebte Kreuz. 

 

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which to draw when writing Jakob der Lügner, but rather relied on stories he heard from his 

father.40  

The autobiographical element of the novel is further complicated through Becker’s 

complex mode of narration. The novel is about Jakob Heym and his made-up radio; the story, 

however, is not transmitted by Jakob himself, but rather by an unnamed survivor from the ghetto. 

While this first-person narrator knows what Jakob has told him and can supplement with his own 

personal experience, the story is ultimately not his own. The survivor narrator puts it this way: 

“Immerhin erzähle ich die Geschichte, nicht er, Jakob ist tot, und außerdem erzähle ich nicht 

seine Geschichte, sondern eine Geschichte” (44). With statements such as these, the narrator 

simultaneously emphasizes his authority and his own fallibility and, as Jefferson Chase argues, 

makes the narrative voice a unique link between author and narrator: 

 [T]he narrator spends a great deal of time discussing his sources and attesting to his 

narrative’s accuracy, yet he also admits inventing a number of situations to which he had 

no access. The narrator serves as a bridge between Jakob, who invents reports of the war, 

and the author Jurek Becker himself, who invents the whole novel based on an initial true 

story and on intensively researched but ultimately insufficient historical information. The 

author Becker can thus be seen to play the role in life that Jakob plays in Becker’s fiction; 

that of the innocent forced by circumstances into inventing fictional stories. (334) 

The text is marked by this complex mode of narration—shifts in the narrative voice between 

first- and third-person narration—simultaneously blurring the lines between author and narrator 

and between the survivor narrator and Jakob. The voice of the survivor-narrator thus allows 

Becker to insert himself and his own subjective experiences into the text. 

40 The original idea for Jakob der Lügner came from Becker’s father who told him the story of a man who kept an 
actual radio in the ghetto and relayed news of the war to his fellow inmates (Chase 328). 

 

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While the majority of Jakob’s story is told in the third-person omniscient style, the voice 

of the first-person survivor narrator is that which creates the self-reflexive tone of the narrative, 

as it continually disrupts the narrative, bringing attention to the constructed nature of the story. 

Rachel Halverson argues that the importance of this intrusive, intradiegetic narrative voice and 

his interruptions should not be underestimated, as they function to shape and guide the reader’s 

interpretation of the story: 41   

These asides lend [the intradiegetic narrator] the quality of an orchestra director. He 

literally conducts the reader’s progress through the novel, telling the reader when and 

where to direct his or her attention and why that is important at that particular point in the 

story. In this way, he controls the reader’s interpretation of his text and enforces his 

subjective control over the ebb and flow of the story. (459) 

As the only survivor of the ghetto and thus the one tasked with telling Jakob’s story, the main 

concern of the first-person narrator is narrative authenticity. As pointed out above, the narrator’s 

interruptions function simultaneously to call attention to the speculative nature of his storytelling 

and to attest to its narrative accuracy. Susan Figge and Jenifer Ward put it elegantly: “the 

narrator agonizes about the relationship between history and story and about the need to invent in 

order to arrive at what can be named as the truth when no one can say any more ‘what really 

happened’” (92). In order to differentiate between history (fact) and story (fiction), the narrator 

speaks in multiple registers and with multiple voices, each playing its own role in bearing 

witness to the unspeakable events of the Holocaust. 

 

41 While Halverson uses the term “intra-homodiegetic” narrator to describe Becker’s third-person, omniscient 
narrative voice, I will use the term “intradiegetic” for clarity and simplicity. In the Routledge Encyclopedia of 
Narrative Theory, there is no entry for “intra-homodiegetic” narrator. Instead, Routledge distinguishes between 
homodiegetic narration and an intradiegetic narrator. Homodiegetic narration defines the kind of narrative that 
features an intradiegetic narrator who is the teller of a story within the storyworld.   

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Lament as Narrative Strategy 

 

 

Reimann and Becker creatively employ multi-voiced narration to more effectively and 

compellingly tell their stories—stories of identity crises and stories that come to terms with 

trauma and loss. In this next section, I will argue that both narratives are written with linguistic 

elements of lament that will address the limits of language. The language of lament expresses 

sorrow or mourning through poetic language and has a long tradition in Western culture with 

biblical roots. In the book of Lamentations, the author expresses his sorrow concerning the 

destruction of Jerusalem and appeals directly to God. A few examples from the text:42 “Wie liegt 

die Stadt so wüst, die voll Volks war! Sie ist wie eine Witwe, die Fürstin unter den Heiden; und 

die eine Königin in den Ländern war, muß nun dienen … Ach HERR, siehe an mein Elend; denn 

der Feind prangt sehr” (Die Lutherbibel, Klgl. 1.1, 1.9)! “Ach HERR sieh doch und schaue, wie 

schnöde ich geworden bin” (Klgl. 1.11)! The direct appeal to an addressee, to God (Ach HERR), 

characterizes the tone of Lamentations and is a characteristic of lament in general. In Reimann’s 

novel, Franziska finds the addressee for her lament in a lover named Ben. The novel opens with 

a lament addressed to this figure. “Ach Ben, Ben, wo bist du vor einem Jahr gewesen, wo vor 

drei Jahren? Welche Straßen bist du gegangen, in welchen Flüssen hast du gebadet, mit welchen 

Frauen geschlafen?…Ich möchte mein Leben verdreifachen, um nachzuholen, die lange lange 

Zeit, als es dich nicht gab” (5). In the opening sections of the novel, Franziska laments not 

having met Ben earlier in her life, laments her loss of childhood through the traumas of war, and 

laments the psychological loss of a brother. The remainder of the novel, in part, represents a 

working through of unresolved childhood traumas in the mode of self-exploration through the 

use of multiple narrative voices.  

42 I use a German edition of the Bible (Die Lutherbibel) here to emphasize the similarities in language between 
Lamentations and the two GDR texts. 

 

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In Jakob der Lügner, through narration of the traumatic experience itself, the narrator 

laments his role as the only survivor of the ghetto who is tasked with the difficult responsibility 

of remembering and recounting the Holocaust. Grant Henley argues that Becker’s text is similar 

to a tradition of Jewish trauma literature that responds to catastrophe, drawing a comparison with 

other Jewish texts including the biblical book of Lamentations:43 “The reader is invited to 

consider the implications of the story [of Jakob der Lügner] as a Jewish religious narrative that 

does not convey a theologically orthodox Jewish understanding of God, rather espouses a telos 

of deus absconditus—that God has forgotten and completely abandoned the Jewish people” (29-

30). In the book of Lamentations, the writer, too, wrestles with a sense of theistic abandonment 

but nonetheless still appeals directly to God in his lament. The narrator in Becker’s text, on the 

other hand, searches for an addressee for his story—a recipient for his lament:  

Ich habe schon tausendmal versucht, diese verfluchte Geschichte loszuwerden, immer 

vergebens. Entweder es waren nicht die richtigen Leute, denen ich sie erzählen wollte, 

oder ich habe irgendwelche Fehler gemacht. Ich habe vieles durcheinandergebracht, ich 

habe Namen verwechselt, oder es waren, wie gesagt, nicht die richtigen Leute … Ich darf 

nicht soviel trinken, jedesmal denke ich, es werden schon die richtigen Leute sein, und 

ich denke, ich habe alles sehr schön beieinander, es kann mir beim Erzählen nichts mehr 

passieren. (9)  

Three times the narrator refers to “die richtigen Leute.” Up until now, he has not found the right 

people, the right addressee, to whom to tell his story. In the act of reading, the reader becomes 

the recipient of the narrator’s lament.  

43 Henley further argues that Becker’s narrative transgresses the boundaries of Jewish trauma literature with an 
absent God and Becker’s incorporation of humor to a narrative of trauma.  

 

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Furthermore, the language of lament is of particular interest with respect to the expressive 

limits of language. The Jewish philosopher Gershom Scholem understands lament as a marker of 

the boundaries of language. As Paula Schwebel explains, Scholem makes a distinction between 

an inner core of language and how it can be expressed exteriorly in lament. In the extraversion of 

inner language, expression ruins symbolic interiority. In other words, only a ruin of the inner 

core of language is externally communicable and as such indicates a limit of verbal language 

(28). The expressive limitations of language were also a philosophical theme that preoccupied 

thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Shoshana Felman argues that Benjamin, 

for example, seemed to have a fixation on the inexpressible, which arose from the experience of 

World War I (202). Benjamin contends that the war struck dumb its survivors and left them 

unable to understand or narrate their experiences. In other words, the broken condition of 

modernity had reached a state that was beyond expression, where language had reached its 

limits. For this reason, philosophers and thinkers were turning to other modes of communication 

to deal with this shortcoming. Benjamin turned to translation and the work of art, and Adorno to 

music. Each claimed that these extra-linguistic media had the capacity to point to that which 

language could not express. 

Adorno argues that art is the language of suffering because it does not approach reality as 

rational cognition does. Reason cannot express suffering in the medium of experience, therefore 

suffering remains mute. The silent suffering discussed here has resonances with Scholem’s inner 

core of language, for only in its silence is it reflecting its inner truth. Any extroversion of the 

inner mourning (in lament) is a ruined language that cannot and does not reflect real, internal 

“truth.” Adorno further argues that art may be the only remaining medium of truth because it can 

“speak” for suffering (Ästhetische Theorie 27). The idea that art can speak where words alone 

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fail is one Adorno more specifically addresses in an essay on music and its relationship to 

language: “noch Ausdruckslosigkeit wird in Musik zum Ausdruck” (“Fragment” 141). In this 

brief but important formulation, Adorno is addressing music’s inherent extra-linguistic quality 

and claiming that it is within this extra-linguistic medium that that which is inexpressible in one 

medium finds its expression in another.  

Understanding the novels at hand as semi-autobiographical texts that process trauma 

through lament can, in part, help to illuminate the complex narrative modalities employed by the 

authors. In attempting to externalize their inner suffering in literary form, the disparity between 

language and what it can depict is made manifest. In both texts, the voices of the author-narrator 

call into question the ability of their storytelling to represent reality. In the translation of these 

texts to film, the filmmakers had to make strategic, aesthetic choices in deciding how to retain 

(or not) the unique modes of narration from the texts. Fascinatingly, in both film adaptations, the 

protagonists are conspicuously silent. Instead of voicing their trauma, they mourn silently. In the 

next sections, I will argue that both Warnecke and Beyer turn to music to enact layers of lament. 

Their aesthetic choices draw attention to music’s ability to point to the limits of language to 

express trauma and suffering.  

 

  

(Musical) Lament for an Author: Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben  

Lothar Warnecke’s Unser kurzes Leben was produced in 1981, seven years after the 

posthumous publication of Reimann’s unfinished novel. The film purports to be “nach Motiven” 

of the over 600-page long text, and, at just under two hours long, leaves out large swaths of the 

story. Along with a major plot reduction, the film also differs greatly on the formal and thematic 

levels. For example, Andrea Rinke argues that the film departs from the novel in its vastly 

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different narrative structure and its singular narrative perspective (302). Muriel Cormican argues 

that the figure of Franziska—a radically headstrong female protagonist in the novel—is tempered 

in terms of gender in Warnecke’s adaptation, resulting in what Cormican deems an ambivalent 

sexism in the film. Perhaps it is due to this stark departure from Reimann’s influential and 

beloved novel that the film adaptation has garnered little scholarly attention and the reviews tend 

to be lukewarm at best.44  

Here, I will suggest that a reconsideration of Warnecke’s film with an emphasis on film 

music results in a more satisfying understanding of the translation from novel to film. In this 

section, I argue that the film music in Unser kurzes Leben features a deployment of a multi-

voiced musical theme that parallels Reimann’s complex, multi-voiced narration in the novel. 

This is significant for many reasons. In the novel, the multi-voiced narration is central to creation 

of the highly nuanced picture of Franziska for the reader. The reader hears about Franziska in the 

third-person narration, hears from Franziska in the first-person narration, and gains insights into 

the author’s perspective from the voice of the author-narrator. This combination of multiple 

voices and modalities creates the reader’s deep identification with Franziska and, indirectly, with 

the author Reimann herself. In the film, the multi-voiced musical theme as narrative voice 

creates a deeper and richer understanding of the (often silent) filmic Franziska. The musical 

theme features a dialogue between different musical “voices,” which, while not a one-to-one 

translation, reflects the multiple voices with which Franziska speaks in the novel. The film also 

allows the narrative perspective to shift to other characters through its use of mediated music, 

which, as discussed in Chapter One, provides glimpses into a character’s subjective thoughts and 

44 For example, a review in Variety claimed: “… the story can’t carry its own weight and becomes boring in the end 
due to stereotyped acting and wooden dialogue” (Holl 20). 

 

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emotions. This parallels a technique in the novel in which third-person narration gives voice to 

people other than Franziska and contributes to the complex style of Reimann’s novel.  

Furthermore, I will argue that the film is trying to do something different than the novel 

and that this becomes most apparent by an examination of the film’s music. While the semi-

autobiographical novel tells the story about the fictional Franziska Linkerhand, the film 

implicitly shifts focus to the late author, Brigitte Reimann, embodied in the figure of Franziska. 

Through a unique utilization of the main musical theme, the film reproduces the novel’s tone of 

mourning and characterizes the film as a lament on the short life of the famous GDR author. This 

not only accounts for the change in title from novel to film but elevates the importance of certain 

autobiographical elements of Reimann’s life in the narrative. By investigating the film’s 

multivalent use of music, I will show how the film music provides unique links between novel 

and film and how it is essential for a full understanding of the film’s narrative perspective and 

overall message.  

 

The opening sequence of the film takes place at a construction site where Franziska finds 

herself among a group of architectural students. Despite her small stature in comparison to the 

other (mostly male) students, Franziska proves herself to be a star student, singled out by the 

revered professor as someone with talent and promise. The soundtrack in this sequence is 

comprised only of the dialogue and diegetic sounds of a construction site. On the musical level, it 

is silent. After this opening sequence, the camera cuts to a close shot of Franziska sitting at her 

desk while she works on an architectural blueprint. After putting down her pencil, Franziska 

looks up from her sketch to stare directly at the camera. Cormican explains the significance of 

Franziska’s gaze:  

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Her ‘look back’ is a challenge, both in terms of form and content. Although she does not 

speak, she addresses viewers directly with her gaze, smirking slightly in a way that 

suggests she is about to surprise them. Her professor has just praised her and told her that 

he can identify an architect’s talent by three lines drawn on a page. Ironically, right 

before Franziska stops and stares into the camera, she draws two lines, prepares to draw a 

third, and then decides against it. (171) 

Not only does this show Franziska’s resistance to categorization, this is the only time where she 

acknowledges the presence of the camera—a brief but powerful moment of self-reflexivity. 

Furthermore, this is the first time music is heard in the film. As Franziska stares at the camera, a 

buzzing synthesizer line cuts prominently into the sonic landscape. The combination of intense 

gaze and buzzing music signals that there is more happening here than meets the eye. I will argue 

that these visual and aural elements create the parameters for the reflexive voice of the author-

narrator from the novel. Here, early in the story, an author-narrator is making her presence 

known. Franziska’s intense stare then functions to tie her figure to Brigitte Reimann, to whom 

the voice of the author-narrator belongs, and to the music that begins to play at this precise 

moment.  

Music’s importance for the figure of Franziska is soon confirmed in the sequence that 

follows. During the entire four-minute-long sequence, the film’s main musical theme plays 

prominently while Franziska herself remains conspicuously silent. The instrumentation is 

striking—an ensemble of flute, clarinet, oboe, and harp. Each instrument plays a solo passage 

separated by moments of silence with intermittent intrusions of the voice of the synthesizer. 

After holding the camera’s gaze, Franziska gets up and goes out into the city in hopes of meeting 

up with her husband, Wolfgang. As she waits for him outside his workplace, one of his 

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colleagues informs her that “ihr Mann ist längst weg, junge Frau.” Franziska answers with a 

silent stare and then moves on to the local bar, thinking she might find him there. Again, she is 

disappointed as one of the workers tells her: “Wissen Sie denn nicht, dass Ihr Mann bei uns 

Lokalverbot hat?” Franziska leaves in silence and walks down to a riverbank where she finally 

finds Wolfgang drunk and laid out in a pile of lumber. She bends down to his level, and then, 

seeing her, he chuckles and with a dismissive gesture, belittlingly calls her “Frau Diplom 

Architektin.” As Wolfgang stumbles to get up, he grabs Franziska and tries to kiss her. She 

shoves him off and he responds with a swift slap to her face, hard enough to draw blood. The 

two opening scenes of the film—the construction site and the search for Wolfgang—juxtapose 

Franziska’s opposing, gendered realities. In the public sphere, she is seen as confident and 

competent, the GDR’s ideal emancipated woman. In the private sphere, she lives a fraught and 

even dangerous domestic reality. The tension between ideal and reality on the level of gender is a 

recurring theme in both novel and film and serves to intensify the trauma of this scene. In what 

follows, I will show how the music in this sequence speaks for Franziska and how it is used to 

externalize her internal working through of trauma which is so prominently featured in the novel.  

In the opening sequence of Reimann’s text, Franziska is anything but silent. As indicated 

above, the beginning paragraphs contain Franziska’s lament addressed to her lover, Ben. 

Franziska speaks in the manner of an Ich-Erzähler, the voice of a more mature Franziska looking 

back on the past. This melancholic lament is followed by an abrupt temporal shift to Franziska’s 

childhood, to the end of World War II on the traumatic day the Soviets invaded. From here, the 

novel jumps back and forth between temporal levels, sometimes even jumping forward to parts 

of the story that foreshadow events to come. These temporal shifts are accompanied by shifts in 

the narrative voice, from first- to third-person narration, and punctuated by cuts into the diegesis 

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by the reflexive voice of the omniscient author-narrator. The continual shifting in time, place, 

and voice of the opening chapters lends them a considerable sense of instability and 

fragmentation.  

While the film does not incorporate the multiple storylines from the novel, it does capture 

this unstable and fragmented narrative tone by the skillful deployment of the multi-voiced music. 

The musical theme which is described above will repeat throughout the rest of the film. This first 

iteration establishes the centrality of the theme and points to Franziska’s fraught internal realities 

in the novel that are not thematized on the visual or verbal levels of the film. The complexity of 

the instrumentation reflects the complexity of the opening portion of the novel and establishes 

the film’s musical multi-voiced mode of narration. The musical theme that switches back and 

forth between instruments functions analogously to the shifting of narrative voices in the novel. 

Each distinct musical “voice” embodies the different tones in which the literary Franziska speaks 

as she explores her own identity, creating a kind of internal dialogue like that in the novel. 

Furthermore, the loud buzzing of the synthesizer that cuts in and out of the soundtrack mirrors 

the intrusive voice of the author-narrator that troubles Franziska’s storytelling in the novel. The 

prominence of this musical mode of self-exploration in the film juxtaposes considerably with 

Franziska’s verbal silence. Here, the music is in effect speaking for her as she experiences and 

mourns the domestic trauma on screen and points to the lamenting and working through of 

trauma that happens on multiple levels in the novel. This aesthetic choice allows Warnecke to 

avoid the complex translation of multi-voiced narration to filmic dialogue and furthermore 

avoids the externalization of verbal lament, instead pointing to it with the music.  

Franziska’s silence in pivotal moments in the narrative is a theme that runs throughout 

the film. Instead of dialogue, music on the mediated level is used to grant access to Franziska’s 

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subjective point of view and creatively links film to novel in moments of considerable emotional 

and psychological intensity. One such example occurs during Neustadt’s spring ball when 

Franziska and Trojanowicz, the “Ben” in the novel, dance for the first time.45 Franziska has come 

to the ball with her work colleagues to enjoy the town’s festivities. It is a light-hearted affair until 

she sees Trojanowicz. In the novel, when the two lovers dance for the first time, the scene is 

depicted from Franziska’s perspective. As Trojanowicz pulls her close, the third-person narrator 

grants access to Franziska’s internal reality, tracing her thoughts that flutter to and fro in this 

intoxicating moment: 

Er legte den Arm um ihren Rücken und zog sie zu sich herüber, und sie kam, sie ging ihm 

entgegen, den halben Schritt, den weiten Weg, der irgendwo im Dämmerungsland der 

Kindheit begann, vielleicht in der Gasse zwischen Hecken aus Teufelszwirn, und als sie 

sich trafen, lehnte sie die Stirn an seine Brust, ahnungslos, daß sie in diesem Augenblick 

schon die Rollen für sich und für ihn wählte … obgleich sie sich kaum von der Stelle 

bewegen konnten, war ihr schwindlig, als ob sie sich sehr schnell und mit geschlossenen 

Augen im Kreis gedreht hätte, o du mein Neckartal, um den Punkt im Kies des 

Schulhofes, den nachher die schwärzliche, wie mit dem Zirkel geschlagene Spur der 

Mädchenschuhe umlief. (355) 

As Franziska dances close with her soon-to-be lover, her thoughts transport her back to 

childhood with images of school yards, gravel, and little girl shoes—perhaps signaling 

something from her childhood yet unresolved. Furthermore, the narrator’s invocation of “O du 

mein Neckartal”—a song from Franziska’s childhood—in a moment wrought with psychological 

and emotional significance is noteworthy. This is the moment in which her love story with 

45 In the novel, “Ben” is an idealized version of Trojanowicz—a combination of different male figures in 
Franziska’s life and her own projection of the ideal lover.  

 

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Trojanowicz—with Ben—begins. Without directly describing the meaning of this pivotal 

moment for Franziska, the narrator reaches to memory and music to point to its significance.  

In the translation to screen, the music and image work in tandem to align the viewer with 

Franziska’s perspective paralleling the perspective in the novel. When Trojanowicz approaches 

Franziska to ask her to dance, the sonic construction of the scene shifts. Up until this point, a live 

band has been playing background music. When Franziska and Trojanowicz begin to dance, the 

camera cuts to a tight close up of Franziska, and the band’s song swells in volume and switches 

to a waltz-like piece played in 6/8 with heavy reverb. The camera then cuts to Trojanowicz; 

however, the angle is from below from Franziska’s perspective as she gazes up toward him. The 

intimate camera angles and the use of mediated music situate the viewer as Franziska in this 

sequence, experiencing things from her perspective. However, as is the case in the film’s 

opening sequence, Franziska is silent. During their dance, she does not speak but instead the 

music “speaks” for her. The associations of childhood from the novel are translated by the 

instrumentation of the song playing as they dance—electric guitar and drums keeping a steady 

beat while a flute prominently plays the melody. The flute flutters along, creating a lighthearted 

atmosphere, and then it repeats the melody up an octave—the high register lending a child-like 

tone to the music. This is also reminiscent of the flute music in Der geteilte Himmel and, I would 

argue, functions similarly, signaling a certain youthfulness and instability. The music here 

creates a unique link to the novel, externalizing “O du mein Neckartal,” which “sounds” in 

Franziska’s thoughts, to the sounds of the flute. Again, music here points to the internal workings 

of the literary Franziska and allows the filmic Franziska to remain silent. 

Another notable instance of mediated music shifts the subjectivity away from Franziska 

to Trojanowicz, paralleling a shift in perspective in the novel. After the night at the ball, 

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Franziska and Trojanowicz’s love affair begins. In the film, the bulk of their love story is 

depicted in scenes in the country—a setting markedly different than the film’s other urban and 

industrial scenes. The two lovers traipse around the countryside on a motorcycle and speak in 

philosophical terms about love and life. During one such outing, Franziska departs from their 

normal topic of conversation to discuss her work at the architectural office. She has convinced 

her boss to allow the architects to have a contest to see who can develop the best model of a new 

downtown for Neustadt. As Franziska describes her design, kneeling down in the dirt using rocks 

and twigs to recreate her model, the perspective shifts to Trojanowicz’s. Cormican argues that:  

… the shot-reverse shot emphasizes [Trojanowicz’s] perspective on Franziska. She is 

already somewhat infantilized because she is standing in the sand, stripped down to a 

white slip, waving her arms excitedly as she talks in a fast-paced chatter, and she appears 

to be engaging in play while he works on the motorbike … Thus, when the camera shifts 

from a slight upward tilt in the shot of Trojanowicz watching Franziska to a downward 

tilt in the reverse shot of what he sees, the infantilization is heightened. Furthermore, as 

the camera zooms in on her upper body—gesticulating arms and grimacing face—her 

voice is drowned out and replaced by somber piano music, making her solely the object 

of his erotic gaze. (175) 

The music that Cormican describes is the main musical theme played on the piano which has 

been playing in the background all along. At this moment, the music increases in volume to 

drown out Franziska’s voice along with all other diegetic sounds. The musical transgression of 

sonic boundaries here and the doubling of sensory perspective—both the visual and aural 

perspective belong to Trojanowicz—signals its mediated status, this time aligned with 

Trojanowicz.  

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These love scenes in the countryside differ from all other scenes in the film in setting, 

tone, and content. Furthermore, the instrumentation of the film’s main musical theme in these 

sequences is noteworthy. Instead of the multi-voiced instrumentation of the iterations before, the 

theme here is played on a solo piano. Although the notes and rhythms are the same, the mood 

and tone differ considerably. The gentle voice of the piano and the significantly slowed tempo 

create a reflective and romantic atmosphere. This more lyrical iteration of the theme has direct 

ties to a conversation between Franziska and Trojanowicz out in the countryside. Down by a 

river nearing sunset, Franziska waxes philosophical: “Ich will nur sagen, vielleicht lebst du 

anders, wenn du weißt du hast nicht alle Zeit der Welt. Und wagst Dauer, weil du selbst nicht 

von Dauer bist. Chopin starb mit 39 Jahren. Ein Leben das sich gelohnt hat.” Trojanowicz: “Und 

ohne die paar Dutzend Préludes hat sich’s nicht gelohnt? Du gehst davon aus, dass jede 

menschliche Existenz eine Rechtfertigung bedarf, womöglich durch schöpferische Leistung.” 

Franziska: “Ja, nur da sein, das ist soviel und sowenig wie eine Grottenolm-Existenz.”  

For a GDR audience, this scene would have great significance, as they would know that 

Chopin’s biography parallels that of Brigitte Reimann’s (they both died at 39). While Chopin’s 

“schöpferische Leistung” was his music—his prelude and etudes—Reimann’s was her literary 

texts—her crowning achievement the novel, Franziska Linkerhand. The uncanny aspect of this 

scene is that it is reproduced almost word for word from the text. Reimann herself thematized 

Chopin’s short life and indirectly compared it with her own. In fact, Chopin and his music play a 

significant role elsewhere in the novel. Another example occurs later in the story and comes from 

Trojanowicz’s perspective. In an attempt to express how much Franziska means to him, he 

appeals to music—specifically to Chopin’s music—as he cannot find the words to express his 

feelings:  

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[Franziskas] Vertrauen in seine Festigkeit peinigte ihn. “Ich kann mich nicht verständlich 

machen”, sagte er, “weil ich außerstande bin—weil ein Mann außerstande sein sollte, 

über gewissen Situationen zu reden.” … Ich lege eine Schallplatte auf, jeden Abend 

dieselbe … Chopin, ich höre Chopin, weil ich hoffe, daß Sie jetzt, zur selben Zeit—die 

egoistische Hoffnung, Sie schlafen nicht. (505-06)  

Trojanowicz cannot use words to express his love and deep affection for Franziska. Instead, he 

turns to music to commune with her. Chopin’s music connects the two lovers and steps in for the 

unspoken words.  

 

In the translation to film, the prominence of Chopin and his music is intensified through 

the film music. When the main musical theme is played on the piano, it imitates the tone of 

Chopin’s etudes and preludes. Understanding music in this way changes the reading of the scene 

where Trojanowicz watches Franziska as she explains her architectural project. Instead of 

understanding his gaze to be infantilizing and erotic, the music—Chopinesque music—links the 

filmic Trojanowicz with the literary one, stepping in for him when words fail to express his love 

for Franziska. Furthermore, if Franziska is embodying Brigitte Reimann in the film, I would 

suggest that her white, lacy clothing is less, as Cormican puts it, “virginal and bridal” (173) but 

rather angelic and saintly—the emphasis on her femininity less for sexual purposes than spiritual 

ones. The prelude-like music combined with Trojanowicz’s gaze invokes the tone of an elegy for 

the loss of the young, talented GDR author.  

This piano theme plays a central role in the film, playing in each one of the love scenes, 

but also playing at the beginning and end of the film as a kind of narrative framing. As described 

above, the opening sequence of the film features the main musical theme played by multiple 

instrumental voices. What I left out, however, is that the final iteration of the musical line is 

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played on the piano as Franziska walks away from her abusive husband and as the title of the 

film appears on screen. The switch from the unsettled multi-voiced instrumentation to the more 

lyrical, Chopinesque piano voice as the title Unser kurzes Leben appears underscores the 

significance of this music for the change in title. The novel’s singular title—Franziska 

Linkerhand—is broadened by the use of the first-person plural unser. If the film’s narrative voice 

is thematized in the music, the speaker of “our short life” could be Franziska speaking in the 

reflexive voice of the author-narrator, referring not only to herself, but to Reimann, Chopin, and 

the viewer as well. The link between Reimann, Franziska, and Chopin is further confirmed in 

one of Reimann’s diary entries from 1970:   

Ich höre Chopin. Eine wunderbare Wiederentdeckung. Gestern den ganzen Abend die 

Etüden und Préludes. Enthusiastisches Entzücken und tiefe Niedergeschlagenheit. Oder 

hab ich mich zu sehr in meine Franziska versetzt? Ich habe den Chopin wieder 

hervorgesucht, weil ich seine Musik für den Kapitelschluß brauche, an dem ich schon 

lange herumarbeite, immerzu unterbrochen durch Leute, Liebe und dergleichen. Aber ich 

bin ja immer noch und trotz zehn Jahren Altersunterschied in der Lage der Franziska. 

(Die geliebte 328)  

The diary entry provides context for the importance placed on Chopin in the novel and for its 

connection to Reimann herself. The author equates her need and desire to listen to Chopin’s 

music with a deep identification with the character of Franziska. Understanding the music this 

way, the film performs a kind of mourning, a lament for the short life of Brigitte Reimann. 

Through the piano theme, the film becomes a medial externalization of the novel’s literary 

lament from a silent language (words on a page) to an auditory language through the music.  

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At the end of the film, Franziska’s model city places first in the design competition at her 

architectural office. Thrilled with this news, she celebrates with her colleagues. However, this 

euphoria is short-lived, for she soon finds out that her plans for a new downtown will not and 

cannot be realized. After hearing the devastating news, the filmic account ends with Franziska 

leaving work, walking purposefully through a cemetery, accompanied by the Chopinesque 

music—the image and sound working together to lament the “short life” of Reimann, the 

beloved GDR author. 

 

The Music of Suffering: Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner  

On the face of it, Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner and Frank Beyer’s same-titled film 

exhibit far fewer differences than Franziska Linkerhand and Unser kurzes Leben. Despite its 

fidelity to the source text, scholars and critics have found Beyer’s adaptation less than satisfying 

in particular in its retention (or lack thereof) of the unique narrative voice from the novel 

(Bjornstad; Corkhill; O’Doherty). However, what most of these estimations fail to account for is 

the music. While the film’s musical soundtrack is generally silent, I will demonstrate how 

Beyer’s sparse use of music has dramatic impact on our understanding of the film. As we will 

see, the film’s use of music as narrative voice translates the unique reflexive modality of the 

novel to the filmic genre. 

The original screenplay for Jakob der Lügner was written by Jurek Becker in 1965, the 

same year as East Germany’s 11th Plenary. As discussed in Chapter One, the results of this 

infamous Plenary were a tightening of regulations on DEFA and the ousting of renowned film 

director, Frank Beyer, the intended director of Becker’s screenplay. The combination of Beyer’s 

removal with concerns about the plot’s failure in adhering to the GDR’s signature Holocaust 

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aesthetic of glorified anti-fascist resistance resulted in the film’s ultimate rejection. However, 

unwilling to abandon his story, Becker transformed the screenplay into a tragicomic novel, 

which was published in 1968. In the wake of the novel’s international success, the easing of 

restrictions on DEFA, and Beyer’s return to the film industry, Beyer’s same-titled film was 

released in 1974, almost ten years after the original screenplay.  

Jakob der Lügner went through many aesthetic and thematic changes that have been the 

source of much scholarly inquiry. As discussed above, scholars and critics agree that what makes 

Becker’s source text unique is its use of humor, its challenge to the dominant GDR norms of 

Holocaust representation, and its unique narrative voice. In its medial translation, Beyer’s film 

has been criticized for failing to retain the novel’s tone of resistance to literary norms in large 

part due to its failure to preserve the novel’s multi-voiced narration. Alan Corkhill, for example, 

purports that Becker’s biggest challenge was how to incorporate the first-person survivor 

narrator into the film and argues that Becker dispenses with it completely (100). If one takes only 

the filmic images and dialogue into account, it may seem that the film has, indeed, lost its unique 

aesthetic. However, what most analyses of this film fail to consider is the soundtrack. The only 

exception to this is Paul O’Doherty’s article, “Fiddler in the Ghetto,” in which he argues that the 

main difference between Becker’s novel and Beyer’s film is related to the theme of resistance. 

He claims that the novel features organized acts of resistance by Jews in the ghetto (albeit few) 

and thereby challenges GDR norms of Holocaust and Jewish representation. The film, on the 

other hand, removes all such resistance in an attempt to make the narrative more conformist to 

GDR standards of representation. O’Doherty attempts to prove this claim in part by examining 

the film’s main musical theme, which he argues is a reworking of the main fiddle theme from 

Norman Jewison’s film musical, Fiddler on the Roof (1971). He argues that “[j]ust three years 

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after the success in the GDR of Fiddler on the Roof, [Jakob der Lügner] is using this element in 

a quite transparent attempt to establish an association in the mind of the GDR viewer with the 

passivity of the Jews in the musical, thus eliminating any suggestion of resistance” (314). What 

O’Doherty misses, however, is the film’s use of music to translate the reflexive tone from the 

novel. I will argue that the narrative voice is translated to the filmic medium by the recurring 

solo fiddle motif. The motif thematizes the novel’s multi-voiced narration by calling attention to 

itself by sounding at strategic points in the otherwise conspicuously silent soundtrack. In this 

way, the music functions as Halverson’s “orchestra director,” directing and guiding the viewer’s 

progress through the film, drawing attention to particular narrative themes and motifs. 

The first time the viewer hears music is at the very beginning of the film during the 

opening credits. The musical motif is played on a solo fiddle with two noticeably distinct voices. 

The fiddle vacillates between legato bowing and pizzicato plucks of the strings. The voices are 

very fragmented, in that they start and stop unexpectedly and have a great deal of silent space in 

between them. The music is paired with static images of the empty ghetto. Each image is split 

down the center—the camera’s view shows a juxtaposition between light and shadow, interior 

and exterior. The dual nature of the music and the image reflects the doubled “I” of the narrative 

voice in the novel. This sequence sets the (aural) tone for the film and introduces the viewer to 

the main musical theme that will return repeatedly throughout the film.  

The novel commences with the voice of the highly subjective intradiegetic narrator 

telling about the significance of trees in his life.46 The narrator then switches his attention to 

Jakob, transitioning to recounting his unlikely encounter with the ghetto authorities in the tone of 

an omniscient narrator. One evening, a Nazi guard falsely accuses Jakob of being out on the 

46 The tree motif is one that does not appear in the film but continually resurfaces in the novel.  

 

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street after curfew and demands that he go to the Nazi headquarters to ask for his “gerechte 

Bestrafung.” While Jakob is in the station, he overhears a news report on the radio saying that 

the Russians are advancing just 20 kilometers outside of Bezanika; a town not far from the 

ghetto. As it is illegal for ghetto inmates to own a radio, this is the first news Jakob has heard in 

weeks, maybe months, and its happy contents fill him with hope. After a lengthy exposition of 

this account, the narrator switches registers to bring attention to the constructed nature of this 

story:  

Wir wollen jetzt ein bißchen schwätzen. Wir wollen ein bißchen schwätzen, wie es sich 

für eine ordentliche Geschichte gehört, laßt mir die kleine Freude, ohne ein Schwätzchen 

ist alles so elend traurig. Ein paar Worte nur über fragwürdige Erinnerungen, ein paar 

Worte über das flinke Leben, wir wollen einen schnellen Kuchen backen mit 

bescheidenen Zutaten, nur ein Stückchen davon essen und den Teller wieder zur Seite 

schieben, bevor uns der Appetit auf anderes genommen ist. (24) 

The narrator not only switches narrative levels, in effect ripping the reader out of Jakob’s story 

back to the narrator’s mediated level, but, in this testimonial space, brings attention to the 

unreliability of memories and equates the process of storytelling and story hearing to that of 

baking and consuming a cake. A story is made up of individual ingredients that, once mixed 

together, make a palatable story, but one that cannot be digested all at once. With this analogy, 

he hints at the precarious relationship of truth and memory and in doing so, justifies his mode of 

storytelling.  

The film’s use of music in the opening sequence mimics the tone established in the novel. 

As the survivor narrator continually draws the reader’s attention back to the constructed nature of 

storytelling, so too does the music draw attention to itself as a composed musical line. The music 

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is not background music that causes the viewer to suspend disbelief and succumb to a curated 

picture presented by the film, but rather is fragmentary and disjointed. The musical line does not 

function as Claudia Gorbman’s “unheard melody,” but rather functions to cause the viewer to 

pause and take note of its presence. 

It is also pertinent to mention here that the film’s soundtrack is very silent, a style alluded 

to in a Newsweek review which states: “One of the few films to come to the U.S. from East 

Germany, it is a movie of quiet power (emphasis mine), deep integrity and shattering irony” 

(Kroll 108). Moreover, the beginning of the film functions like a silent film with the combination 

of musical preamble and three short intertitles: “Die Geschichte von Jakob dem Lügner hat sich 

niemals so zugetragen. Ganz bestimmt nicht. Vielleicht hat sie sich aber doch so zugetragen.”47 

Jakob der Lügner’s silent film aesthetic is also noted by O’Doherty. However, he finds the film’s 

nod toward the silent era to be incomplete and unconvincing:  

Intertitles were used almost entirely in the era of silent film, as a technique which enabled 

viewers to understand incidents, settings, and sequences of events which were not 

immediately obvious without sound. If the point was to make us aware that the story was 

not to be regarded as definitive, then it would surely have been necessary to continue 

with this pattern, or perhaps with a voice-over which might have reminded us of the 

uncertainty surrounding the events being portrayed. (315) 

O’Doherty’s discomfort with the intertitles’ ability to convincingly signal the uncertainty of the 

filmic events can be assuaged by understanding music as narrative voice that guides and shapes 

the film’s structure. The musical interjections emulate the prominence of the first-person 

 

47 Figge and Ward understand the intertitles as a weak attempt to integrate the survivor narrator into the film: “While 
the film does open with brief intertitles in which the spectator is warned to question whether or not the story of 
Jakob is true, absent the self-questioning narrator of the novel this thread is not woven throughout the fabric of the 
film” (93). 

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narrative voice that cuts into the novel to problematize its authenticity and to lament the 

difficulties in recounting a traumatic past. Furthermore, by employing aural means of expression, 

Becker’s film avoids the verbal externalization of the inner core of lament that marks the story 

about Jakob and further points to the difficulties in speaking about the Holocaust.  

Another important use of music occurs when Jakob mentions his contraband radio for the 

first time. The day after Jakob narrowly escapes the Nazi headquarters, he is shown at the 

railway station schlepping heavy boxes with his friend and fellow ghetto inmate, Mischa. The 

entire day Mischa has been eyeing a boxcar that he heard was full of potatoes. Not having eaten 

a proper meal in some time, he contemplates sneaking over to the car to steal some potatoes even 

though it could cost him his life. Distressed at the thought, Jakob tries to convince Mischa that a 

few potatoes are not worth it. Seemingly unphased at the thought of dying, Mischa continues to 

eye the boxcar, hatching a plan to reach it unnoticed. Jakob realizes he will need something big 

to divert Mischa and tells him the news that the Russians are closing in on Bezanika. This causes 

Mischa to pause, but ultimately does not convince, as it is a well-known fact that no one goes 

into Nazi headquarters and comes out alive. In a final attempt to convince him, Jakob exclaims, 

“Ich sag dir die Wahrheit. Ich hab ein Radio.”  

In the novel, this scene is described in great detail by the narrator in third person and in 

what at first seems an omniscient tone. However, through a clever combination of third-person 

narration, direct quotation, and free indirect discourse, the reader has access to Jakob’s subjective 

thoughts. Jakob to Mischa:   

“Die Russen sind zwanzig Kilometer vor Bezanika!” … “Das ist nett von dir, Jakob.” 

Jakob trifft fast der Schlag. Da überwindet man sich, mißachtet alle Regeln der Vorsicht 

und alle Vorbehalte, die ja nicht aus der Luft gegriffen sind, da macht man einen 

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blauäugigen jungen Idioten zum Auserwählten, und was tut die Rotznase? Sie glaubt 

einem nicht. Und du kannst nicht einfach weggehen, du kannst ihn nicht stehenlassen in 

seiner Blödheit, ihm sagen, daß ihn der Teufel holen soll, und einfach weggehen. (30) 

As the news has not convinced Mischa to abandon his suicidal mission, Jakob struggles with 

what to do next and exclaims out of desperation: “Ich habe ein Radio!” After the utterance of 

Jakob’s first lie, the survivor narrator breaks into the diegesis in the tone of lament to bemoan 

Jakob’s position in the ghetto. “Mischa ist es so egal, was das heißt, ein Radio im Ghetto. Sollen 

es tausend Paragraphen bei Todesstrafe verbieten, sollen sie, ist das jetzt noch wichtig, wo 

plötzlich morgen auch noch ein Tag ist? ‘Ach Jakob . . .’” (33). This “Ach Jakob” comes from 

the survivor narrator to remind the reader of Jakob’s ultimate fate, and this lamenting phrase will 

punctuate the rest of the recounting of this event.  

The translation of this pivotal scene to the screen results in a considerably less detailed 

and intricate depiction of the events than might be expected. With no voiceover narrator to grant 

access to Jakob’s tortured thoughts, the scene seems to lack the interiority present in the novel. 

However, when Jakob finally speaks aloud the lie about the radio, music cuts prominently into 

the diegesis. The music is the same fiddle motif we heard at the beginning of the film that 

paralleled the voice of the literary narrator, and its placement here is noteworthy. Up until now, 

the musical soundtrack has been silent in this scene. The entrance of the fiddle is sudden and 

signals that the viewer should take note, calling attention to itself as it emerges from the silence. 

The general silence of the filmic account, combined with the prominent use of the musical motif, 

points to the tone of lament in the novel. The fiddle functions as a musical sigh that punctuates 

the scene just as the first-person narrator’s “Ach Jakob” punctuates his storytelling. In this way, 

the music sonically laments Jakob’s well-intentioned lie that will serve as the catalyst for his 

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future fate. 

 

The next time we hear music occurs shortly after this musical lament when Jakob is 

shown walking alone through the silent ghetto, lost in thought. All of a sudden, the camera cuts 

quickly from the ghetto street to a scene from Jakob’s earlier life. The lighting is softer, and the 

image is accompanied by the solo fiddle heard at the beginning of the film. Flashbacks are 

shown sporadically throughout the film and loosely trace a narrative about a lost love from 

Jakob’s past. Christian Jäger notes that flashbacks play a more important role in the film than in 

the novel, arguing that it fulfills “die Funktion psychologischer Grundierung, aber zeig[en] auch 

die Armut und Not mit Vergleichungen” (319). While it is true that these flashbacks provide the 

viewer a glimpse into Jakob’s internal thought life, they tend to arise devoid of context and 

without explanation. What links these decontextualized memories, however, is the musical motif 

of the solo fiddle that marks the temporal relationships and creates cohesion to an otherwise 

unexplained storyline. The manner in which the fiddle plays is also noteworthy, as it contrasts 

with all other instances of the fiddle theme in the film. Rather than being fragmented, the music 

played here is legato with heavy vibrato and very reverberant, as if it is being played in a 

different mode or register.  

In the novel, memories of life before the ghetto are told by the survivor narrator. 

However, just as the fiddle “speaks” in a different mode during the flashbacks, the narrator, too, 

speaks in a new and noteworthy way. For example, part way through the novel, Jakob is walking 

through the ghetto and reflecting on his former life. Here, the narrator gives the reader access to 

Jakob’s internal musings by narrating his thoughts, switching fluidly from telling about Jakob in 

the third person to, in a sense, speaking in Jakob’s voice as signaled by the use of the second 

person:  

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Jakob geht mit seinen zwei Stunden spazieren, es ruht sich nicht nur aus in engen 

Zimmern und bei ans Herz gewachsenen Kindern, der Hang zum Schlendern ist ihm noch 

geblieben, trotz Schweinwerfer und Revier. Schlendern in einem Städtchen, aus dem du 

dein Leben lang nie weiter weggekommen bist als eine Woche, die Sonne scheint dir 

freundlich auf den Weg, so freundlich wie auch die Erinnerungen sind, um derenwillen 

du doch bloß dein Haus verlassen hast und zu denen dir jede zweite Straße eine Brücke 

baut, man weiß es bereits. (185-86)  

This use of “du” in this passage has a dual function. On the one hand, it blurs the lines between 

the narrator’s and Jakob’s perspectives, in effect, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. This 

technique lends authenticity to a part of the story that could be called into question, as Jakob 

would be the only one who could accurately recount his thoughts. On the other hand, the 

addressee of the narrator’s “du” is ambiguous—is it the reader or Jakob? In this way, the reader’s 

identification with Jakob and his subjective experience in this section is intensified. In the film, 

the legato mode and the addition of vibrato to the “voice” of the fiddle in the flashback reflect 

the altered register in which the literary narrator speaks in these scenes. Here, the music mirrors 

the tone of the narrative voice in the novel in that the passionate and reverberant music works to 

intensify the viewer’s emotional identification with Jakob in this scene.  

The next scene in this analysis features a particularly striking use of music to blur the 

boundaries between Jakob’s voice and the voice of the survivor narrator. The scene is when the 

reader/viewer is first introduced to the character of Lina—a young orphan girl whom Jakob has 

been hiding in his home in the ghetto. As Lina must be hidden from the Nazis, she spends her 

days in Jakob’s attic, daydreaming about far-away lands and fairy tale princes and princesses. 

When Lina has developed a fever, Jakob comes to check on her and bring her some food. While 

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the two talk about Jakob’s day at work, a doctor arrives to examine the sick girl. At this point in 

the novel, Jakob gets lost in thought thinking about his desire to adopt Lina and to teach her 

about reality: “Ich werde ihr sagen, daß jetzt Schluß ist mit dem ewigen Märchenerzählen, nicht 

immer bloß Prinzen und Hexen und Zauberer und Räuber, die Wirklichkeit sieht ganz anders 

aus, du bist alt genug, das hier ist ein A” (82). The use of the first-person here is noteworthy. 

Although it is characteristic of the survivor narrator to continually remind the reader that his 

version of the story is fallible, here, the narrator provides access to Jakob’s subjective thoughts in 

a way that hints at authenticity. The narrator even uses the first-person pronoun ich, blurring the 

boundaries between his and Jakob’s perspective with interior monologue. 

The filmic account of this scene is very similar; some of the dialogue from the novel is 

even reproduced word for word in the film. The novel’s unique blurring of perspectival 

boundaries seems at first to be missing in the film but turning an ear to the soundtrack reveals 

Jakob’s interiority through a skillful use of music. This pivotal moment in the film parallels an 

episode in the novel that comes directly after Jakob’s musings about Lina. Interrupting this 

moment of interiority, Professor Kirschbaum teases with Lina as he holds his stethoscope to her 

heart:  

“Nanu, was ist denn das? Da drin pfeift doch etwas?” Lina sieht amüsiert zu Jakob, und 

der macht weiter, er hat nicht gemerkt, wie er angefangen hat, aber jetzt macht er weiter, 

er wird doch Kirschbaum den mageren Scherz nicht verderben, und Lina lacht über den 

dummen Professor, der gar nicht begreift, daß das Pfeifen nicht aus ihrer Brust kommt, 

sondern von Onkel Jakob. (82-83) 

Here, it is as if Jakob’s whistling is an unconscious phenomenon, its source completely 

unbeknownst to him. The Pfeifen in the novel is reproduced on screen by Jakob who lightly 

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whistles while he waves teasingly at Lina. The tune Jakob whistles is the fiddle theme. This is a 

notable choice as this musical theme has, up until this point, been purely non-diegetic and, as I 

have argued, has represented narrative voice. When Jakob whistles this tune, it parallels the 

literary narrator’s use of ich in the passage above. It is as if the narrator who speaks for and 

through Jakob in the novel is (aurally) embodied in the musical theme in the film. He makes his 

presence known by the fiddle theme’s crossing of musical boundaries from non- to diegetic 

music—violating the story/discourse distinction. In this way, the voice of the author-narrator 

speaks in and through Jakob, signaling the constructed nature of the story and causing the viewer 

to wonder who exactly controls the narrative. 

Along with marking this perspectival shift, the music also works together with the image 

to intensify the viewer’s alignment with Lina. This mirrors a narrative strategy from the novel 

that Grant Henley has noted: “The constant narrative tension between fact and fiction causes the 

reader to try and decide between fact and fiction. The fictional aspect of the story invites the 

reader on the one hand to empathise with the story’s figures. … the reader response is even 

encoded in the text in the behavior of the orphan Lina in the story” (29). Throughout the 

narrative, Lina struggles with the tension between fantasy and reality—struggling whether or not 

to believe if Jakob’s radio is real and whether or not the fairytales she hears are true. The 

viewer’s first encounter with Lina follows directly after a shot of a castle in the distance 

accompanied by the fiddle motif. There is then a quick cut to Lina peering out of the attic 

window as the camera slowly zooms in to a close-up of her face—the view revealing that the 

fairytale-like castle is shown from her perspective. The shot-counter-shot also functions to 

position the viewer as Lina, this type of shot occurring a number of times throughout the film. In 

this scene in the film, the viewer’s identification with Lina is not only signaled by the camera’s 

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perspective, but by the musical theme. It plays when the viewer first sees Lina peering out the 

window, and again when Uncle Jakob whistles the tune the doctor “hears” through his 

stethoscope. Both instances are ones in which Lina is differentiating reality from fantasy. Is the 

castle in the distance the one in her fairytales? Is Uncle Jakob making that noise or is it really her 

heartbeat? The viewer, positioned as the child Lina, is signaled by the music that s/he, too, 

should wonder about reality, the music pointing to something unsure. Perhaps the viewer should 

wonder whether what is being told to them is true. Here, the music draws attention to the 

constructed nature of the narrative and functions analogously to the voice of the first-person 

survivor narrator in the novel.  

I have thus far demonstrated that the music in the film is used to thematize complexity in 

narrative voice, to blur perspectival boundaries, point to the constructed nature of the story, and 

align the viewer with the figure of Lina. The final scene in this analysis is where all of these 

usages converge and where music most clearly functions as lament by sounding when language 

has reached its limit. Lina has caught wind that Jakob owns a radio and desperately wants to see 

it for herself. After pestering him about it for days, Lina finally convinces Jakob to allow her to 

listen to his radio. Jakob takes her down to the cellar where he claims he has been hiding his 

radio. Hiding behind a wall, he imitates an interview with Winston Churchill, tells a fairytale, 

and even plays music on the pretend radio, which, as we will see, is of particular import. As 

Jakob imitates the music, he shuts his eyes and loses himself in the music making. In the novel, 

Jakob’s made-up melody is described in notable detail: 

Die Melodie ist ungewiß, Jakob sagt, eine improvisierte Tonfolge, durchsetzt mit 

diversen bekannten Themen, aber ohne jede Gesetzmäßigkeit, feststeht nur, es handelt 

sich um einen Marsch. … Jakob verliert, wie es heißt, alle Hemmungen, der einzige 

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Zwang, dem er sich unterwirft, er hat trotz der Eile eine gewisse Regel im Ohr, damals 

vom Vater streng beachtet, und zwar, Vokale sind sparsam zu verwenden, nach 

Möglichkeit vollständig zu vermeiden. Weil Instrumente sich nur in Mitlauten äußern, 

genau genommen nur in Tönen, die sich zur Not mit Konsonanten beschreiben lassen, 

ihnen entfernt ähnlich sind, aber nicht gleich. (italics mine) Also kommt ihm kein 

simples Täterä über die Lippen und kein Lalila, es gilt, Laute zu formulieren, die sich in 

keinem Alphabet befinden, der Keller dröhnt von Niegehörtem. (168). 

In the narrator’s description of musical imitation, there are parallels to Scholem’s language of 

suffering and its externalization in lament. In Jakob’s imitation of musical instruments, only an 

approximation of their sounds and tones can be produced, and, to account for this, he reaches to a 

new alphabet—a new language of expression. This, too, is the case for the expression of 

suffering. As Scholem argues, any extroversion of inner suffering in the language of lament is a 

partial expression—a mere “ruin” of inner realities. In order to externalize suffering, as Adorno 

argues, only an extra-linguistic medium is suitable. Here, Jakob reaches to music to “speak” for 

his suffering, thus pointing to the limits of verbal language.  

The music in the filmic account of this scene is of utmost importance just as it is in the 

novel. As Jakob begins to play his pretend melody, buzzing his lips together as if he were 

playing a trombone, music from another sonic space enters into the mix. This music is unlike any 

that has come before in the film. Instead of the expected fiddle, a full orchestra plays a 

lighthearted melody. When Jakob closes his eyes and loses himself in the music, the camera cuts 

to one of his flashbacks. The viewer sees Jakob happily dancing to the sounds of the orchestra 

with the beautiful woman from his other memories. The camera then cuts back to Lina, who 

sneaks over to peek around the corner and spies Jakob with his eyes closed consumed in music 

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making. In this instance, she learns what the viewer has known all along: the radio is fake. 

However, rather than being disappointed, she sits back down and with a slight grin on her face, 

lovingly stares back toward Jakob, content to hear his music. The stark juxtaposition of Jakob’s 

life now and his life before the ghetto exemplifies his current suffering. In this scene, the film 

music functions to transcend Jakob’s reality in the ghetto and sonically laments the unspeakable 

events of the Holocaust.  

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Epilogue 

 (Musical) Afterlives 

For each character in this study, exploring their own identity in the context of a 

collectivist society has been of utmost importance. In order to synthesize their (often) conflicting 

realities, they must come to terms with how their own subjectivity can (or cannot) exist in 

society. Music’s fundamental role in creating subjectivity in the translation from novel to film 

(or vice versa) points to its ability to tell stories in unique and subtle ways. Without having 

looked to the music in each one of the films in this study, we would have missed out on 

important aspects of the narrative that change our understanding of each film and consequently 

their corresponding text. By focusing attention on the function of music as narrative voice, this 

study has opened space for new questions about the limits and forms of expression in DEFA 

cinema specifically and narrative cinema more broadly. Just taking one step away from an East 

German context demonstrates the broader implications of this study. Let us now turn a critical 

eye and ear to the afterlives of some of these DEFA films, exploring what music does in other 

cinematic contexts.  

In 1999, Peter Kassovitz directed Hollywood’s take on Jakob’s experiences in the ghetto 

in the film featuring well-known actor Robin Williams, called Jakob the Liar. Many scholars 

have criticized Kassovitz’s film, as the plot departs significantly from Becker’s novel in its 

addition of organized Jewish resistance. This is seen most obviously in the inclusion of a planned 

Jewish uprising and the martyrdom of Jakob, which turns him into a heroic Jewish resistance 

figure. Pól Ó Dochartaigh explains this departure from the plot as conforming to a specific 

American approach to the Holocaust that glorifies “the cult of Jewish resistance” (457). 

Therefore, the addition of Jewish resistance turns Jakob’s story into a quasi-American one. 

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However, there are other ways in which Jakob’s story becomes an American one, and nowhere is 

this clearer than in the film’s use of music.  

The musical theme in Kassovitz’s version first plays at the very beginning of the film and 

features a specifically American variation of klezmer music. Traditional Jewish klezmer is 

played on the strings, hammered dulcimer, flute, and accordion. Around the turn of the 20th 

century, klezmer was heavily influenced by American jazz, especially among Jewish-American 

immigrants. This mix of jazz and klezmer has since become the most well-known variation of 

klezmer music. The jazzy influence led to the introduction of clarinet, trumpet, and snare drum to 

the typical orchestration of a klezmer band. The musical theme in Kassovitz’s film is played on a 

perfect blend of traditional and American-influenced klezmer instrumentation—clarinet, 

accordion, and violin. This American-klezmer sound colors the entire film as music dominates 

the soundtrack in contrast to the relative silence of the East German film. Kassovitz’s music 

designates the story as part Jewish and part American.   

Furthermore, jazz music as a thematic element plays a prominent role in Kassovitz’s film. 

In this version of Jakob’s story, he indulges in his lying and storytelling, embellishing on his lies 

much more than in either the East German novel or DEFA film.48 At one point, Jakob is telling a 

group of men the latest news he “heard” from his radio and begins to tell about the Americans 

who had just joined the war. According to Jakob, the Americans would tend to come in on big 

tanks, upon which jazz bands would play to help cheer up and entertain the troops. He even 

specifies the instrumentation of his made-up band—a clarinetist and three female jazz singers. At 

one point, Jakob even tells the orphan Lina about the Americans and their jazz music. Then at 

the very end of the film, the musical story comes full circle.  

48 This is in part due to Robin Williams’ well-known screen persona—working to further Americanize Jakob’s story. 

 

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Just as in the East German version, the ending of the film shows the ghetto inmates on a 

train being deported to the concentration camps. In the American version, Jakob’s voiceover 

narration explains that they were sent from the ghetto to the camps and never seen again. Then 

he hesitates and says, “but maybe it wasn’t like that at all...” Just as Jakob says this, the viewer 

hears accordion and harmonica music slowly fading in from the background. The Soviets have 

come to liberate the ghetto, just as in the alternate ending in Becker’s novel, but Kassovitz takes 

it one step further.49 Lina peers out of the train at the approaching tanks and sees two men 

playing accordion and harmonica in the distance. She shuts her eyes tight and, as she does, the 

music morphs from Russian march music to American jazz. When she opens her eyes, the Soviet 

troops have been transformed into the American band from Jakob’s fantasies. It is just as Jakob 

had described, a band accompanying a clarinet player and three female jazz singers. The film 

ends as the band plays and Lina watches wide-eyed from the train. As has become clear, the 

film’s use of music turns Jakob’s story into a quasi-American one. Through fantasies of an 

American jazz band, Jakob gives hope to the hopeless ghetto inmates. It is not the Russians who 

save them, but American troops and the delightful sounds of a jazz band.  

 

Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar is an example of a DEFA film’s “afterlife.” A mere 

preliminary look at the role of music in the film proves that music is just as important (arguably 

even more) in shaping the narrative structure and for creating the message in the American 

version than it was for the East German film. If we turn to the other films in this study, we will 

see that the same holds true for their (musical) afterlives. Die Legende von Paul und Paula, for 

example, has a kind of afterlife in the film Sonnenallee (1999) by Leander Haußmann. 

 

49 The end of Becker’s novel features two endings: the “real” ending in which Jakob and his fellow Jewish inmates 
are deported from the ghetto and sent to a concentration camp and the imaginary ending in which Jakob is killed 
trying to escape just before the Soviets come to liberate the ghetto. 

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Sonnenallee looks back with nostalgia at the GDR, in particular at the youth culture, and in doing 

so attempts to come to terms with a past that has been lost. Throughout the film, covert and overt 

references are made to culturally significant figures, films, and music of the former GDR. 

Perhaps the most obvious reference is to Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula. Paul Cooke 

explains:  

A central moment of such ironic revisitation comes in the film’s evocation of the 1973 

DEFA youth film Die Legende von Paul und Paula. In this film’s climax Paul takes an 

axe to his lover Paula’s door in order to break it down and to be with her. Although made 

three decades later, Sonnenallee is set in the same period as Paul und Paula. In the 

climactic moment in the Micha/Miriam romance plot line, Micha runs to his would-be 

lover’s house to the growling music of the Puhdys’ hit from the earlier film, ‘Geh’ zu ihr 

und laß deinen Drachen steigen’. On the stairs of her building he then bumps into Paul 

from the DEFA film (played by Winfried Glatzeder) who is even wearing the same frilly 

shirt he has on in Paul und Paula. (164-65)  

Noteworthy here is the film’s sonic thematization of Paul und Paula. This sequence 

represents the second time in the film that the Puhdys’ “Geh zu ihr” is played. As Berghahn has 

argued, the prominence of the song “Geh zu ihr” in the most iconic scene in Die Legende von 

Paul und Paula (aboard the boat in Paula’s fantasy) is in large part what contributed to the film’s 

cult status (Hollywood 200). The multiple iterations of this song in Sonnenallee are not only an 

overt reference to Carow’s film but help to create the overall musicality of the film. Marianne 

Wellershoff’s review of Haußmann’s film in Der Spiegel, for example, is entitled “Musik der 

Freiheit,” pointing to music’s significant role in characterizing the film. This musical reception 

parallels the way in which music marked the reception of Die Legende von Paul und Paula. The 

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films have even more parallels in that Sonnenallee—like Die Legende von Paul und Paula—was 

adapted to a novel shortly after the film’s release. What is the music doing in Sonnenallee? Is it 

merely a musical reference to a cult film from the lost days of the GDR or is there more to it? 

Does the music help to create the subjectivity of Mischa, the film’s main character? Does the 

music tell more than the filmic images and dialogue alone?   

 

Let us shift our focus from screen to stage to examine the afterlife of Der geteilte 

Himmel—a stage adaptation by Tilmann Köhler. The play premiered at the Staatsschauspiel 

Dresden in 2013. The play’s 5:47 long YouTube video trailer begins with a woman—the 

equivalent of a filmic voiceover narrator—philosophizing about life: “Was wäre denn das 

richtige Leben im Richtigen gewählt? Wäre ich unter diesen anderen Verhältnissen ein anderer 

Mensch geworden? Besser? Klüger? Ohne Schuld? Nicht immer sind die Tatsachen die Gefühlen 

gegenüber im Recht.” Directly following this brief monologue, the curtains open and a group of 

men and women surround Rita asking her: “Bist du glücklich, Kind?” Rita looks distantly into 

the audience and repeats, “glücklich?” Immediately, the group begins to raucously dance around 

and sing “Von den Bergen rauscht ein Wasser.” Rita joins in singing with the group and then the 

voice of Tilmann Köhler begins to talk about the adaptation project. Why start the trailer—the 

introduction to the play—with the folk song from the scene at the bar? What is it about this scene 

that stands out? In stark contrast to both the East German novel and film, women’s voices 

(including Rita’s) have joined in the song. What is music telling us here? How has Rita’s story 

changed across temporal and medial boundaries?  

Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand, too, has an “afterlife” in an opera entitled 

Linkerhand by Andrea Heuser and Moritz Eggert that premiered in 2009. A description of this 

musical reworking on the website Wise Music Classical reads: “Instead of retelling the plot of 

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the novel, Andrea Heuser and Moritz Eggert have placed the inner landscape of Franziska 

Linkerhand at the focal point of the opera. In dense musical images comprised of elementary 

inner and outer stations in the development of the protagonist, the opera more or less makes a 

sound-world out of the poetic substrate of Reimann’s novel.” What is it that makes the intricate 

psychological contours of Franziska’s story have resonances for a musical translation? How does 

music in this context add to an understanding of the multi-voiced narration in the text? Many 

questions arise from even a brief examination of these various afterlives. What is it that gives 

these East German narratives their staying power outside of the context in which they were 

written/produced—a context that has completely disappeared? What lessons are left to be 

gleaned from these stories? Furthermore, the importance of music in each of the afterlives is 

striking. What about music is helpful in understanding stories that thematize the East German 

past? Does music do something that dialogue, image, or gesture cannot?  

In this study, I focused tightly on adaptations in part because of the richness of the 

comparative structure and in part to help focus my attention on narratological concerns. Looking 

forward, I wonder what broadening my lens by removing the layer of adaptation will reveal 

about music’s function in cinema. Do music and sound continue to have narratological functions 

without the explicit link to a literary text? What new things can music and sound do outside the 

constraints of adaptation? By asking questions such as these, film music will be propelled further 

into larger discussions in film and music studies, combating the long-held assumption that “film 

music is not a serious genre worthy of exploration and thoughtful criticism” (Provenzano 79). 

This study has proven quite the opposite and has revealed music’s essential role in shaping how 

we “hear” and understand narrative film.  

 
 

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BIBLIOGRAPHY 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

145 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

 
 

 

 

Primary Texts 
 
Literary Texts 
 
Becker, Jurek. Jakob der Lügner. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982. 
 
Braun, Volker. Die Unvollendete Geschichte und ihr Ende. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998. 
 
Brussig, Thomas. Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee. Volk & Welt, 1999. 
 
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis. Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 1951. 
 
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. 2001. 
 
Die Lutherbibel. Martin Luther, 1545. 
 
Plenzdorf, Ulrich. Legende vom Glück ohne Ende. VEB Hinstorff Verlag, 1981. 
 
Reimann, Brigitte. Alles schmeckt nach Abschied: Tagebücher 1964-1970. Aufbau-Verlag, 1998. 
 
---. Ankunft im Alltag. 10th ed. Verlag Neues Leben, 1994.  
 
---. Franziska Linkerhand. 3rd ed. Aufbau-Verlag, 2001. 
 
Wolf, Christa. Der geteilte Himmel. Methuen Educational, 1987. 
 
---. Lesen und Schreiben: Aufsätze und Prosastücke. Luchterhand, 1972.  
 
---. Moskauer Novelle. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1961. 
 
---. Nachdenken über Christa T. Luchterhand, 1968. 
 
Films 
 
Fiddler on the Roof. Directed by Norman Jewison, 1971. 
 
Der geteilte Himmel. Directed by Konrad Wolf, 1964. 
 
Goya oder der arge Weg zur Erkenntnis. Directed by Konrad Wolf, 1971. 
 
Jakob der Lügner. Directed by Frank Beyer, 1974. 
 

146 

 

 

 

Jakob the Liar. Directed by Peter Kassovitz, 1999. 
 
Das Kaninchen bin ich. Directed by Kurt Maetzig, 1965. 
 
Karla. Directed by Herrmann Zschoche, 1965. 
 
Die Legende von Paul und Paula. Directed by Heiner Carow, 1973. 
 
M: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder. Directed by Fritz M. Lang, 1931.  
 
Reservoir Dogs. Directed by Quentin Tarantino, 1992. 
 
Der rote Kakadu. Directed by Dominik Graf, 2006. 
 
Shutter Island. Directed by Martin Scorsese, 2010. 
 
Sonnenallee. Directed by Leander Haußmann, 1999. 
 
Spur der Steine. Directed by Frank Beyer, 1966. 
 
Unser kurzes Leben. Directed by Lothar Warneke, 1981. 
 
Der Verdacht. Directed by Frank Beyer, 1991. 
 
 
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its National and Transnational Contexts. Berghahn Books, 2016.  

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