Katja Mann, wife of German novelist Thomas Mann, recalls their fifty years of marriage and their history both as a couple and independent intellectuals. Born in Germany, the Manns were exiled to the United States during WWII, and returned to Europe after the war, settling in Kilchberg near Zurich. Katja (née Pringsheim) was a witness to all her husband’s writing and guarded him from interruptions throughout the years. Thomas Mann’s well known...

In 1987, after over ten years of work, Werner Tübke (1929-2004), one of East Germany’s most important painters, completed the monumental, oil-on-canvas painting The Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. Painted in the Renaissance styles of Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer, the painting—measuring 14 meters high and 123 meters wide—is in the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia, the site of the last battle of the German Peasants’...

This portrait of East German sculptor and graphic artist Fritz Cremer (1906-1993) shows the artist at work in his studio and some of his art works, including sculptures for his Buchenwald Memorial. It accompanies the images with a text by Bertolt Brecht, read by actor Wolfgang Heinz of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

As a painter in the court of King Carlos IV of Spain, Goya has attained wealth and reputation. He believes in king and church, but he is also a Spaniard who dearly loves his people -- a contradiction that presents a deep dilemma. Based on Lion Feuchtwanger's novel, Goya is one of only 10 East German films originally shot in 70mm. This release is the director's cut and shows the influence of great filmmakers from Buñuel and Saura, to Eisenstein. Goya...

While working on his Hercules Concept, director Lutz Dammbeck began to study the life and work of the German sculptor Arno Breker (1900-91). How could a highly talented sculptor who had met French avant-garde artists in Paris in the 1920s, and whose works were first labeled as “degenerate art” become one of Adolf Hitler’s and Albert Speer’s preferred sculptors and protégé? In trying to find an answer, Dammbeck met with contemporaries and...

Berlin in the 1950s: divided, but not yet walled. Young artists, at the start of their careers and seeking a new lifestyle, frequented the East Berlin cafés and bars that were meeting places for intellectuals, as well as Cold War secret service agents and black marketeers. Former East Berlin bohemians gather at Ganymed, the legendary restaurant near Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. In the early 1990s, soon after the fall of the Wall, they recall...

At the Vienna Art Academy in 1994, an unidentified person painted over 27 works by Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer in black. Rainer had become world-famous for his abstract art and, in particular, for his over-layering of photographs and overpainting of his own and other artists’ works. But who painted over the “overpainter”? Speculation rages: Did he attack his works himself? A year later, an unsigned letter surfaces claiming responsibility...

When Leipzig pianist Kyra Steckeweh realised that her repertoire almost exclusively consisted of music composed by men, she began searching for pieces written by female composers. Her research in archives, libraries, and publishing houses quickly brought to light a variety of remarkable piano pieces that have been buried in history and rarely performed.. Steckeweh sees a lot of catching up to do, which is why the focus of her piano recitals and recordings...

In this short, East German photographer Gundula Schulze (b. 1954) vividly explains her creative process and talks about her desire to and concerns about capturing the whole personality of the women in her work. She sees her nude portraits, posed in social settings, as the antithesis of the usual, superficially erotic nude photographs. As of the late 1970s, Schulze’s innovative photo series were met with official disapproval because they captured...

East Berlin, summer 1989: A young East Berliner navigates the final months of the GDR. Enrico has quit his apprenticeship to focus on the punk band Sperrmüll (BULKY TRASH), which he founded with three friends from their high-rise housing development. Making music with what other people discard helps him let off steam and frustrations with his family, politics and his country. When his mother and sister move to West Berlin, he holds on to his beliefs...