The Politics of Magic: Defa Fairy-Tale Films - Paperback

by Qinna Shen (Author)

From Paul Verhoeven's The Cold Heart in 1950 to Konrad Petzold's The Story of the Goose Princess and Her Loyal Horse Falada in 1989, East Germany's state-sponsored film company, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), produced over forty feature-length, live-action fairy-tale films based on nineteenth-century folk and literary tales. While many of these films were popular successes and paved the way for the studio's other films to enter the global market, DEFA's fairy-tale corpus has not been studied in its entirety. In The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films, Qinna Shen fills this gap by analyzing the films on thematic and formal levels and examining their embedded agendas in relation to the cultural politics of the German Democratic Republic.

In five chapters, Shen compares the films with earlier print versions of the same stories and analyzes revisions made in DEFA's film adaptations. She also distinguishes the DEFA fairy-tale films from National Socialist, West German, and Disney adaptations of the same tales. Her archival work reconstitutes the cultural-historical context in which films were produced and received, and incorporates the films into the larger narrative of DEFA. For the first time, the banned DEFA fairy-tale comedy, The Robe (1961/1991), is discussed in depth. The book's title The Politics of Magic is not intended to suggest that DEFA fairy-tale films were merely mouthpieces of official ideology and propaganda. On the contrary, Shen shows that the films run the gamut from politically dogmatic to implicitly subversive, from kitschy to experimental. She argues that the fairy-tale cloak permitted them to convey ideology in a subtle, indirect manner that allowed viewers to forget Cold War politics for a while and to delve into a world of magic where politics took on an allegorical form.

Author Biography

Qinna Shen is Assistant Professor of German at Bryn Mawr College in the suburb of Philadelphia. Her research interests concentrate on the areas of German Studies (20th century), Film Studies, and Transnational Studies with a focus on German-Asian cultural relations. She has co-edited Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (Berghahn, 2014). Her monograph entitled The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (Wayne State UP, 2015) is the first comprehensive, critical, book-length treatment of the live-action fairy-tale films from former East Germany. Her next book project is tentatively titled "Raising the 'Bamboo Curtain': Film Exchange between China and Divided Germany." It will focus primarily on international film trade, genres, cultural politics, censorship, reception, as well as on German-Chinese co-productions.