What Was to Remain of the GDR
The GDR State Film Documentation
The State Film Documentation (SFD), which operated from 1970 to 1986 at Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin, was an “exotic” organization in the GDR film industry: the SFD did not produce its films for GDR cinema or television, nor were they intended for immediate release. SFD productions were handed over to the GDR State Film Archive for storage as soon as they were completed. There, in the stacks, they were to survive for 30, 50 or even 100 years in order to serve as visual and source material for later filmmakers or academics.
As a department of the State Film Archive of the GDR, the SFD was commissioned by the Main Film Administration of the Ministry of Culture in 1970 to document society as a whole as far as possible. It seemed particularly urgent to avoid impending gaps in tradition and memory, for example to document personalities before they died, to capture crafts and customs on film before they were no longer practiced, to record Berlin streets and buildings before they fell into disrepair and were demolished.
However, this “gap-filling” was a delicate task - it also touched on questions of censorship. Because if the state and society of the GDR were to be systematically and completely documented for the future, it was also necessary to lift the usual guidelines and restrictions for filming, the so-called “recommendations for daily information”. Although at no time did this touch on such fundamental issues as the SED's claim to power and leadership, it certainly touched on everyday problems of the 1970s and 1980s, which it was assumed would be solved in the not too distant future. It was expected that the great utopia would soon come true, the problems would disappear and future generations would look back on the difficult beginning with relief. It was only when this optimism about the future faded that the SFD's privilege of providing uncensored insights into everyday life in the GDR became more and more of a problem. The Ministry of Culture wondered whether the SFD was still based on a common world view and whether the principle of partisanship still applied.
Support for the SFD continued to wane until it was finally dissolved in 1986. The experiment to create an island in the middle of the GDR's regulated film industry, where at least for future generations what could not be seen in the current media was recorded, was completed. What remained were over 300 SFD film documents, which today are for the present precisely what they were once intended to be: Film material that does not present a completely different view of the GDR, but an unusually open one. The occasion for the film series is the completed digitization of the entire SFD collection by the Federal Archives, which has been presenting all SFD films in the Digital Reading Room since summer 2024. (Anne Barnert, Andreas Kötzing)
The film series What Was to Remain of the GDR. The State Film Documentation of the GDR is a cooperation between the Zeughauskino, the Dictatorship Experience and Transformation Research Network and the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research with the kind support of the Federal Archives.
