Abstract
George Cukor’s My Fair Lady opened in East Germany on October 8, 1967, less than a year before the DEFA musical film Heißer Sommer. Joachim Hasler’s summer blockbuster came into East German cinemas on June 21, 1968, and attracted over two million spectators, almost the Hollywood musical’s film attendance, which drew close to 2.25 million viewers.’ Convenient screening locations, a storyline teenagers and young adults could identify with, contemporary tunes from the East German music charts and their singers as lead actors, and the presentation of East Germany as visually appealing homeland all contributed to the success that made Heißer Sommer a cult film and a timeless classic of East German cinema.
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Notes
See also chapter 2 for more details on the import of US and West German films. Other interesting sources are, for example, Hans Joachim Meurer, Cinema and National Identity in a Divided Germany 1979–1989: The Split Screen (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000)
and Rosemary Stott, Crossing the Wall: The Western Feature Film Import in East Germany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011).
See http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=79 for an excerpt of the constitution in English translation. The entire constitution (in German) was reprinted in Volker Gransow and Konrad Jarausch, eds. Die Deutsche Vereinigung: Dokumente zu Bürgerbewegung, Annäherung und Beitritt (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1991), 40–41.
Helga Balach. Wir tanzen um die Welt: Deutsche Revuefilme 1933–1945 (Munich: Hanser, 1979).
Mary Wauchope, “The Other ‘German’ Cinema,” in Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, ed. John Davidson and Sabine Hake (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 220.
Andrea Rinke, “Eastside Stories: Singing and Dancing for Socialism,” Film History 18 (2006): 73.
Andrea Rinke, “Film Musicals in the GDR,” in Film’s Musical Moments, ed. Ian Conrich and Estelle Tincknell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 190.
For more about Gert Natschinski, see, for example, Manfred Haedler, “Der weiße Fleck: Musikfilm: Gespräche mit dem Regisseur Horst Bonnet und dem Komponisten Gerd Natschinski,” in Kino-und Fernseh-Almanach: Prisma 07, ed. Horst Knietzsch (Berlin: Henschel, 1976), 64–80.
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© 2013 Sebastian Heiduschke
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Heiduschke, S. (2013). Renegade Films, Defa Musicals, and the Genre Cinema: Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, Joachim Hasler, 1968). In: East German Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322326_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322326_10
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