Winfried Junge on his ninetieth birthday: How the “Children of Golzow” became part of the memory of the GDR
His long-term documentary is considered a milestone in documentary filmmaking: With "The Children of Golzow," the director painted a unique portrait of East German lives. A guest contribution.
He made a pact with transience, making the passing of time his co-director for more than half a century. Winfried Junge, of course, couldn't have known this when, in the summer of 1961, just in his mid-twenties, he first came to Golzow in the Oderbruch region to observe village children about to start school with his camera.
The plan was straightforward: watch the little ones learn the letter A. And it went on and on, until in the mid-1990s, a survey ranked "The Children of Golzow" among the 100 most important German films: the only documentary among all the feature films. And the American magazine Variety even called it a "unique milestone in film history." Of course, there were always other voices, too; in 1999, this newspaper declared the Golzow series a "horror without end."
Winfried Junge's teacher, documentary filmmaker Karl Gass, wanted to protect his assistant from ideological complications during his first filmmaking steps and therefore issued a motto: The most appropriate and promising material for a start was, in principle, "monkeys and children." Parallel to the Golzow story, the young filmmaker also shot "The Monkey Terror" at the Leipzig Zoo.
In the most deserted area: How Golzow made film historyBut why on earth Golzow? The capital seemed too disorderly and front-line-like to be the physical border of the system; Eisenhüttenstadt, the laboratory of socialist construction, was daunting in another way: twenty first-class students! Which one should he take? Young mentor Karl Gass had meanwhile come up with a new selection criterion: We're going to "the most deserted area we can find." So, Golzow in the Oderbruch region. This lost-world phrase can now be put into perspective, because "The Children of Golzow" is the world's best-known long-term observation of international film, and the location is already in the title. Over the years, both Indira Gandhi and Kim Il Sung also passed through, though more because of the Golzow LPG.
Junge – who later always worked with his wife Barbara – was probably the right person for this project from the start: he detested anything overly spectacular in the cinema. It all began when his father wanted to see "Little Red Riding Hood" with his four-year-old son. They arrived too late, the theater was long dark, and Winfried saw a giant wolf in the darkness; he screamed until his father realized they had to leave. His father presumably fell on the Oder River in the spring of 1945. He was later declared dead, and his son would never stop sensing the great passing, the peace. This director had the eyes and the gift to watch others grow without ever feeling anything like boredom. The only dramatic thing that interested him was the dramatic in the undramatic.
Junge's films were an innovation right from the start: almost without commentary, especially at the beginning. Yet the time had barely passed when raspy male voices and powerful music, explaining everything, made a documentary film, and the images were almost secondary. Junge reversed this, but the footage of a school opening speaks for itself. 26 children pick their school cones from the school cone tree. Of course, it was about more than that from the start. Wasn't the generation that would one day build socialism coming to school? Junge wanted to say it that way, but Gass advised: "We won't talk much." Thus, at the end of the first short film, it simply says: "And it won't be very long before they stand beside us: citizens of the German Democratic Republic."
26 children had Junge's heavy studio cameras in front of them. But there's no communist film in which everyone could be equally close to the camera. They had to single out a few faces. The nice thing is that almost everyone got their own film later, including Dieter, the one who had to repeat a year and was the only one not allowed to pick a school cone from the tree. Brigitte, who died at the age of 29, suffered from a heart defect.
Children's faces are almost always full of expectation; growing up means losing this expression. Like Brigitte, who became a poultry farmer, or Jochen, who later threatened to beat his children if they became milkers like him.
Children believe that real life begins with adulthood. That's their mistake. No, life doesn't always become fuller, as the audience learned here as well: Perhaps all abundance actually begins in the beginning. Experiencing this gives all 19 Golzow films, Junges, their melancholic undertone.
After the success of "Eleven Years Old," the director and studio knew they had to continue until the Golzow residents reached 25, i.e., fully developed people. Children speak freely, peasant children continue to speak even when they are older. Only in retrospect do you realize the astonishing self-confidence the workers and peasants in the GDR possessed; seen in this light, it truly was a workers' and farmers' state. The answers never seemed staged, just as Junge retained his sometimes somewhat staid openness in his questioning, even when Uwe Kant—Hermann Kant's brother—began to comment on the films, if only because there were now some things to be explained: Who is who and what age?
Half a century of GDR history in fast motionIt soon became clear to everyone that the first generation, raised entirely under socialist conditions, had failed to produce any new model individuals, but something else happened instead: the fall of the Berlin Wall hit the Golzow residents when they were already over thirty. And Junge knew he had to keep going. Could there be greater happiness for a director than a veritable epochal turning point in the middle of his never-ending story? Most of them experienced unemployment; some have long since moved to the West, chasing work like so many others. But one shouldn't say that so summarily, because Junge managed early on to see the Golzow residents as both a collective and yet completely individual.
Perhaps only he was able to keep such an impossible project as this alive. He was in the first year at the Potsdam Film School, and when the school realized that they would rather have only half the number of dramaturgy students instead of 14, he was among those expelled. The student who was to be expelled then submitted a protest note with a detailed account of his exam, examined his exam, and the grade was: failed. That worked. And later, when it came to film lengths, he declared succinctly: "Should the studio force me to make a fragment, I will oppose this film with all my determination." Junge never stopped fighting for the people of Golzow and later even opened the wallets of those who would have gladly closed their doors to him.
Needless to say, this director has made many other documentaries, for example, about Libya and Somalia or the Markersbach pumped-storage power plant. But his name remains inextricably linked to the people of Golzow.
Time. This was once a more or less straight path to the future, but now it's different: Every life flows into the eternal cycle of growth and decay. The straight line becomes a circle. Today, Golzow filmmaker Winfried Junge turns 90, and the children of yesteryear whose first day of school he filmed are long gone, some of them already gone. But their life stories have become an enduring part of East German, indeed all-German, film memory.
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Berliner-zeitung
