Love instead of hate: Actor Jaecki Schwarz filming a crime thriller
Photo: dpa/Hendrik Schmidt
“You don’t hear much good about this person,” says actress Jenny Gröllmann in her role as Margot Kunze. Jaecki Schwarz, who played her husband Dieter at the time, reacts in the DEFA feature film “Isabel on the Stairs” with the words: “Well, Margot, that’s going too far.” In another scene in the film, her son Philipp, played by Mario Krüger, complains: “I think you think the Chileans have to be grateful. You get upset when they celebrate loudly.”
The film, shot in 1984, tells the story of a Chilean woman who fled her homeland with her young daughter after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in 1973 and how she, like around 2,000 of her fellow countrymen, was taken in by the GDR. These people were given apartments and jobs or places to study. Although the population mostly felt sorry for these refugees and treated them kindly, there were prejudices and tensions – partly because of the shortage of living space in the 1970s.
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The Defa Foundation, which maintains and seeks to preserve the legacy of the GDR film company, is now using the above-mentioned scenes from “Isabel on the Stairs” for a video clip of its campaign “We have the choice!” You can see the young Jaecki Schwarz 40 years ago in his role as Dieter Kunze and then the 78-year-old today, explaining: “I think it’s in everyone to be a little bit afraid or scared of the other, of the new – and if they speak differently, look different, have a different culture, then even more so.” But Schwarz says: “If you say ‘foreigners out’, that’s not a solution!” He says: “You must not believe those who use people’s fear to get into power themselves, and you must not vote for them either.”
Jaecki Schwarz and other old Defa stars such as Carmen-Maja Antoni and Winfried Glatzeder are working with the Defa Foundation to show their faces and attitude. Together they are fighting against the worrying resurgence of right-wing forces in Germany. This is happening with a view to the state elections on September 1 in Saxony and Thuringia and on September 22 in Brandenburg.
In these three federal states, the AfD is between 24 and 30 percent in opinion polls – the 24 percent is the value for Brandenburg.
The AfD is not explicitly mentioned in the video clips. But it is quite clear that the actors are concerned with this party and its view of humanity. First, a scene from an old DEFA film is shown and then the actors who appeared in it have their say. Ute Lubosch speaks about the film “The Architects” (1990). She comments on a film sequence that deals with the question of whether women should be counted as fully valid employees because they can get pregnant and be absent from work. Lubosch says: “Anyone who still claims today that women belong in the kitchen is obviously out of date. Let’s make sure that reactionary images of women have no chance in the future.”
Foundation director Stefanie Eckert explains at the start of the campaign: “The Defa Foundation stands for participation instead of exclusion, for diversity of opinion instead of hatred and deformation, for dialogue and togetherness. We have the choice in September.”
An impressive excerpt from “Coming Out” (1989) was a sensation at the time. It showed how neo-Nazis abused a young man with dark skin on an East Berlin S-Bahn and other passengers watched idly until a young girl intervened, shouting “Stop it, you filthy pigs.” The fact that neo-Nazis even existed in the GDR had never been shown in the cinema before.
In his supporting role without lines in “Coming Out,” Pierre Bliss played the victim who was pushed around and had his hair pulled. Now he is appealing to his viewers’ conscience: “I’ve been letting myself be beaten up in this film for 30 years so that you wake up a little. So go vote and make your mark in the right place.”
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