Mother of the nation? The German Democratic Republic’s forgotten television star, Agnes Kraus

Abstract

Agnes Kraus was one of the most recognizable and popular television actors in the German Democratic Republic. She rose to prominence in the 1970s when she became known for almost exclusively playing Berlin mothers, grandmothers and widows, whose brusque but caring manner was exaggerated for comedic effect, and her characters frequently served as the bearers of traditions and community cohesion. The lasting appeal of Kraus and her characters among audiences from the former GDR is evident from the recent re-release of her television series and films, which are now marketed as ‘Agnes Kraus films’. It may be tempting to attribute Kraus’ ongoing appeal to a desire to revisit the community spirit of the GDR that is encapsulated in these series and films. However, such a conclusion requires closer investigation for, as this article will argue, much of Kraus’ appeal in the 1970s and 1980s resided in the fact that her characters transcended the specificities of nationally-framed values and structures readily identifiable with the GDR.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Birgit Scholz at the Filmmuseum Potsdam and Jörg-Uwe Fischer at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv for their invaluable support in accessing archival material in the preparation for this article. I would like to thank Stephan Ehrig and Stephan Petzold for their extremely helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Torsten Wahl, ‘Aber Agnes!’, Berliner Zeitung, July 21, 2003.

2 Margot Zielinski, ‘Wie ist sie denn, die Agnes Kraus?’, Wochenpost, April 5, 1985.

3 A largely forgotten part of Kraus’ professional biography is that she appeared in a number of films by the GDR’s leading directors including Konrad Wolf, Ralf Kirsten and Herrmann Zschoche, and regularly appeared on stage with the Berliner Ensemble.

4 In the GDR, the term Publikumsliebling was preferred to the term ‘star’. In contrast to the purportedly capitalist construct of the extraordinary star, the term Publikumsliebling was designed to celebrate an actor’s ordinariness and working-class affiliations. Heinz Hoffmann, ‘Der eigene Beitrag’, Filmspiegel 12 (1979); Klaus Klingbeil, ‘Komikerin mit Charakter’, Mitteldeutsche Neueste Nachrichten, June 8, 1973.

5 Ostalgie is a German portmanteau of Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia) used to describe a nostalgia for the former GDR that is most frequently expressed through markers of the everyday such as food brands, culture and community activities.

6 An exception to this is Victoria Rizo Lenshyn’s study of Kraus’ career in ‘Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany’ (PhD Diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2018).

7 John Langer, ‘Television’s “Personality System”’, Media, Culture and Society 4 (1981), 351–65 (355).

8 Anna-Luise Zimmermann, ‘Zwischen Sensibilität und Komik’, Der Morgen, March 7, 1975; Anikó Imre, TV Socialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 200.

9 The concept of the ‘socialist personality’ was promoted by the SED as a model of idealized – but attainable – behaviour. Angela Brock’s definition is particularly helpful here: the ‘socialist personality’ was intended to have ‘an all-round education of “head, heart and hand” and to possess a wide range of virtues which took their cue from societal requirements rather than individual interests’. Angela Brock, ‘The Making of the Socialist Personality – Education and Socialisation in the German Democratic Republic 1958–1978’ (PhD diss., University College London, 2005), 2.

10 ‘Agnes Kraus: Das BE war ihre künstlerische Heimat’, Berliner Morgenpost, May 4, 1995.

11 Ulrich Roloff-Momin, cited in Irma Weinreich, ‘Schwester Agnes kannten Millionen’, Berliner Zeitung, May 4, 1995. Berlin Herz und Schnauze (literally ‘heart and snout’) is an affectionate phrase used to describe Berliners’ friendly but often direct and brusque attitude. It is also used to describe the distinctive Berlin dialect, which was closely associated with Kraus’ characters.

12 Kraus featured in thirty television and film productions between 1969 and 1984.

13 This is one of the few areas in which Kraus’ on and off-screen lives diverged: she never married and never had children. Fernsehen der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, ‘Schwester Agnes’, In dieser Woche im Programm 10 (1975), Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv Presse Archiv/Schwester Agnes.

14 FF Dabei 23 (1977).

15 Kraus’ surname at birth was Krause.

16 Whilst the place names have no inherent meaning, they could roughly be translated as Large Klüchow and Small Machnow.

17 With ‘icke, dette, kieke mal’, Kraus is using heavily accented Berlin dialect for ‘ich, das and guck mal’. Her words translate approximately as ‘I, that, look there’. Marianne Wilczynski and Manfred Heidel, ‘…nun machen Se mal, die Leute wollen lachen!’, Berliner Zeitung am Abend, July 23, 1977.

18 Ibid.

19 Henryk Goldberg, ‘Menschlichkeit – das ist der Grund, warum ich gern hier lebe’, Neues Deutschland, December 31, 1981.

20 Torsten Wahl, ‘Aber Agnes!’, Berliner Zeitung, July 21, 2003.

21 For an excellent study of Heitere Dramatik, see Steffi Schültzke’s Propaganda für Kleinbürger. Heitere Dramatik im DDR-Fernsehen (Leipzig: Leipzig Universitätsverlag, 2009).

22 ‘So-called’ as this was never the official term used at the time. It is, however, widely used in scholarship.

23 Cited in Knut Hickethier and Peter Hoff, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1998), 384.

24 In 1972, Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF) was renamed Fernsehen der DDR (DDR–FS). The television channels were likewise renamed from DFF–1 and DFF–2 to DDR–F1 and DDR–F2. As this change took place during the period from which this article takes its case studies, the abbreviations DFF, DFF–1 and DFF–2 will be used throughout this article for ease of reference and consistency.

25 Officially, the Committee was under the control of the Council of Ministers of the GDR. In reality – and reflected in archival correspondence to and from DFF – the Committee was subordinated to the SED’s Central Committee.

26 Knut Hickethier and Peter Hoff, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1998), 285.

27 Sascha Trültzsch and Sebastian Pfau, ‘Von der Partei zur Familie? Die Darstellung des Alltags in den Familienserien der DDR von 1960–1990’, in Alltag. Zur Dramaturgie des Normalen im DDR-Fernsehen, ed. Henning Wrage (Leipzig: Leipzig Univerisitätsverlag, 2006), 139–56, (147).

28 Meister Falk was a character in Meine besten Freunde. He resolves problems in the community and workplace by unabashedly espousing socialist ideals and rhetoric. Knut Hickethier and Peter Hoff, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1998), 303.

29 Ibid., 385.

30 Peter is actually born on 6 October, but the family’s grandfather, Willi, convinces his wife to agree that the child was born four minutes later so that their grandchild can share his birthday with the founding of the GDR.

31 Sascha Trültzsch and Sebastian Pfau, ‘Von der Partei zur Familie? Die Darstellung des Alltags in den Familienserien der DDR von 1960–1990’, in Alltag. Zur Dramaturgie des Normalen im DDR-Fernsehen, ed. Henning Wrage (Leipzig: Leipzig Univerisitätsverlag, 2006), 139–56, (147).

32 Sebastian Pfau, ‘Unterhaltende Ideologie? Die Familienserie Die lieben Mitmenschen’, in Die Überwindung der Langeweile? Zur Programmentwicklung des DDR-Fernsehens 1968 bis 1974, eds Claudia Dittmar and Susanne Vollberg (Leipzig: Leipzig Univerisitätsverlag, 2002), 295–309, (301).

33 Sascha Trültzsch and Sebastian Pfau, ‘Von der Partei zur Familie? Die Darstellung des Alltags in den Familienserien der DDR von 1960–1990’, in Alltag. Zur Dramaturgie des Normalen im DDR-Fernsehen, ed. Henning Wrage (Leipzig: Leipzig Univerisitätsverlag, 2006), 139–56, (144).

34 Sebastian Pfau, Vom Seriellen zur Serie. Wandlungen im DDR-Fernsehen (Leipzig: Leipzig Univerisitätsverlag, 2009), 154.

35 Ibid., 156.

36 Jan Palmowski, ‘Narrating the Everyday. Television, Memory and the Subjunctive in the GDR, 1969–1989’, in German Division as Shared Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday, eds Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski and Katrin Schreiter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 31–55, (37).

37 Torsten Wahl, ‘Aber Agnes!’, Berliner Zeitung, July 21, 2003.

38 Peter Berger, ‘Heiter-besinnliche Familienchronik’, Freie Presse, October 14, 1969.

39 In 1985, the GDR’s divorce rates were the fifth highest in the world at fifty-one percent.

40 Andrea Rinke, Images of Women in East German Cinema 1972–1982: Socialist Models, Private Dreamers and Rebels (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2006), 26.

41 Ibid., 21.

42 Further evidence of Kraus’ sustained appeal can be seen in the fact that Schwester Agnes attracted a higher audience every time it was broadcast: in 1975, it attracted 52.5% of viewers, rising to 59.7% in 1979 and 59.9% in 1981. Steffi Schültzke, Propaganda für Kleinbürger. Heitere Dramatik im DDR-Fernsehen (Leipzig: Leipzig Universitätsverlag, 2009), 179.

43 Schwester Agnes says this of herself in the film.

44 The Law for the Interruption of Pregnancy (Gesetz über die Unterbrechung der Schwangerschaft) was the only law that was not passed unanimously by the Volkskammer, receiving fourteen votes against and eight abstentions.

45 ‘East German Parliament Approves Free Abortion’, New York Times, March 10, 1972.

46 Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 114.

47 This problem appears in Florentiner 73, Neues auf der Florentiner 73, Schwester Agnes and Mensch, Oma!.

48 Here I am drawing on Rick Altman’s model of genre as the interplay of semantic and syntactic structures. Rick Altman, ‘A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’, Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 6–18.

49 Rachel Green, ‘Heimat, fremde Heimat: Renegotiating and Deterritorialising Heimat in New Austrian Film’ (PhD diss., University of Leeds. 2017), 7.

50 For instance, the press notes prepared for the broadcast of Schwester Agnes begin ‘Without doubt, Agnes Kraus is one of the most loved actors of our Republic. A few years ago she was even voted Fernsehliebling. Agnes Kraus became known and loved through television.’ Fernsehdienst, ‘Schwester Agnes’, March 3–9, 1975.

51 Alexandra Ludewig, Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 20.

52 Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7, 63.

53 Kraus’ performances drew very heavily on the Berlin dialect. As Victoria Rizo Lenshyn has revealed, however, her casting card at the East German film studio DEFA lists her languages and dialects as German, English, French alongside Berlin and Bavarian dialects. Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, ‘Bridging Contradictions: Socialist Actresses and Star Culture in East Germany’ (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2018), 167.

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Elizabeth M. Ward

Elizabeth Ward is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research and a Lecturer in German. Her monograph, East German Film and the Holocaust, was published in 2021 with Berghahn Books. Her research interests include the Holocaust on film, East German cinema, and Cold War German cinema.