At the end of the film, she cries and walks lonely on the tracks that stretch to the horizon.
The sun shines over the industrial plants.
The petite girl just wants to flee from her cramped world, her social ties, her professional obligations.
Klaus Renft, from the rock combo of the same name, sings in a rough voice: "When I was like a bird that sang in the evening, everyone just shouted sunset".
The song is an ode to freedom, because Susanne's everyday life is not free.
Kevin Hanschke
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The young woman is a skilled worker in a textile company. Whether at work or in her family, she is there for everyone. Nobody notices her needs and the love for Lutz, not even Lutz himself, who is hooking up with Susanne's best friend.
The GDR youth film “Still too skinny for love?” From 1973 is a parody of youth in the real existing socialist system and at the same time a story of the rise in the sense of socialism, because the film traces Susanne's path to emancipation. The ambivalence between adapting to the systemic conditions and the search for artistic freedom and criticism of the living conditions in the German Democratic Republic runs through many DEFA films. The roots of this contrast, which led to a special cinematic style, go back almost thirty years when the film was made.
On May 17, 1946, the state film production company was founded in Potsdam.
In the halls of the Althoff studios in Babelsberg, a complex with film studios, Deutsche Film AG begins its work in order, as the Soviet cultural officer Sergej Tulpanov outlined in his speech, "to help restore democracy in Germany, to free the German minds from fascism and to educate them to become socialist citizens ”.
Tulpanow hands over the license for the "production of films of all categories".
A short time later, while still in the ruins of Berlin, the first German post-war film “The Murderers Are Among Us” was made, an expressionist film noir thriller about National Socialist misdeeds with the young Hildegard Knef in the lead role.
State-loyal film production
From then on, the models of the DEFA films were anti-fascism and socialist realism. The production statutes say that filmmakers should “expose” the way they think and depict “nihilism, decadence and philistinism” in their works. The films should reflect the humanistic values of the GDR. Propaganda monumental films emerge, such as Kurt Maetzig's Ernst Thälmann epic or the Karl Liebknecht biography "As long as life is in me" by Günter Reisch.
Despite the ideological foundation and the control by the SED supervisory authorities, the filmmakers always set highlights. This is also due to the organization of the film studios, which are divided into collectives, which allows certain freedoms. Some productions are received worldwide and included in the international canon in 2005 at a retrospective of the New York Museum of Modern Art with the title “Rebels with a Cause”. The show was named after Gerhard Kleins and Wolfgang Kohlhaase's "Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser" from 1957, a social study that conveys the lifestyle of urban youth.
One of the masterpieces from this early phase is the film adaptation of Frank Beyer's novel “Naked Among Wolves”, which premiered in 1963 and was intended to manifest the anti-fascist founding myth of the GDR. This is also in line with the founding of DEFA - “Taking sides on questions of fate is a matter for the artist. You cannot remain apolitical ”. In contrast, two years of film were banned in 1965 and 1966, including “Die Spur der Steine” and the poetic youth drama “Fräulein Schmetterling” by Kurt Barthel about a girl's search for meaning in an old building area in Berlin that is threatened with demolition. The script for the film, which for a long time only existed in rough draft and was reconstructed for the anniversary, was written by the writer couple Christa and Gerhard Wolf.