Postlagernd Turteltaube (1952)

The story is set, without saying so explicitly, in divided Germany in the early 1950s, and symbolizes the division—the deep gulf carved by the ideologization of Eastern Europe—which runs not only through the country and the nation, but even through entire families. There is the free West, the still-young Federal Republic, and the unfree East: the GDR, a state shaped by Stalinism, deeply ideological, and comprising only part of the country. Wolfgang Hartung and Lena Forche belong to these two extremes and, as antipodes, are also excellent representatives of their respective worldviews. Wolfgang and Lena are siblings who have not seen each other for years, because of the war and the early postwar period. When they meet again for the first time, they encounter each other not merely as strangers; they seem like creatures from entirely different planets. Hartung has become a devout SED apparatchik, firmly convinced of his mission to make socialism succeed. Lena, meanwhile, has been shaped in recent years by the spirit of freedom and liberalism of the Western powers, and is appalled by her brother’s ideological blindness. The siblings argue, and the two so unlike one another agree to a daring experiment. Hartung is to draft a letter and slip copies with identical wording through the door mail slots of five tenants in “his” apartment building, where he also serves as the SED-appointed, loyal-to-the-party representative. The letter is a very general, anonymous warning. “Everything has come out,” it says ominously, and each recipient is urged to go as quickly as possible to a certain address in the West, where they will learn more under the code name “Poste Restante Turtledove.” Wolfgang is convinced that “his people” are being transformed into socialist human beings; he believes no one will be led astray by such a “temptation”—not the young teacher, nor the press cartoonist, a despicable blackmailer and informer; not the university professor with his wife and mother-in-law, nor the expropriated grocer with his wife and three sons, and certainly not the fitter who has risen to become a people’s judge. Faith in socialism as a better way of life than the temptations of the West will surely prevail. Lena Forche disagrees. She is convinced that even such a broadly worded warning will provoke sheer panic among its recipients, whether or not, by socialist standards, any of them has done something wrong. At a residents’ meeting, despite all the emphatic propaganda speeches and the pressure to make “voluntary” declarations, she had observed nothing but fear and despondency among those addressed. And, in fact, things turn out as Lena predicted: all the letter’s recipients quickly pack their belongings and flee headlong to the West, where they will try to build new lives. Lena’s Western address becomes the gathering point for “Poste Restante Turtledove,” and all those who have fled the Republic turn up there one after another. Finally, even Hartung the functionary, accused by his own people of being a counterrevolutionary, slips across the still-open border and secretly flees back to his sister, ragged, filthy, and hungry. His faith in socialism and the party’s omnipotence has given way to newfound thoughtfulness. He and the other residents who fled the apartment building can now begin new lives without constant fear. The unassuming East German teacher Ilse Krüger, for instance, can no longer work in her former profession in her new home, so she launches a career as a fashion model in the West. Meanwhile, the East German professor Gomoll has to start all over again in the West and tries to make ends meet as a night watchman. In a university art-history lecture hall, dark as night and empty of people, he gives one more ghostly mock lecture, wistfully recalling his former self. “The film culminates in an appeal against fear,” Der Spiegel noted in 1952. “A refugee delivers it. He says he was always afraid: back then of the block warden, later of the building representative. In view of this apotheosis, Buchholz described ‘Poste Restante Turtledove’ as a ‘comedy against fear.’ He dedicates it to the East just as much as to the ‘somnolent West.’”