Winter adé (1989)

On a (constructed) train journey, Helke Misselwitz asks women in various places about their lives. “The women Helke Misselwitz meets speak with remarkable candor about relationships and marriage, family and children, their working lives and personal dreams.” The film offers a critical account of the often still unequal living conditions of women in the GDR, which continued to exist despite official equality. “Tracks are often seen in the film. Tracks on which trains stay on course, which can be changed, and which sometimes seem to lead nowhere.” The railway journey “stands as a poetic symbol of change. Movement in society expresses the fact that there are prescribed tracks one must follow, that tracks can also come to an end, that one can change tracks, and that there are points that are switched from the outside.” “The title song ‘Winter adé’ sings of bidding farewell to the dark season and welcoming spring.” At the age of 40, Helke Misselwitz travels to Planitz near Zwickau to begin her documentary Winter adé at the railway crossing. This is where she was born in 1947, in an ambulance with her grandmother’s help, and it is the starting point for her film journey through the GDR. She wants to find out how other people have lived so far and how they would like to live in the future, and meets people—predominantly women—at work and at home. The first person she interviews is 42-year-old advertising economist Hiltrud Kuhlmann from Berlin, on the train from Zwickau to Altenburg. In the compartment, in the Mitropa dining car, and on the platform, she talks about her two husbands, her two children, and her work. In Altenburg, Helke Misselwitz meets a married couple who teach dance and own the oldest dance school in the GDR. We watch a dance lesson, and Lieselotte Schaller recounts her experiences before, during, and after the Second World War. At a briquette factory, Helke Misselwitz follows 37-year-old worker Christine Schiele, whose job is to keep striking the sheet-metal pipes and ducts with a large wooden mallet so that coal dust does not settle inside them. At home, Christine then talks about her life: she left school after seventh grade, met a man, and had a daughter. Christine then filed for divorce, but withdrew the petition at her husband’s request. They had another child, a son, and then the marriage ended in divorce. Her daughter has an intellectual disability, and Christine also talks about the particular challenges this brings and how, for that reason, she has not found a new partner. Her son, however, helps her a great deal. After a brief visit to a doll hospital in Delitzsch, where they meet Frau Helene Wolf, Helke Misselwitz encounters two 17-year-old punks, Kerstin and Anja, under a railway bridge. The two spend all their time styling their hair. Their main aim is to “hang around” somewhere, and that is why they keep running away from home. After filming, both girls end up in a youth work camp. Back on the train, the film crew meets a young family with three small children, who talk about how difficult it is to make ends meet. In Berlin, we see the newly established wedding suite at the Egon Schultz Youth Tourist Hotel in Berlin-Lichtenberg, opened in connection with the city’s 750th anniversary celebrations. The suite is inaugurated by Helga and Andreas Gerlach from Greiz, a cook and a mail-order warehouse worker who have been married for seven days. Next comes a ride on the U-Bahn to Berlin Alexanderplatz station. Asked how many women are employed as U-Bahn drivers in Berlin, the woman driver cannot answer. In a radio and television shop on Friedrichstraße, several televisions show broadcasts of the SED Central Committee’s formal reception for International Women’s Day and the news program Aktuelle Kamera. Continuing north by train, four young girls are asked about their hopes for the future. At a drive-in cinema, we see excerpts from the DEFA film The Legend of Paul and Paula. In Groß Fredenwalde, Margarete and Hermann Busse celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary. It is unusual that none of their many children and grandchildren has divorced. In a conversation with Margarete Busse alone, she says that she really deserved a better husband. He is not nearly as good as he always makes out. At Neubrandenburg station, young men are seen off as they leave for service in the National People’s Army. It is clear that saying goodbye is difficult for their girlfriends and family members. In the next scene, several women at the Sassnitz fish-processing plant place filleted herring into cans and weigh them. During a break, they tell the film crew what they think of men. Some say they would have lived their lives differently if they had the chance to do it again. The last of the women interviewed is Erika Banhardt. She is 55, runs a children’s home for children from troubled families, and has a son and a daughter. Until now, she had ruled out marriage for herself because her work had taken up so much of her time. Now, in old age, she can imagine possibly living with a man.