The Divided Heaven

Having seen two Konrad Wolf films set in WW2 ("Stars" and "I Was Nineteen", I was keen to see more of his work. I wish I hadn't bothered with this one, and can't explain why I sat through it to the end. I see it has been voted one of the 100 best German films, which says a lot about German cinema, none of it good. The two major problems are the story and the dialogue. As a voice- over near the end admits, the story is banal. I've had experience of life behind the Iron Curtain, so the girl's decision to split with the man she loved and return to the laughably-named German Democratic Republic made no sense to me. She wasn't a Communist, she'd seen the way the system treated her friend and fellow student, and she barely bothered to see her mother, so what drew her back? The joy of working in a factory making railway carriages, which was a waste of her intelligence? Lack of courage and imagination ("I've always lived in the same town")? What really sinks this film, as Thomas from Berlin points out, is the dreadful dialogue. Since the book is drawn from a Crista Wolf novel, and she helped write the script, I suspect the blame is largely hers. Characters, with the exception of the hero's father, just don't talk like human beings. I certainly feel no urge to read any of the lady's novels.

While watching "Der geteilte Himmel" I had to think of "Cold war" (2018, Pawel Pawlikowski). In both films a romance is troubled by the division of Europe (in the case of "Der geteilte Himmel" even Germany) in East and West.

But there are differences too. In "Cold war" the man flees to the West out of idealism and the woman stays in the East due to career considerations. In "Der geteilte Himmel" it is the other way round.

"Der geteilte Himmel" was made when films from Eastern Germany were almost exclusively propaganda. In this respect "Der geteilte Himmel" is certainly a favorable exception without however being a real great film.

The film while being no propaganda for Communism isn't very critical either. The story is told from the perspective of the women, who stays in East Germany out of idealism.

There are however critical elements such as the father of the man. He was a Nazi in the Second World War and nevertheless climbed the ladder of the Communist party hierarchy after the war. In this way the film discusses a topic that with respect to West Germany was treated only much later in a film like "Labyrinth of Lies" (2014, Giulio Ricciarelli). The topic is the collective amnesia regarding Nazi crimes in the decades right after the war.

The critical elements in the film are rather surprising when you think about it. In the Soviet Union there was a (short) period of cultural liberalism after the death of Stalin, that led to films such as for example "The cranes are flying" (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov). A similar period of cultural liberalism is unknown to me in East Germany.

On top of that both director Konrad Wolf and writer Christa Wolf (no family) were no dissidents but rather loyal members of the regime.

The film is shot in a dynamic style, the movements of city life symbolising the psychological dynamics in the relationship between Rita and Manfred.