Qinna Shen’s The Politics of Magic is an impressive survey of East German live action fairy-tale films that provides continuous insight into the importance, production, reception, and cultural history of DEFA’s fairy-tale corpus. By providing in-depth thematic and formal analyses of DEFA fairy-tale films, Shen’s thoroughly researched volume closes an important gap in today’s scholarship of fairy-tale studies and the genre of East German cinema. Throughout her assiduous examination of how the much-neglected fairy-tale film history evolved over four decades, Shen’s personal commitment and passion for the film productions of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) come to the fore.

Divided into an intriguing introduction, five elaborately structured and styled chapters, and a compelling conclusion, the book successfully contrasts GDR fairy-tale adaptations with their literary precedents by nineteenth-century writers, such as Wilhelm Hauff, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Ludwig Bechstein, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, among others. Following an approximately chronological order in her organization of the volume, Shen maps out profound narrative alterations and revisions in DEFA’s fairy-tale productions and sheds new light on the films’ embedded agendas in relation to the cultural politics of the East German state.

Shen creates an interesting opening for the reader by examining how GDR fairy-tale films differ from National Socialist, West German, and Disney retellings. Further, she especially focuses on DEFA’s distinctive approach to reconcile magic with the aesthetics of socialist realism in compliance with the political imperatives for GDR cultural productions of the time. Shen clearly demonstrates her expert knowledge in this area, attesting to the detailed amount of information drawn from diverse sources and historical documents to support her painstaking—and undoubtedly very time-consuming—research conducted in various archives in Berlin. Films such as The Wooden Calf (1959/1961), The Robe (1961/1991), and How to Marry a King (1969) stand out in her observations as prime examples of politically ambitious works using slave language and encrypted regime critique that fell victim to censorship.

Chapter 1 centers on tangible similarities between the first two DEFA fairy-tale films—Paul Verhoeven’s The Cold Heart (1950) and Wolfgang Staudte’s The Story of Little Mook (1953)—and Alexander Ptushko’s Soviet production The Stone Flower (1946). Shen defines the films as “countertales” since the narratives contain heavy doses of disenchantment and subordinate magic to human action. Although the films feature wondrous worlds, they reveal magical interventions to be only temporary solutions to the problems the protagonists face and ultimately reject fantastic solutions to real issues. While DEFA’s first fairy-tale adaptations based on Hauff’s Kunstmärchen (literary fairy tales) inherit the German classical-humanist tradition and values, Shen notes that they “do not extricate themselves from the correlated bourgeois trappings” (45). The films thus portray a unique fusion of socialist and bourgeois characteristics.

The second chapter examines the films of the 1950s and 1960s, from Herbert Ballmann’s The Devil of Mill Mountain (1955) and Helmut Spieß’s The Brave Little Tailor (1956) to Götz Friedrich’s Little Red Riding Hood (1962). Shen zooms in on how the films dramatize class struggles and a triumph of good over evil: the hardworking, virtuous lower-class protagonists on the one side and the greedy farmers, wealthy merchants, and exploitative members of the upper class on the other. DEFA’s folksy fairy-tale retellings not only legitimize the transfer of power to the exploited and oppressed but also turn the “happily ever after” into a Marxist utopia for the lower-class hero. Cloaked in an allegorical fairy tale, the East German government could use the films for self-promotion and convey socialist messages in a subtle, indirect manner. However, Shen convincingly argues that these “politically partisan” films were actually controversial in the GDR.

In chapter 3, Shen takes a closer look at how DEFA filmmakers put an anticapitalist spin on the traditional stories, reflecting the GDR’s position in the Cold War. East German reimaginings of fairy tales, such as Francesco Stefani’s The Singing Ringing Tree (1957), Gottfried Kolditz’s Snow White (1961), and Walter Beck’s King Thrushbeard (1965) and Briar Rose (1971), denunciate the pursuit of wealth, emphasize love, familial bliss, and friendship, encourage diligence and hard work, and modernize kings and princesses to make them more relatable for viewers in the GDR. Shen offers fascinating insights into DEFA’s radical revisions to create socialist “countertales” with new endings that aligned the goals of wealth and power with West German capitalistic pursuits. Especially illuminating for the reader are her comparisons between East and West German fairy-tale adaptations and her discussion of the drastically different reception history of several films.

The last two chapters analyze some DEFA fairy tales as covert satires that use slave language in response to the stringent censorship hurdles imposed on all filmmakers. Chapter 4 revisits the fairy-tale film’s ability to conceal regime criticism and clad politically sensitive topics. Shen devotes fifteen pages to an insightful discussion of the only banned DEFA fairy-tale film, The Robe, with a special focus on its underlying connections to the Marxist playwright Berthold Brecht. The much-understudied final decade of DEFA films in the 1980s is at the heart of the fifth chapter. Shen explores the themes of young love, Romanticism, women’s emancipation, peace, and ecology, arguing that it was the specific East German context that endowed the fairy-tale films of this fecund period with special meanings.

The book closes with a differentiation between “countertales” and “antitales,” DEFA’s genuine attempt at socialist disenchantment in their fairy tales, the relationship between East German films and socialist realism, and a summary of DEFA’s revisions that differentiate the GDR versions from other fairy-tale retellings in media and print. The appendix, a list of DEFA fairy-tale adaptations of classic tales, is not only very helpful to guide the reader through DEFA’s thirty-nine years of production, but also winds up nicely Shen’s exquisite job of narrating the cultural history of East German fairy-tale films. In all, she puts forth expert analyses of DEFA fairy-tale films and provides an excellent critical starting point to foster interest in East German fairy-tale adaptations. Shen’s clear, accessible language and her informative and formal—but not stilted—writing style make this study a wonderful resource for a wider audience of readers, including students, scholars, and general readers with an interest in fairy tales, film, culture, politics, history, and the fields of German, media, Eastern European, and gender studies.

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[Review length: 1036 words • Review posted on September 15, 2015]

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