Anyone for The Legend of Paul and Paula, Angela Merkel’s favourite film? At least that’s what the German chancellor (as she was at the time) told an audience at a 2013 screening.
Coming out in 1973 when Merkel was 18, it caught the young Merkel at an impressionable age. But she wasn’t alone. The Legend of Paul and Paula is also the most popular film in the entirety of the existence of the German Democratic Republic, where Merkel grew up behind the Iron Curtain.
Hugely controversial, it wouldn’t have made it onto the screen at all without the personal blessing of Erich Honecker, East Germany’s boss at the time. Only two years into a long reign that would last until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism, Honecker was at this point still in his relatively liberal period and so said yes to a film that most of the Party functionaries around him were keen to ban.
It’s a love story about two people who go separately to a carnival, a metaphor for capitalism quite possibly, and come home with separate but distinctly similar problems – Paul (Winfried Glatzeder) with a libidinous wife, Ines (Heidemarie Wenzel), who’s always playing away (I say away, but she flagrantly has sex with other men right in the couple’s apartment), and Paula (Angelica Domröse) with an unwanted pregancy after having bunk-up sex with a long-haired carnival worker who is soon also having sex with strangers in her apartment.
But, after more preparatory scene-setting than seems strictly necessary, in a moment of eyes-across-the-room plotting, Paul and Paula meet in a nightclub and fall instantly, ecstatically in love with each other. Cue fantasy sequences, shots of Paul and Paula walking hand in hand and dewy eyed, making declarations of love to each other. Cue also a deeper exploration of the lovers’ characters, which turn out to be quite different.
Paul is politically committed and eager to do his bit to advance socialism, his country and his career – all three align in his eyes. Paula explicitly just wants personal happiness and has no goal higher than earning enough money to keep her family together.
Whatever else had got the party apparatchiks twitchy – the pop music, the frivolity, the interest in fashion, the pleasures of the flesh – it is Paula’s embrace of a credo that goes against the collectivising instincts of socialism that really rankled.
Maybe Erich Honecker fancied Angelica Domröse and that’s why he let the film be seen. She is easy to fancy, with her Julie Christie-style looks and a foal-like vulnerability, a bright smile and clear eyes. Glatzeder plays Paul as a bit of a gangling naive. Likeable enough, decent enough. But for all Paul’s many virtues there’s not much to know about him apart from his home situation and that he works in a job connected with bringing much-needed foreign currency into the country.
We know much, much more about Paula – her work, her family, her gynaecological problems, the fact that she’s also being courted by a much older man (Fred Delmare – a beautiful performance that’s all impossible expectation and disappointment).
Strange as it may seem from this description, The Legend of Paul and Paula is billed as a comedy drama, and while it never breaks any records for laughs, they do start to come more frequently as the film progresses, especially when Paul becomes caught in a threeway struggle for Paula’s affections with the older man, Saft (which translates as “Juice”, a comedy name for a character who looks like he has none left).
To watch this movie and get the most from it, it’s really necessary to don your Socialist goggles and transport yourself back in time to 1973, when East Germany was doing relatively well compared to the other countries behind the Iron Curtain but the gap between itself and the richer, West-aligned Federal Republic of Germany next door was just becoming too obvious to ignore.
“Ideals and reality never coincide, there’s always a gap,” Paula’s gynaecologist tells her towards the end as, pregnant again, she listens to his warnings about the inherent danger of having another baby. He’s talking about Paula’s own ideals vis a vis motherhood, though cinema audiences in 1973 doubtless interpreted those words politically. Will socialism take us to the promised land? Will Paula find happiness? No spoilers.
The Legend of Paul and Paula – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
