When Kurt (Tom Gramenz), for example, asks his father, a high-ranking SED member, about the character of the uprising, the latter avoids giving a clear answer. Isn’t Imre Nagy, the head of the Hungarian state, a socialist? No answer is forthcoming from their parents and teachers. The young people have a hard time believing the event is a counterrevolution.
Western propaganda, on the other, praises the insurrectionists as freedom fighters wanting to bring back capitalism. On the one hand, the East German Stalinist regime denounces the Hungarian revolt as a counterrevolution. The drama is told from the perspective of young people seeking to establish the truth in the face of opposed propaganda campaigns. The basic story up to the students’ flight has been kept in The Silent Revolution, although some characters are composites or lose their original names. A few days later, the majority fled to West Berlin.
As punishment, the entire class was then denied the right to take final examinations. In an attempt to uncover the ringleaders of the action, the GDR education minister himself intervened, but was unable to break the students’ solidarity. In response to the violent Soviet Stalinist suppression of the popular uprising in Hungary in November 1956, the students spontaneously observed a minute of silence.
Kraume’s new film, The Silent Revolution, based on a book by Dietrich Garstka, depicts the courageous struggle of a high school class in East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR) in 1956 against the country’s Stalinist state apparatus headed by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). Fritz Bauer (2015), Kraume dealt with the right-wing judicial apparatus that dominated postwar West Germany and the struggle by prosecutor Fritz Bauer to initiate the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of Nazi officials (1963-1965). One of the most interesting German efforts at this year’s Berlin film festival was Lars Kraume’s The Silent Revolution. The first part was posted March 14, the second on March 16, the third on March 20, the fourth on March 22 and the fifth on March 26. This is the sixth in a series of articles on the recent Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, held February 15-25, 2018.
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