Property and Propriety: Reflections on Archived and Archival Cultures

Abstract

Walter Beck is a retired film director who worked for the film division of DEFA in East Germany, specializing in films for children, including a number of fairy tale films.Post-1989 unified Germany undertook a thorough restructuring of the East German media landscape and production sites, so there was little chance for Beck to continue as a director.Besides, he felt strongly about the quality of his division and what they had been able to achieve as a team despite their limited budgets and technical equipment."There was no political interference," he claims: "we had our own meetings, and intense discussions on what ought to be important in good children's films.Plus we experimented with aesthetic options and drew on those influences to which we had access."If anything, the state encouraged treating traditional narratives as part of cultural heritage and thus -despite the clearly capitalist dreams of wealth and success to be found in such narratives -discouraged altering them.P 1F 2 P As an early retiree, Beck set out to write the history of what he calls "our studio family" as well as a retrospective of his own work.In trying to locate where the records of the film studio had been stored, he finally located them at the 1 This is the plenary presentation given during the conference "Cultural Archives and the State" in Columbus, OH, May 3, 2007; only bibliographic references were added and I regard the piece as a first stab at a topic I hope to work on further.Many thanks to go Dorothy Noyes and Margaret Mills for organizing this truly stimulating event.Thanks also go to Timothy Ash, Cornelia Vismann, and Mario Wimmer for giving me access to additional papers and references of relevance to the topic of archival culture.The paper is not attempting to offer an overview of state folklore archives -this is being done in a much more interesting fashion by other participants of this conference.Rather, I seek a path into archival experience and practice in general and hope that this will somehow usefully complement the political explorations in the conference as a whole. 2 Some of these films nonetheless found ways to implicitly comment on the nature of bourgeois aspirations.The film makers also drew on non-German tale material so as to have a platform for showcasing pedagogic lessons or expressing more abstract messages.I have been in contact with Walter Beck for a number of years, as he agreed to participate in a lecture series on the folktale at our university, and I would like to thank him for the trust he has shown me in conversations and in sharing his manuscripts.

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