REVOLUTION AND ROMANTICISM — THE MEDIATION OF LATIN AMERICAN POETRY IN DEFA DOCUMENTARY FILM OF THE 1970S

ABSTRACT This article investigates the mediation of Latin American poetry in DEFA documentary cinema in the 1970s, and especially in Uwe Belz's film Pablo Neruda (1973) and Karlheinz Mund's film Erinnerungen an Otto René Castillo (1979). DEFA documentaries about the developing world in general, and Latin American writers in particular, played a key role in the revival of Romantic ideas in the GDR. Both films draw on the tropes and metaphors that had defined the image of the Americas during the Romantic period as a utopian, exotic space against which European identities could be negotiated. Comparing the two documentaries’ deployment of such Romantic tropes reveals a discernible shift in the way questions about the current state (and future) of East German socialism were projected onto the historical and cultural landscape of Latin America. In Pablo Neruda , narratives of revolutionary struggle and socialist nation building are reaffirmed as progressive concepts that re‐rehearse Romantic notions of ‘Volkskultur’ and ‘Volkspoesie’ which had underpinned the GDR's founding discourse. Erinnerungen an Otto René Castillo , by contrast, mobilises the disruptive potential of Romantic tropes of longing and alienation to critically probe teleological ideas of progress and the development of socialism in the GDR and globally.