Word of the Day: Stummfilm

Today I was introduced to the UT Connewitz, an amazing hidden cultural treasure in Leipzig.  Check this out:

The UT Connewitz is one of the oldest movie houses in Germany.  Built in 1912, the house stands as one of the few remaining theaters that retains its original look and feel.  The theater began as a silent movie house, with an orchestra pit (still in existence beneath the stage) where musicians would play music to accompany the film.  Film screenings occurred uninterrupted through both World Wars and during the Communist era, when the theater was owned by the DDR.  After German reunification cinema costs increased substantially, leading to the theater’s decline. The theater ceased operation in 1992. In 2001 a local nonprofit organized an effort to resurrect the theater as an underground, avante-garde cinema/music/theater site.  Quite extraordinary!  The UT Connewitz hosts regular viewings of art films, mostly in German or with German subtitles, and four times a year screens silent films.  Thus, the word of the day: Stummfilm, or “silent film.”

On February 20, the UT Connewitz will be screening a 1926 Stummfilm entitled Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (“The Adventure of Prince Ahmed”).  My understanding is that the film is one of the oldest preserved animated films (I think that’s the translation of ältester erhaltener Animationsfilm).  That night the film will be accompanied by a Berlin jazz trio, “Bordel Western.”  The trio promotes itself as a purveyor of “western flavored jazz.” I’m assuming that means American jazz, or perhaps by “Western flavored jazz” they mean that California cool jazz style of Dave Brubeck?  It’s sometimes hard for me to discern how similar German nomenclature is with American, at least when it comes to jazz music.  We are looking into the price of tickets for students who want to attend.  Our students who volunteer here will essentially be doing theater work on set nights–serving attendees, helping to set up and clean up after the viewing.  It’s not fancy stuff, but the volunteer services offer our students a grand opportunity to encounter a unique Leipzig.

Also wonderful: the woman who runs the nonprofit told us that if we are interested in scheduling a night in April she would open the theater to a private viewing for our students and the German student mentors.  I’m extremely eager to do this.

After the UT Connewitz, I spent the remainder of the afternoon at the Haus Steinstrasse, an intergenerational community center that offers a range of arts and crafts classes for children and adults.  The Haus also hosts a basement cafe that is open to the public on Monday-Thursday afternoon, serving coffee, tea, and some tasty cakes.  We spent part of our tour in a room devoted to the art of printmaking, space where kids and adults can create their own books.  While in this room, the tour guide showed us some old typewriters that they use to introduce kids to technology prior to the computer age.

Big deal, a typewriter, right?  The reason why this made an impression on me is because both of these are DDR era typewriters.  Earlier this week, Tara and I watched a great German film, The Lives of Others.  The film focuses on the work of the Stasi, the East German secret police who surveilled, interrogated, and, critics would say, terrorized the East German population until the fall of Communism.  The Stasi required every typewriter to be registered with the State, a policy that made it possible for the secret police to narrow their search when trying to discover the source of illicit documents.  By analyzing print type, the Stasi could identify the kind of typewriter that was used and then focus on those to whom such typewriters were registered.  But of course that was the past.  States don’t surveil their populations like this anymore. Sidebar: Edward Snowden.  Google it.

Next week I’ll be finishing up my site visits, and tomorrow my family and I leave with our students for a weekend in Berlin.  I should be able to do some blogging and hope to share more interesting things from our journey.  A final postscript to this blog: words can’t express my appreciation for the assistance that the German students have given us during these visits.  The directors at many of these sites sometimes speak very little English, and our students speak very little German.  The mentors have been indispensable in aiding our communication, and the relationships that we are forming with them have been one of the great pleasures of our time so far.  Vielen Dank!