Five Cartridges

The strong connection between the Spanish Civil War and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or what is commonly referred to in the west as East Germany, might not be an obvious one. Yet, for numerous political and historical reasons, the Spanish Civil War played an important part in the short-lived communist country's political and cultural life. 

Set in Spain in 1938, Fünf Patronenhülsen/Five Cartridges (1960) follows seven members of the International Brigades who are tasked with providing cover for their retreating battalion as it prepares for a major Republican offensive. Finding themselves in enemy territory, five members of the group struggle to relay to their headquarters what they believe to be vital military information contained in five cartridge cases passed to them by their dying commissar. The five soldiers are from five different countries and are introduced this way at the start of the film: José the Spaniard, Willi the German, Pierre the Frenchman, Oleg the Pole, and Dimitri the Bulgarian. 

Five Cartridges exemplifies the way in which East German cinema was utilised to depict the events that took place in Spain between 1936 and 1939 in a manner that fitted with the state leadership's view of the conflict: not as a war between democracy and fascism as it was represented in US films such as For Whom the Bell Tolls (Wood, USA, 1943), but as the ‘National Revolutionary War of the Spanish People’ or the ‘War of Fascist Intervention’. 

Five Cartridges was a significant success inside the GDR and the film's director, Frank Beyer, one of the country's leading filmmakers, proceeded to make a number of celebrated anti-fascist films including Königskinder/And Your Love Too (GDR, 1962) and Nackt unter Wölfen/Naked Among Wolves (GDR, 1963). Beyer, however, fell foul of the state authorities later in his career when they responded furiously to his mild satire, Spur der Steine/Traces of Stones (GDR, 1966). Although Five Cartridges appears to be an uncritical homage to the International Brigades, closer inspection reveals that a tension arises from the complex characterisation of the International Brigade members. This tension undercuts the notion that it is simply state propaganda and suggests that the film can be read as a harbinger of Beyer's later problems with the GDR state. 

DA