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German movies of the 1970s will forever be linked with the New German Cinema movement, the auteur directors — led by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff — who shook the country out of its postwar stupor. “Papa’s Kino ist tot” (‘Papa’s cinema’s is dead’) was their motto, and they held radical new visions of what movies could do.

But alongside this art house wave, ’70s Germany also was a breeding ground for a cruder, more commercial strain of cinema, one that took inspiration from sexploitation and spaghetti Westerns, biker films and grindhouse horror and grafted it onto the zeitgeist-y themes of political upheaval and sexual liberation. The Berlinale pays tribute to this seldom-seen oeuvre of German genre cinema in its 2025 retrospective, which features 15 titles — cult classics and curios from both East and West Germany — that prove that German film could also be “wild,...

Why do stories about resisting the Nazis seem so important right now? Here are two discs from different labels, with one subject. Both stories are set in Germany during the war, but the approaches are quite different. A political prisoner struggles to subsist in The Fiancée an East German classic from the part-educational Defa Film Library. The recent The Invisibles from the reunited Germany chronicles the true story of four Jewish Berliners, who went underground and hid right through the war.

The Fiancée

DVD

Defa Film Library

1980 / Color / 1:37 flat full frame / 106 min. / 2019 / Die Verlobte / available through Defa Film Libary / institutional access.

Starring: Jutta Wachowiak, Regimantas Adomaitis, Slávka Budínová, Christine Gloger, Inge Keller, Käthe Reichel, Hans-Joachim Hegewald, Barbara Zinn.

Cinematography: Jürgen Brauer

Film Editor: Erika Lehmphul

Original Music: Karl-Ernst Sasse

Written by Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker, from books by Eva Lippold

Production Manager: Hans-Erich Busch

Directed by Günter Reisch, Günther...