Publication about cinema in the GDR published

Cinema as a place of encounter and public communication offers people moments of relaxation, distraction and entertainment. However, the phenomenon of cinema is not only explained by the perception of moving images and dream worlds to escape from everyday life, but must be seen in the context of multilayered contexts: The architecture of the cinema building and the ambience in the auditorium play just as much a role in the cinematic experience as the social component of collective film viewing, which determines whether the cinematic event is anchored in the memory of the visitors as a cinematic experience. "The cinema thus becomes a social and cultural space of experience, which, via the personal memories of the individual, becomes fixed in the social memory of entire generations," emphasize Marcus Plaul, Anna-Rosa Haumann and Kathleen Kröger.

Although the stories and experiences of the people are closely linked to this, the history of GDR cinema after reunification has been written primarily as a history of film politics and film production, without adequately taking into account the perspective of the audience. This is where the now published anthology "Kino in der DDR – Perspektiven auf ein alltagsgeschichtliches Phänomen" (Cinema in the GDR – Perspectives on an Everyday Historical Phenomenon) comes in. It deals with the significance of cinema for the people in the GDR and is dedicated to three thematic approaches: performance formats and venues, cinematic offerings in the GDR and how audiences perceived them, and the memories of film fans and former employees of the cinema and film industry.