Ralf Schenk was a man of quiet sovereignty. He didn’t have to pretend because what he knew was important. His importance as a film historian and journalist grew out of an immense knowledge not only of cinema history, but also of the circumstances of the time, literary theory and music. In a sympathetic Thuringian tone, he was able to talk about Anna Seghers’ proximity to the Nouveau Roman in France as well as about the similarities in the use of film music by Christian Petzold and Alfred Hitchcock. Schenk, born on March 27, 1956 in Arnstadt, knew the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Egon Günther, Costa-Gavras and Andrzej Wajda, Dennis Hopper and Eldar Rjasan. This knowledge also enabled him to engage in polemics.
When Volker Schlöndorff’s film “Strajk” about the workers’ uprising in the Gdańsk “Lenin” shipyard was released in cinemas in 2007, Schenk wrote in the “Berliner Zeitung”: “‘Strajk’ is a film with rough outlines that does not adapt to the conditions and metamorphoses of the real socialist Polish society, but only viewed them from the end, from their downfall. It’s an undialectical film. A propaganda film”. Schenk joked about Katharina Thalbach as the “positive heroine” Agnieszka, who places her hopes in Pope John Paul II: “At this moment, Katharina Thalbach’s Agnieszka reminds less of Mother Courage and more of a kind of Ernestine Thälmann, leader of her class, who remembers warmed by the sun of their very special Lenin”.
Schenk knew the Defa propaganda film “Ernst Thälmann – FührerHis Class” very well – in contrast to Schlöndorff, the chief liquidator of Defa after the end of the GDR, who deigned to remark in 2008: “I abolished the name ‘Defa’, Defa -Movies were terrible. At that time in Paris, where I was studying, they were only shown in the cinema of the communist party. We went in there and laughed. The name had to go. At the Defa everything went smoothly.”
Schenk, on the other hand, took Defa’s legacy seriously: Günther’s complex, intricate stories, the boldly modern women’s films, the politically subversive cinema for children and young people. After 1990 he published standard works on the feature, documentary and animated film productions of the GDR film society, published books on female directors and on banned films. Schenk was involved in the reconstruction of several films withdrawn from circulation by the SED party leadership.
From 2012 to 2020, Schenk finally took over the management of the Defa Foundation, conducted interviews with eyewitnesses, pushed ahead with the digitization of the film heritage and published a beautifully designed book in 2019 for the 75th birthday of the documentarian Volker Koepp. But Schenk was more interested than Defa. He was a member of the feature film selection committee for the Berlinale competition for fifteen years, looked after the screenings for the documentary film festival in Leipzig and worked on the film advisory board of the Goethe Institute.
In addition to film, his great love was musical theater. He hardly missed any of the Berlin premieres; With his wife he regularly went to the opera on trips abroad and in Berlin he appreciated the delicious cuisine of the “Cochon bourgeois”.
As the Defa Foundation is now reporting, Ralf Schenk died in Berlin on August 17 after a short, serious illness. He was 66 years old.
