The Films of Konrad Wolf: Archive of the Revolution

Again and again the rural peasant world of Russia, with its communal sobor’nost or Gemeinschaft, is shown in the film to be an organic Heimat only destroyed by Nazi invasion—and not, for instance, by the violence of forced collectivization or the famines of the 1930s.

“In the early nineteenth century a xerographical idea of telling history, of a document-based, non-conjectural history, runs almost parallel with a technologically driven sense of realistic representation. The obsession with an unmediated representation of the past is itself a media effect; the apparent shift of emphasis in nineteenth-century historiography from describing to showing can be deciphered as an effect of the new optical
media.”