Joachim Kunert was born in Berlin in 1929. He worked as an assistant director at various theaters, including the Deutsches Theater, before he became a director at the DEFA Studio for Weekly Newsreels and Documentary Films (1954-1955) and then at the DEFA Studio for Feature Films, where he remained until 1970. He joined GDR Television in 1971. Kunert belonged to the “second generation” of DEFA filmmakers, characterized by a worldview primarily shaped by the East German experience. Kunert’s feature film debut was Identifying Features: None (1955), about women in postwar Germany. When DEFA began forming production groups, he teamed up with directors Heiner Carow and Gerhard Klein under the supervision of Slatan Dudow (Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World?, 1932). Kunert often addressed taboo topics in his films, as he did in The Adventures of Werner Holt, which focused on WWII and the unspoken past of his father’s generation. The Second Track (1962), about traces of the Nazi-era in 1960s East Germany, gained no recognition until it was re-discovered as part of The Museum of Modern Art’s DEFA retrospective in 2005.

Selected Filmography

1989 The Glass Torch (TV) 1981 Crisis 1977 The Interrogation (TV), 1974 The Reed (TV), 1972 The Great Journey of Agatha Schweigert (TV), 1968 The Dead Stay Young, 1964 The Adventures of Werner Holt, 1962 The Second Track, 1959 Martin Andersen Nexö, 1958 The Lottery Swede, 1957 Crime Scene Berlin, 1955 Identifying Features: None