East Germany's film monopoly, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA), produced a breadth and depth of films ranging beyond simple propaganda to westerns, science fiction films, musicals, melodramas, spy thrillers, women's films, fairy tales, and children's films. This book covers the entire range of filmmaking under the DEFA logo, from their beginnings in the Soviet Occupied Zone through unification and shows their continuing impact in contemporary culture. East German cinema offers the opportunity to see the complete picture of German film beyond Murnau, Lang, von Sternberg, and Fassbinder to equally important East German directors such as Frank Beyer, Wolfgang Staudte, Kurt Maetzig, and Konrad Wolf. In his analysis of twelve representative films produced between 1946 and 1990, Heiduschke illustrates the complex nature of DEFA's monopoly affected by domestic, international, and transnational dynamics and directs the attention to an influential, but often forgotten part of German film that bridged the cinemas of eastern and western Europe during the Cold War in surprising ways.