# The Legend of Paul and Paula
**The Legend of Paul and Paula** (German: *Die Legende von Paul und Paula*) is a 1972/73 East German romantic drama directed by Heiner Carow and written by Carow with Ulrich Plenzdorf, produced by the DEFA Studio for Feature Films in Potsdam-Babelsberg. It tells of the love between Paula, a single mother played by Angelica Domröse, and Paul, an unhappily married ministry official played by Winfried Glatzeder, and it became the most popular film in DEFA's history.[1](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula/) • [2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701) • [3](https://www.umass.edu/defa/film/3566)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Production | DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme (Potsdam-Babelsberg), artistic group "Berlin"; shot in 1972 in East Berlin and surroundings[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701) |
| Director and script | Heiner Carow; script by Carow and Ulrich Plenzdorf, from Plenzdorf's "Filmerzählung" of the same name[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701) |
| Premiere | 29 March 1973 at the Kosmos cinema, East Berlin; general release from 30 March[1](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula/) |
| Cast | Angelica Domröse (Paula), Winfried Glatzeder (Paul), Heidemarie Wenzel (Paul's wife Ines), Fred Delmare (Reifen-Saft), Rolf Ludwig (Professor)[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701) |
| Music | Score by Peter Gotthardt, performed by the East German rock band Die Puhdys, including "Geh zu ihr" and "Wenn ein Mensch lebt"[3](https://www.umass.edu/defa/film/3566) • [4](https://www.potsdam.de/de/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula) |
| Format and length | 35 mm Orwocolor, 2,881 m; 109 minutes in the original version, 105 minutes in the censored and digitalized versions[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701) |
| Attendance | 3,294,985 admissions as of 2016; more than 1.8 million viewers in the first year alone[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701) • [5](https://www.superillu.de/magazin/heimat/ddr/defa/die-wahre-geschichte-von-paul-und-paula-2911) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
Paul and Paula have known each other by sight since childhood in the same [East Berlin](https://www.edgepedia.org/east-berlin) neighborhood. Paul has made a career as an employee in the Ministry for Foreign Trade but is stuck in an unhappy marriage that has hardened into routine; his wife, Ines, is having an affair. Paula lives alone with her two children, works as a cashier, and has been considering a "safety marriage" with the tire dealer Reifen-Saft (Fred Delmare). When the two meet in a music bar, they fall passionately in love.[1](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula/) • [6](https://www.filmdienst.de/film/details/11150/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula)
Paula commits herself without reservation, while Paul hesitates, unwilling to risk his social position. After Paula's child dies in an accident, she separates from Paul, who has refused to acknowledge their relationship. Only facing this loss does he recognize the depth of his love. He besieges her apartment door for days and finally breaks it open with an axe to the applause of the building's residents, winning her back. Their child, Paula's third, costs Paula her life in childbirth.[1](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula/)
The film mixes reality and dream sequences, such as a bridal bed carried by boat across a lake, and its imagery is built around demolition: old Berlin apartment buildings are blown up around the lovers as new prefabricated housing rises. Stephen Brockmann, a scholar of German studies who has written a critical history of German film, reads the ending as ambivalent, since the building that housed the couple's love nest is itself demolished to make way for a more modern one, so that "the modern and the efficient" appear not only as progress but as a force eliminating older social traditions.[7](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BrockmannStephen2010-ACriticalHistoryOfGermanFilm.pdf) • [2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701)
## Production and censorship context
The film was based on Ulrich Plenzdorf's "Filmerzählung" (film narrative) of the same title, which at the time could be published only in the West, by Suhrkamp. Despite what filmportal.de describes as numerous bureaucratic obstacles, it became the most successful DEFA film of all time.[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701)
The premiere at the 1,200-seat Kosmos cinema was celebrated with twenty minutes of standing ovations, but only 400 tickets had been sold to the general public; the rest of the audience was filled with party functionaries. The state distributor Progress Film-Verleih then deliberately pulled prints from the large, well-equipped cinemas of the republic, which did not stop the film's success.[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701)
## Reception in the GDR
**Official criticism was cool.** According to the film scholar Joshua Feinstein, whose book covers daily life in East German cinema, the production and approval process had proceeded without significant problems, but the film appeared as the favorable cultural-political climate of the early 1970s was deteriorating. Controversy began after Harry Tisch, the party district leader in Rostock, saw the unreleased film; his complaints led [Erich Honecker](https://www.edgepedia.org/erich-honecker) to view the film personally at the Kosmos cinema in Berlin before its opening there. Reviews in *Neues Deutschland* and *Junge Welt* were critical, and Horst Knietzsch, the GDR's most politically authoritative film critic, complained that much in the film "was not quite fully fermented" and that the figure of Paul lacked "internal logic."[8](https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Joshua%20Feinstein%20-%20The%20Triumph%20of%20the%20Ordinary_%20Depictions%20of%20Daily%20Life%20in%20the%20East%20German%20Cinema%2C%201949-1989%20%282002%29%20%281%29.pdf)
The official ambivalence probably helped the film commercially: Honecker's unusual pre-premiere visit did not escape notice in the capital, and Carow found the cinema already packed on opening night.[8](https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Joshua%20Feinstein%20-%20The%20Triumph%20of%20the%20Ordinary_%20Depictions%20of%20Daily%20Life%20in%20the%20East%20German%20Cinema%2C%201949-1989%20%282002%29%20%281%29.pdf) The film's frank treatment of sexuality, adultery, and jabs at an over-bureaucratized state made it, in the words of the filmportal commentary, a film carrying much of what the East German state actually wanted to avoid.[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701)
## Later history and cult status
The film was shown on GDR television on 11 October 1975 and premiered in the West on ARD on 7 November 1975; it had reached West German cinemas on 14 March 1974.[6](https://www.filmdienst.de/film/details/11150/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula) After the Biermann expatriation, both leads went to the West, Angelica Domröse with her husband Hilmar Thate in 1980 and Winfried Glatzeder two years later, and the film then disappeared into the "poison cabinets" of Babelsberg and Adlershof until reunification.[2](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701)
Its cult status persisted. Berlin's Börse cinema ran the film several times weekly for eight years before closing in 2003, and a 2003 *Neue Zürcher Zeitung* review observed that even people who had not experienced the GDR were drawn to the story.[9](https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9780801460067.pdf) Many East Germans named their daughters "Paula" after the protagonist, and the film became a significant part of what was ironically called Ostalgie (nostalgia for life in communist East Germany) after 1989.[7](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BrockmannStephen2010-ACriticalHistoryOfGermanFilm.pdf) It is also reported as the favorite film of former Chancellor Angela Merkel.[10](https://www.sandstein-kultur.de/reader/98-787_DerDeutscheFilm/51/)
## Critical debates
The film attracted sustained feminist criticism. A year after its release, the West German feminists Helke Sander and Renée Schlesier criticized as sentimental and male-chauvinist the depiction of a woman whose greatest fulfillment lies in loving a man and bearing his child, while still calling the film "the expression of a strong critique of the repressive reality of the GDR." The East German feminist Irene Dölling later argued that the depiction of Paula was at least partially conventional, reproducing "the familiar codes of modernity's symbolic gender order." Brockmann counters that in the East German context, where the state pushed women into the workforce, a woman seeking fulfillment primarily in love was potentially more transgressive than in the West.[7](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BrockmannStephen2010-ACriticalHistoryOfGermanFilm.pdf)
Scholarship has also located the film's subversive force in its absolutizing of love and personal fulfillment. A 2019 analysis by Stephan Brössel describes the film as processing "romantic" love as a solution strategy within a relationship between individual and culture that the film marks as restrictive.[11](https://ejournals.uni-muenster.de/paradigma/article/view/6066) The film scholar Daniela Berghahn notes that the Western press, one of the few East German films it noticed, reacted with bafflement, while the film contributed, within its limited means, to a liberalization of everyday life in the GDR.[12](https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/post-new-wave-cinema-in-the-soviet-union-and-eastern-europe/section/eeb7e096-2a6d-4d54-b307-a07750207b86)
## References
1. [Die Legende von Paul und Paula, DEFA-Stiftung film database](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula/)
2. [Die Legende von Paul und Paula, filmportal.de](https://www.filmportal.de/film/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula_ab9ce09c38b64d2f9fd96724a2a01701)
3. [The Legend of Paul and Paula, DEFA Film Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst](https://www.umass.edu/defa/film/3566)
4. [Die Legende von Paul und Paula, Landeshauptstadt Potsdam](https://www.potsdam.de/de/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula)
5. [Die wahre Geschichte von „Paul und Paula", SuperIllu](https://www.superillu.de/magazin/heimat/ddr/defa/die-wahre-geschichte-von-paul-und-paula-2911)
6. [Die Legende von Paul und Paula, Filmdienst](https://www.filmdienst.de/film/details/11150/die-legende-von-paul-und-paula)
7. [Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film, chapter 17](https://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BrockmannStephen2010-ACriticalHistoryOfGermanFilm.pdf)
8. [Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989](https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Joshua%20Feinstein%20-%20The%20Triumph%20of%20the%20Ordinary_%20Depictions%20of%20Daily%20Life%20in%20the%20East%20German%20Cinema%2C%201949-1989%20%282002%29%20%281%29.pdf)
9. ["Paul is different from Paula" chapter, open-access volume](https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9780801460067.pdf)
10. [Deutscher Film in Ost und West 1962–1989, Leseprobe, Sandstein Verlag](https://www.sandstein-kultur.de/reader/98-787_DerDeutscheFilm/51/)
11. [Stephan Brössel, Die subversive Kraft emphatischer Liebe im DEFA-Film DIE LEGENDE VON PAUL UND PAULA, Paradigma (2019)](https://ejournals.uni-muenster.de/paradigma/article/view/6066)
12. [Post New Wave Cinema in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Indiana University Press](https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/read/post-new-wave-cinema-in-the-soviet-union-and-eastern-europe/section/eeb7e096-2a6d-4d54-b307-a07750207b86)
---
*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1970s › Released 1970 to 1976*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license