General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Rabbit Is Me

The Rabbit Is Me (Das Kaninchen bin ich) is a 1965 East German black-and-white feature film directed by Kurt Maetzig for the state studio DEFA, in which a 19-year-old waitress has an affair with a judge who had sentenced her brother to prison for incitement against the state.¹^•⁷ Completed in 1965, it was banned shortly after production by the ruling SED party, kept from the public until 1989 and 1990, and gave its name to the twelve banned films of 1965 and 1966, known as the "Rabbit Films".²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Das Kaninchen bin ich; literary source: Manfred Bieler's novel Maria Morzeck oder Das Kaninchen bin ich¹
Director and studio	Kurt Maetzig; DEFA-Studio für Spielfilme (production group "Roter Kreis"), GDR, 1965¹^•⁴
Lead cast	Angelika Waller as Maria Morzeck, Alfred Müller as the judge Paul Deister⁴
Ban	Approved for release on 26 October 1965 after changes, then banned at the SED's 11th Plenum in December 1965 along with the rest of the year's DEFA feature production⁵^•²
Release after the ban	First screening 13 December 1989 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; cinema premiere 8 March 1990⁴^•¹
Recognition	FIPRESCI Prize (Honorable Mention) and Interfilm Award (Honorable Mention), Forum of New Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival 1990³
Format	35 mm, black and white, 1.37:1, German language; runtime reported as 113 min by DEFA-Stiftung and 109 min by the DEFA Film Library¹^•³^•⁴

Spoilers

Story and cast

Maria Morzeck, played by Angelika Waller, is a 19-year-old waitress who had wanted to study Slavic languages and become an interpreter. Because her brother Dieter was sentenced to three years in prison for "incitement endangering the state," the government did not allow her to attend college. She falls in love with the much older Paul Deister, played by Alfred Müller, and learns that he is the judge who imposed that sentence on Dieter. She confronts him, accusing him of opportunism and hypocrisy, and the film shows him as status-oriented and unable to distinguish right from wrong in his application of the law.⁷^•³^•⁶ Ilse Voigt played Tante Hete and Wolfgang Winkler played Dieter Morzeck.⁴ The script was written by Maetzig together with Manfred Bieler; Erich Gusko was the director of photography, and the score was by Reiner Bredemeyer.³^•⁴

Production and censorship

The film was based on Bieler's novel, which had already been banned when Maetzig decided to make the movie.⁶ Maetzig, one of DEFA's best-known directors and the maker of the propagandistic Ernst Thälmann films, intended the film to encourage discussion of the democratization of East German society and to criticize the political opportunism of judges and prosecutors.⁵^•⁸ Production ran into repeated disputes between the studio and party authorities, but the film was approved for release on 26 October 1965 after some changes.⁵

The 11th Plenum ban. At its 11th plenary session in December 1965, the Central Committee of the SED abruptly changed cultural policy, and the films Das Kaninchen bin ich and Frank Vogel's Denk bloß nicht, ich heule were presented to the delegates and immediately banned. The plenum banned twelve new DEFA films in all, including Trace of Stones (Frank Beyer), Born in '45 (Jürgen Böttcher), Berlin um die Ecke (Gerhard Klein), Fräulein Schmetterling (Kurt Barthel), and Wenn du groß bist, lieber Adam (Egon Günther), effectively halting the studio's entire annual feature production at various stages in 1965 and 1966.⁵^•²^•⁸ The ban was the most extensive in German cinematic history, and December 2015 marked its 50th anniversary.² Film historian Sebastian Heiduschke, author of a book chapter on the film, notes that Maetzig himself said it was surprising the film had been allowed to be made, and that unlike earlier bans, the cause was less the plot than a change in social mood; scholars have described the shelved films as an East German New Wave whose development the ban ended.⁹

Release and reception

The film reached the public only after the Wall came down. A press screening took place in Berlin on 23 November 1989 alongside the re-release of Trace of Stones, and the film's first screening followed on 13 December 1989 at the Akademie der Künste; DEFA-Stiftung lists a premiere date of 8 March 1990 and a cinema release of 9 March 1990.¹⁰^•⁴^•¹ At the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival's Forum of New Cinema it received honorable mentions for both the FIPRESCI Prize and the Interfilm Award.³

After its release it earned critical praise as one of the most important and courageous works ever made in East Germany, and it was screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005 as part of the film series Rebels with a Cause: The Cinema of East Germany.³ Contemporary reviewers noted its formal boldness as well as its political content. Peter Claus wrote in the Berlin Junge Welt on 9 March 1990 that Maetzig "treads new paths" and that no one in East Germany had previously handled flashbacks and inner monologues with such ease; Helmut Ullrich in the Berlin Neue Zeit the same day wrote that the inhumanity the film shows still outraged a quarter century on and that it was "by no means a dated film."³

Legacy

The film's title supplied the name for the whole group of banned works. Films banned for their socio-political content were derisively called "Rabbit Films" (Kaninchenfilme), a term attributed to Horst Sindermann, and with the exception of Trace of Stones, briefly screened in 1966 before being withdrawn, none of the twelve was shown publicly in East Germany until the state's final months.⁶^•¹¹^•¹² The DEFA Foundation later released the twelve banned films as a series for public screenings, with restorations and digitizations of several still-analog titles.² The film is available on DVD and streaming from the DEFA Film Library, with bonus material including a 1999 interview with Maetzig and a 1993 filmed interview with former GDR Minister of Culture Hans Bentzien on the censorship of 1965.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1960 to 1965

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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