ABSTRACT
This chapter explores cultural relations between East Germany (GDR) and China (PRC) in the 1950s through the lens of The Compass Rose (Die Windrose, 1957), a co-produced anthology film composed of five distinct stories. It argues that the film’s format as a travelogue trivializes encounters between the East German audience and their socialist comrades as merely sight-seeing. Moreover, the first four segments of the anthology are presented with their original foreign-language dialogues, which are faithfully summarized or paraphrased by a German voiceover. In the concluding Chinese segment, however, the German narrator impersonates a minor figure in the diegetic world, without translating any of the Chinese characters’ spoken dialogue. Whereas the visual element of the Chinese segment, filmed by director Wu Guoying, portrays the PRC as a progressive socialist state eager to embrace modernization, the German voiceover added by the East German studio during postproduction misrepresents the Chinese dialogue, plot, and images, thus misrepresenting the PRC in turn as a traditionalist society in which conservative views about women’s incompetence in the public sphere still predominated. As a result, the GDR missed an opportunity to establish genuine solidarity with the PRC.
