Kurt Maetzig | German film director, 101

Kurt Maetzig, 101, a pioneering figure in East Germany's socialist film industry after World War II who became one of the country's most respected directors, not least for compelling Germans to acknowledge their Nazi past, died Aug. 8 at his home in Germany.

News organizations said he died in the village of Wildkuhl in the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

He was a founder of East Germany's main film studio at the close of World War II, and in a three-decade career he directed about 30 feature films and documentaries. In most he carefully observed the ideological boundaries set by the ruling Communist Party.

But his 1965 film, The Rabbit Is Me, pushed the limits of cinematic criticism by portraying hypocrisy in the criminal justice system. Party leaders attacked the film, banned it, and urged him to issue a humiliating public self-criticism, which he did. He later said that he had feared imprisonment but that he had come to regret his capitulation as "self-pollution."

East Germany's leaders wanted films to show the inevitable victory of socialism. Still, it was clear from several of his early films that he was allowed considerable creative freedom.

But in Ernst Thaelmann: Son of His Class and Ernst Thaelmann: Leader of His Class - twin films portraying the life of the leader of the German Communist Party, whom the Nazis murdered at Buchenwald - party leaders repeatedly interfered, demanding screenplay rewrites.

He later acknowledged the damage. "It's terrible," he said of one of the films in a 1996 interview. "When I saw it once again, I had red ears and was ashamed." - N.Y. Times News Service