Exploiting
vulnerable labor for profit is everything socialist propaganda crusades
against. Yet, the exploitation of the inmates at Hoheneck Prison helped keep
the financially ailing East Germany from completely imploding. Of course, in
reality there was nothing democratic or republican about the GDR/DDR. Survivors
of the abuse and exploitation tell their tales in Alexander Lahl & Volker
Schlecht’s black-and-white animated short documentary, Kaputt/Broken—The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck (trailer here), which screened
at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
The
Brutalist architecture of Hoheneck screamed East German oppression—and the
insides lived up to the outside. It was perennially overcrowded, because at
least politically-motivated arrests in the DDR consistently ran above quota.
Daily life was a mixture of routine humiliation and grinding toil to make their
production quotas in the prison’s bed linen sweat shop.
Kaputt/Broken is a powerful
seven-minute indictment of the socialist system, executed in an evocatively
severe style that could be described as a cross between Honoré Daumier and a
Stasi dossier. Yet, perhaps what is most striking is the grimly poetic language
taken directly from original oral histories of Hoheneck survivors.