At the end of World War II, Germany was deprived of many territories and the remainder was split in two: the western side was occupied by US, British and French troops, while the eastern side was occupied by the Soviet Union. Berlin, the former capital, which was technically inside eastern Germany, was similarly divided among three western-occupied areas and a Soviet-occupied area. The degree of destruction was appalling. Many Germans were starving for the first time in their life. Thousands of Germans were displaced. Besides the military defeat, Germany suffered from the rift between the western powers (Churchill, DeGaulle and Truman) and the Soviet Union (Stalin), who had been allies of convenience during the war and parted ways rather abruptly after the war ended. Stalin schemed to have Soviet-friendly communist regimes installed in all of Eastern Europe. In March 1946 Winston Churchill described the situation as an "iron curtain" descending on Europe. The tension between the powers cost Germany both economically and politically. In March 1947 US president Truman announced the Truman Doctrine "to support free peoples" everywhere. At the same time Herbert Hoover produced a report that emphasized the importance of the German economy for the economic recovery of Europe, and then Truman's secretary of state, retired general George Marshall, decided to help rebuild Germany. In June 1948 the USA extended the Marshall Plan to provide aid also to Germany (after Britain and France) and replaced the old German currency (the reichsmark), which was worth nothing, with a new stable currency, the Deutsche mark. Stalin, however, was determined to punish Germany and perfectly happy to let the Germans starve. Furthermore, Stalin even wanted Germany to pay for war reparations, whereas the western powers wanted to avoid the mistake made after World War I, when war reparations caused the German economy to collapse and this ultimately led to the rise of Hitler. The Deutsche mark was the last straw: when the western powers started circulating it in Berlin, the Soviet Union blocked all roads, railways and canals leading to west Berlin. The USA and Britain were able to resupply the 2.5 million people of west Berlin only via air. The Berlin Blockade only ended in May 1949. By then the tensions between western powers and the Soviet Union had led to a complete diplomatic fracture. In October 1949 Germany was formally split into two independent nations: the western powers created the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR or West Germany) and the Soviet Union created the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany), ruled by for more than 20 years by the communist Walter Ulbricht. In 1950 the GDR created the Ministry for State Security, the Staatssicherheit, commonly known as the Stasi. Thousands of Germans stuck in the GDR moved to the FDR until, in 1952, tired of losing precious professionals like scientists, engineers and doctors, the GDR began policing its western border. While West Germany was experiencing an economic boom, the economic conditions in East Germany kept worsening. In June 1953 construction workers of East Berlin went on strike and in the following days the protest spread to various cities and became an uprising against the communist regime. It took Soviet tanks to stop the protests in East Berlin. Since the borders with the West were now patrolled by a more diligent Grenzpolizei, the exodus towards the West continued via Berlin, where the border was much more open, until August 1961 when the GDR decided to stop the bleeding by erecting a wall between east and west Berlin, soon to become the most famous wall in the world. Meanwhile the secret police Stasi, ruled since 1957 by Erich Mielke, had infiltrated every aspect of daily life and become increasingly brutal in repressing dissent.

East German culture became increasingly separated from West Germany, increasingly required to submit to the dogmas of socialist realism and increasingly victim of censorship. Writers were forced to hail the epic struggle against capitalism and fascism. The "Aufbauliteratur" (Construction Literature) of the communist era didn't amount to much more than propaganda. In April 1959 a literary conference held at the Bitterfeld Electrochemical Kombinat sanctioned a push towards removing the gap between the intellectuals and the proletariat. While the directives were openly ideological, that conference resulted in a slightly more liberal atmosphere. Those years witnessed the emergence of a new generation of writers, who were largely free of the trauma of the war and little impressed by the utopian program of building the communist paradise. Those were the years of Christa Wolf's novel "Der Geteilte Himmel/ Divided Heaven" (1963), followed by "Nachdenken ueber Christa T/ Reflections About Christa T" (1968), and of Brigitte Reimann�s novel "Die Geschwister/ Siblings" (1963), followed by her posthumous "Franziska Linkerhand" (fully published only in 1998). That generation boasted several poets: Johannes Bobrowski, Peter Huchel, Guenter Kunert, Wolf Biermann, etc. Huchel was since 1949 the editor of the poetry magazine Sinn und Form, but, caught criticizing the regime, was forced to resign and de facto kept under house arrest. Wolf Biermann was the unusual case of a dissident tolerated by the authorities. Biermann was more than controversial: he was a dissident, yet one officially recognised by the state. Banned from radio and television in 1965, he kept smuggling recordings to West Germany's radio and television stations which were easily viewed and heard in East Germany. Bertolt Brecht, a giant of 20th century theater who had always sympathyzed with the communists, moved to East Berlin in 1949 and started a company, the Berliner Ensemble. He didn't write any new masterpiece, but devoted his last years to raising a new generation of theater directors (he died in 1956).

East German cinema restarted in June 1945 when the Soviet distributor Sojusintorgkino commissioned Wolfgang Staudte a German-language version of Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Grozny. In May 1946 three men (who had virtually no connection with the film industry) started the first postwar film production studio, the Deutsche Film AG (DEFA): Herbert Volkmann, who had been appointed in charge of art and literature by the Soviet military administration, the engineer Alfred Lindemann and the anti-fascist Karl Hans Bergmann (who had been jailed by the Nazis in 1935 and then spent three years in exile). The three were soon replaced, but their replacements too had little experience in cinema, people like Rudolf Engel, a communist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and with the French partisans, and Kurt Maetzig, a chemist who became artistic director. Most of the studios were soon relocated to Potsdam. Notable among the early films of DEFA were the "Truemmerfilme" ("rubble movies"), shot in black and white amid the "rubble" of bombed-down cities: Wolfgang Staudte's Die Moerder sind unter uns/ The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Gerhard Lamprecht's Irgendwo in Berlin/ Somewhere in Berlin (1946). Of the films devoted to the Nazi era, some dealt with the persecution of Jews like Kurt Maetzig's Ehe im Schatten/ Marriage in the Shadows (1947), based on the real-life tragedy of a famous German theater couple, Meta Wolff and Joachim Gottschalk. The first literary adaptation was Georg Klaren's Wozzeck (released in December 1947), an adaptation of Georg Buechner�s tragedy "Woyzeck" for which the director assembled costume designer Walter Schulze-Mittendorff (who had worked on Lang's Metropolis), set designer Hermann Warm (who had worked on Robert Wiene's expressionist The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and on Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr) and cinematographer Bruno Mondi (another veteran of silent cinema). When the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was created, DEFA became its official cinematic organ.

Among the propaganda movies (which were the majority) only Slatan Dudow's Frauenschicksale/ Destinies of Women (1952) and Der Hauptmann von Koeln/ The Captain from Cologne (1956), adapted from Carl Zuckmayer's play "Der Hauptmann von Koepenick", stand out.

Konrad Wolf, who had studied at Moscow's famous VGIK film school, took a historical perspective on dramas like: Lissy (1957), adapted from a novel by Franz Carl Weiskopf, Sterne/ Stars (1959), written by Angel Vagenshtain, Professor Mamlock (1961), starring Wolfgang Heinz, and especially Der Geteilte Himmel/ The Divided Sky (1964), a loose adaptation of Christa Wolf's 1963 novel.

Many comedies were made, notably Slatan Dudow's Verwirrung der Liebe/ Love's Confusion (1959), perhaps the most famous East German movie of the era, Guenter Reisch�s musical comedy Maibowle/ May Wine/ The Punch Bowl (1959), and Frank Beyer�s Karbid und Sauerampfer/ Carbide and Sorrel (1963).

The relative freedom of the early 1960s came to an abrupt end after the 11th Plenum of the Central Committee of December 1965 which demanded a "Kahlschlag" (a clean-up) of the film industry. This led to the worst years of the Ulbricht dictatorship. Many films had to be abandoned and many filmmakers couldn't work anymore. Banned films included Frank Beyer's Spur der Steine/ Trace of Stones (1966 but only shown again in 1989), adapted from Erik Neutsch's novel, and Herrmann Zschoche's Karla (1966, but only shown in 1990), written by Ulrich Plenzdorf. Films that were not even completed included Kurt Barthel's Fraulein Schmetterling/ Miss Butterfly (finally reconstructed in 2019), scripted by Christa Wolf and her husband Gerhard.

Meanwhile, the exodus of East Germany towards the West was continuing, but it had become a very dangerous enterprise: East German guards killed more than 100 people who had tried to climb the Berlin Wall alone. Finally, in May 1971 Ulbricht was forced to resign (with Soviet consent) and Erich Honecker became the new dictator. His primary goal was to save the economy that was in a free fall, but he also pledged more freedom of speech. In fact, for a few years East German writers could publish works that previously would have been unthinkable, like Ulrich Plenzdorf's novels "Die neuen Leiden des Jungen W/ The new Sufferings of Yung W" (1973) and "Die Legende von Paul und Paula" (1974), or his hit play "Die neuen Leiden des Jungen W/ The new Sufferings of Yung W" (1973), a tragedy of alienation; or Volker Braun's short story "Unvollendete Geschichte/ Incomplete Story" (1975) and his novel "Hinze und Kunze" (1973). Poets like Ulrich Berkes and Reiner Kunze were able to publish lyrical poetry. In 1972 Honecker signed two international agreements, the Quadripartite Agreement and the Basic Treaty, which paved the way for both West and East Germany to join the United Nations, and allowed millions of West Germans and West Berliners to visit the communist East. Unfortunately for Honecker, this also meant that millions of East Germans realized first hand how richer the West Germans were (and of course it wasn't lost on them that West Germans were allowed to visit the East but East Germans were not allowed to visit the West). In July 1973 hundreds of thousands of young people attended in East Berlin a week-long Weltfestspiele der Jugend und Studenten (Festival of Youth and Students). The regime approved it at the peak of communism geopolitical enthusiasm, when the USA was losing the war in Vietnam and Portugal was losing the colonies in Africa. The official theme was denunciation of imperialism, but it also allowed young people to gather in large numbers for the first time. Michael Heubach's band Automobil, fronted by a 19-year-old Nina Hagen, even had a hit with a song, "Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen ist ein Schlager" (1974), that predated punk-rock.

Cinema too enjoyed more freedom. It was possible for Heiner Carow to make Die Legende von Paul und Paula/ The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973), written by the ever provocative Ulrich Plenzdorf, and for Siegfried Kuehn to make Das Zweite Leben des Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow/ The Second Life of Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Platow (1973), although this one wasn't allowed to play in major theaters.

That relative liberal atmosphere didn't last. It didn't help that East Germany (like the whole Western world) was battered by the runaway inflation caused by the 1973 oil crisis. In 1976 Reiner Kunze was punished for publishing a book in West Germany (something that he had done before) and Wolf Biermann was denied permission to reenter East Germany after performing in West Germany (basically, exiled). Several intellectuals signed a petition protesting Biermann's exile but the result was that the signatories themselved got black-listed.

Unscathed by the political metamorphosis, Lothar Warneke perfected the genre of the quasi-documentarian "Alltagsfilme" (films of everyday life) from Dr Med Sommer II (1969) to the almost clinical Die Beunruhigung/ Apprehension (1982). In the same vein, Konrad Wolf delivered the realist drama Solo Sunny (1980). Notable literary adaptations included Erwin Stranka's Sabine Wulff (1978), based on Heinz Kruschel's novel "Gesucht wird die freundliche Welt/ We're Looking for the Friendly World", made by a Czech who had studied at Prague's famous FAMU film school; Herrmann Zschoche's Buergschaft fuer ein Jahr/ One Year�s Probation (1981), adapted from Tine Schulze-Gerlach's novel; Roland Graef's Maerkische Forschungen/ Research in the March (1982), adapted from Guenter de Bruyn�s novel; and Frank Beyer's Der Aufenthalt/ Held for Questioning (1983), adapted from Hermann Kant�s novel. Zschoche specialized in films about young people, notably the teen love melodrama Sieben Sommersprossen/ Seven Freckles (1978) and Insel der Schwaene/ Island of the Swans (1983), scripted by Ulrich Plenzdorf. Stranka�s Der Haifischf�tterer/ The Shark-Feeder (1985) and Peter Kahane's Ete und Ali/ Ete and Ali (1985) were also about the lives of young people. Ulrich Weiss' realist drama Olle Henry (1983) Roland Graef's Fariaho/ Vagrants (1983) itinerant puppeteer who is a concentration camp survivor

The last major artistic achievement of East Germany was perhaps Reinhard Jirgl's novel "Mutter Vater Roman" (written in 1985 but published only in 1990).

A young Vladimir Putin worked in East Germany from 1985 until 1989 as a liaison officer between the Stasi and the KGB. An existential malaise afflicted East Germany. Peaceful demonstrations started in September 1989 around a church of Leipzig and spread around the country. One month later Honecker resigned. In November people spontaneously jumped on the Berlin Wall and started taking it down.

The end of communism and the reunification of Germany in October 1990 caused a crisis among GDR filmmakers and actors, with many remaining jobless as state jobs disappeared. In 1992 a French corporation, Compagnie Generale des Eaux (later known as Vivendi), acquired DEFA. De facto, the East German film industry disintegrated while the West German one continued its course.