East Germany’s interplanetary Sci-fi epic is finally remastered to Blu-ray quality, with original stereophonic soundtracks. What we once knew as the re-edited First Spaceship on Venus is now 14 minutes longer and laden with ponderous anti-American sermonizing. The sleek spaceship Kosmokrator is a marvel of design, and technical tricks pioneered for Metropolis turn the blasted surface of the planet Venus into a vision of Hell. Yoko Tani is the ship’s doctor in the international crew… the Reds allow a Yank on board, while dissing America’s deplorable atomic aggression. It’s one feature in the four-title disc set  Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA.

The Silent Star
From the Blu-ray disc set Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA
Blu-ray
Eureka!
1960 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 93 min. / Der Schweigende Stern, Milcząca gwiazda, Planet der Toten, Raumschiff Venus antwortet nicht, First Spaceship on Venus / Street Date May 19, 2025 / Available from / £44.99
Starring: Yoko Tani, Oldrich Lukes, Ignacy Machowski, Julius Ongewe, Michail N. Postnikow, Kurt Rackelmann, Günther Simon, Tang Hua-Ta, Lucyna Winnicka.
Cinematography: Joachim Hasler
Production Designer: Alfred Hirschmeier with Lech Kunka, Paul Lehmann, Tadeusz Myszorek, Senta Ochs, Ryszard Potocki, Anatol Radzinowicz, A. Schulz, W. Schäfer
Special Effects: Ernst Kunstmann, Helmut Grewald, Vera Kunstmann, Jan Olejniczak
Costume Design: Ekki-Charlotte Löffler
Film Editor: Lena Neumann
Original Music: Andrzej Markowski
Screenplay by Kurt Maetzig (collaboration), ‘adaptation’ by Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Jan Fethke,
Günther Rücker, Alexander Stenbock-Fermor, J. Barkauer from the 1951 novel
Astronauci by Stanislaw Lem
Produced by Hans Mahlich, Edward Zajicek
Directed by Kurt Maetzig

The fascinating The Silent Star aka Der schweigende Stern is finally getting some serious attention, in a set with three other East German space operas with less claim on Sci-fi greatness. We grew up knowing only its U.S. revision title First Spaceship on Venus. The distributor Crown International gave it a dazzling poster and paired it with Toho’s  Varan the Unbelievable. We had no idea that both features in that double bill had been reworked by Hollywood producers. Forry Ackerman eventually printed its original West German release title, Raumschiff Venus antwortet nicht: “Spaceship Venus does not Answer.”  Ackerman explained that the title was a riff on the 1932 German Sci-fi hit  F.P. 1 antwortet nicht. The phrase had also been used to re-title the German release of  This Island Earth: Metaluna antwortet nicht.

Miserable VHS copies and 16mm TV prints seemed to be all that circulated of First Spaceship. It wasn’t until 1984 that the  Hardy Encyclopedia of Science Fiction told us of the film’s roots as an East German-Polish co-production. In 2000 Image entertainment released the Crown Intl. – Hugo Grimaldi chop-down version on a flat-letterboxed DVD, with contrast so harsh that the face of the film’s African astronaut looked almost entirely black. In 2005 First Run Features released a DVD of the German version, but also flat-letterboxed.

The quality difference between those discs and this new Blu-ray is stunning. The experience will be very different if you’ve only seen the American recut. It removed 14 minutes, re-dubbed the voices and replaced the music track with stock library cues — that include bits and pieces from Universal-International’s Sci-fi movies. The rewritten dubbed dialogue removes several political speeches. The original roster of nationalities on the spaceship crew is altered as well. The main hero is now identified as an American, not East German.

The original film was East Germany’s answer to the grand achievements of the Soviet space program. In 1960 neither the Russians nor the U.S. had yet gotten a man into orbit, but the big space breakthroughs were coming from behind the Iron Curtain. Our rockets were noted mostly for blowing up on the launch pad while the news from the USSR made every effort at Star City seem a smashing triumph. It was with great pride that the filmmakers predicted Socialism conquering the heavens while the United States lagged far behind.

Der schweigende Stern was the first Soviet bloc space feature not filmed in Russia. It was the most expensive film to date from the East German film studio  DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft). The visions created by DEFA’s designers left us kids awestruck: the glittering silver spaceship, a fantastic atom-blasted alien planet. We knew nothing about surrealism or expressionism, yet reacted exactly as the filmmakers wanted us to react … Venus is a vision of Hell.

The fine new extras in Eureka!’s set were organized by the  DEFA Film Library located in Amherst Massachusetts. Thanks to the Library’s Hiltrud Schulz, between 2000 and around 2014 the ‘DVD Savant’ page reviewed scores of East German films on DVD. All were annotated with historical context. The DEFA experts’ analysis covers the ideological restraints put on the production. The Silent Star’s director Kurt Maetzig was a top official at DEFA. His quotes stress that his ‘good socialist’ space film will not repeat the prevailing (Hollywood) emphasis on violent conflict and the militarization of space. The film’s East German trailer announces the show as a great original … even though most everything in it is derivative of earlier American Sci-fi.

This full synopsis has spoilers.

It is 1970, and Earth is a model of international cooperation — save for the aggressive, capitalist United States of America. A base has been established on the Moon and a beautiful four-spired Mars rocket called the Kosmokrator is ready to launch. Miners in Siberia unearth a strange rock-artifact, that Chinese linguist Tchen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta) and Indian mathematician Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann) decide came from Venus. They think it contains a message and work to crack its code. The theory is that a spaceship exploded over Siberia in 1908, creating a crater previously thought to be formed by a meteor impact.

The Kosmokrator is rerouted to Venus to investigate. The code-breakers join an elite international team led by the Russian Prof. Arsenyev (Michail N. Postnikow). Ignoring political pressure, American nuclear scientist Prof. Hawling (Oldrich Lukes) answers the invitation to join the expedition. Polish engineer Soltyk (Ignacy Machowsky) tinkers with a tank-like robot named Omega (pronounced with the accent on the ‘O’). African Talua (Julius Ongewe) is the Kosmokrator’s communications expert. Japanese Sumiko Omigura (Yoko Tani) is a physician whose husband died on the Moon. Ace East German pilot Brinkman (Guenther Simon) has a crush on Sumiko, but she’s committed to celibacy: the Hiroshima bomb rendered her sterile.

Avoiding a meteor storm, the Kosmokrator lands on a bleak Venus of weird and unfamiliar sights. Brinkman discovers a cave infested with metallic insects, which Sikarna theorizes is an archive, a database. A radioactive forest is a tangle of metallic trees that once functioned as some kind of energy-projecting weapon. The planet’s surface was destroyed in a nuclear holocaust, which the decoded artifact reveals occurred when the Venusians were preparing to invade our Earth. The visitors also discover that the interior of the planet hums with giant machines, that have ‘out-lived’ the now- extinct Venusian race and still function.

During the investigation of a strange site, a black & red ooze-blob pursues Omigura, Brinkman and Soltyk up the spiral ramp of a conical structure. In desperation, Soltyk fires his ray gun at it, and it retreats. The move saves the trio, but also upsets the balance of the subterranean machines that control the gravitation of the entire planet. The gravity increases so sharply that the Kosmokrator cannot blast off. The ship escapes only through the sacrifice of three crew members. Talua and Tchen Yu brave a wild storm and enter the underground Venusian power plant. Tchen Yu’s spacesuit is punctured, so Brinkman pilots a mini-rocket in a rescue attempt. Talua’s efforts succeed in reversing the gravitation, which then swings to the opposite extreme — negative gravity. The Kosmokrator is now forced off the planet. Poor Talua is marooned on the surface and Brinkman’s tiny rocket is tossed into the void. Back home, the five survivors mourn their lost comrades. They bring back a sober lesson about an advanced but barbaric alien world whose fate the Earth will hopefully not share.

The Silent Star’s visual effects held their own against Hollywood’s best work in 1960. Unique design ideas animate its futuristic space hardware. One hovercraft is called an ‘Elasticopter.’ The launching pad for the Kosmokrator is a very large forced-perspective live-action set. Converging lines on the ‘concrete’ surface make the large model of the rocket appear to be enormous in size. The illusion is good on a video monitor and spectacular on a big screen. Yes, we see wires … on the spaceship, and on other items that are supposedly weightless in the ship’s cockpit.

Even more impressive are the large sets, both full-scale and miniature, that represent various Venusian landscapes. The surface of the planet looks like crumbled volcanic rock, black and shiny. Smoky surreal forms stick upward from the ground in the ‘radioactive forest.’

Combining live action, miniatures and paintings, most every shot we see was done in the camera. The DEFA commentary tells us that the visual effects expert Ernst Kunstmann had worked on the classic  Metropolis. He revived the clever ‘Schüfftan process,’ an in-the-camera matting trick that involved using a mirror with the silver backing removed from some areas. We see at least ten shots that insert live-action into a miniature this way. Most of these shots are really dazzling. One glass shot is a giveaway — a fiery glow reaches around parts of the painted image, where it shouldn’t.

Superimposed over these landscapes are bolts of lightning and wisps of drifting gas. Were these carefully composited in-camera, using up a latent camera take with each try?  The floating gas trails appear to have been filmed flat and allowed to ‘squash out’ on the horizontal axis.  ↑  They remind us of the psychedelic paint that oozes in the title sequences of some of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies.

The cameras truck along with the rovers that investigate the ruined city, in shots that employ large miniature landscapes. Giant structures are melted and charred by atomic blasts. Clusters of globes evoke photos of the first H-Bomb blast that showed a giant plasma blister hovering over the bombing site. The commentary mentions two or three artists as having inspired the look of post-apocalyptic Venus. We would add to them the painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose imagery is evoked in images of drooping gourd-like buildings. The DEFA experts succeed in creating an imaginative, attractive and consistently logical alien world.

The political posturing of 1950s Science Fiction thrillers is not easy to ignore. The  source novel by Stanislaus Lem (author of  Solaris) offered a general warning against atomic war. DEFA had been trying since 1956 to attract international production partners for what was then called Planet der Toten. A partnership with the French company Pathé was begun, but no agreement was achieved, reportedly because the East Germans insisted on adding political messages to Lem’s story. The finished film repeatedly touts international cooperation while deploring the folly of American aggression.

The harmonious ‘world government’ of 1970 assembles an international dream team. No mention is made of the fact that more than one of the countries represented is militarily dominated by the Russian Soviets. Meanwhile, the United States of America goes it alone, as a political pariah. At a cocktail party in a New York skyscraper, the idealistic American nuclear physicist Dr. Hawling complains that his fellow military industrialist fat cats don’t want him to join the Venus expedition:

“My dream is the stars … not your old dream, which was Hiroshima.”

Another expatriate German physicist, presumably Jewish, talks of fleeing Hitler only to be coerced into making bombs. Hawling’s little boy draws pictures of spaceships but Wall Street is only interested in selling weapons.

The DEFA scholars explain that space fantasies were a prime place to propagandize the Cold War Space Race. Both arguments were simplified. The Soviet-bloc state bureaucracies were dedicated to the dissemination of strategic propaganda. In the American film industry, wildcat producers went for anything that would sell at the box office, and thus concentrated on gloppy monsters and masochistic disasters. Anti-Red messages may have been slipped in to appease Hollywood’s own unofficial political watchdogs, but writers also exercised their own patriotic initiative.  So what’s your poison, pernicious socialist mind control, or chaotic free-market exploitation?

Hawling takes leave of his capitalist friends and is flown to the space center by the East German pilot Brinkman. The original cut gives this beautiful mountain location more screen time — Brinkman and Hawley share a chat in a meadow that would be suitable for the opening of The Sound of Music. In the Crown re-cut Brinkman is identified as an American, even though he enters flying a Russian MIG fighter jet.  ↑

There isn’t a lot of interpersonal drama between these scientists. Dr. Hawling whines that he can’t win a game of chess against Soltyk’s unbeatable robot Omega,  ↓  so Soltyk adjusts Omega’s circuits to make it lose a game or two. The inference is that Yanks are psychologically unbalanced, uncomfortable when they can’t maintain the illusion that they’re winners.

Bothersome in a different way are Brinkman’s repeated attempts to re-ignite an old romance with Sumiko. In the tight confines of a space ship his overtures amount to harassment. Sumiko answers with tragic memories of her husband’s death on a lunar mission, but she also refers more than once to Hiroshima, referring to the loss of her family and her inability to have children due to lingering radiation. “Gee, I understand if you aren’t in the mood, but…:. The Japanese character’s main function is to underscore the screenwriters’ condemnation of America as a nuclear aggressor.

Sumiko is the one to point out the only trace left of the vanished Venusians, ‘atomic blast shadows’ cast on a wall that echo Army documentation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As pointed out by the DEFA scholars, the film’s memory of war crimes is politically selective. The international astronauts resent America’s actions, but express no residual resentment against Germany and Japan, whose murderous onslaught killed millions of Russians and Chinese.

Did the makers of Der schweigende Stern think its messages were subtle?  It plays as blunt propaganda without a hope of distribution on the Western side of the political divide. In most world markets the very expensive movie ended up as exploitation entertainment. The bowdlerized First Spaceship on Venus was first screened in the U.S. over two years later, and then possibly released in West Germany as well — also without its anti-American speeches.

The trailer for The Silent Star proudly proclaims that this is the first movie about the exploration of space, which is of course not true. Most of its story elements had previously been seen in American movies. It’s not likely that Stanislaus Lem could have been influenced by the Lippert film  Rocketship X-M, which stipulates that a Martian civilization destroyed itself with a nuclear war, but similar stories were common in literary SF. The screenwriters lift other events from the first two Hollywood space movies. The Kosmokrator is hit by a meteorite shower, necessitating an EVA to make repairs. Although the Venusians are extinct, their futuristic machinery lives on, as in MGM’s  Forbidden Planet. Is the Venusian blob-thing a living being?  It behaves much the blobs in recent movies from  Hollywood,  Cinecittà and  Toho.

The East German movie also quotes the most insensitive moment from American space Sci-fi. As Dr. Tchen Yu is dying, Sumiko tells him that the seeds he has planted in Venusian soil have sprouted, a bit of business borrowed from the 1955 Paramount film  Conquest of Space. Conquest is similarly obsessed with WW2, but in a completely nonsensical way. Not only is Hiroshima not mentioned, Benson Fong’s Japanese scientist places blame for the war on poor Japanese nutrition.

But The Silent Star has at least one brilliant original idea, the ‘reverse gravitation’ that forces the Kosmokrator off the planet. We 11 year-olds munching popcorn thought it was an ultra-cool mind-blower. It doesn’t matter that it makes no scientific sense, that nothing else seems affected by the altered gravity, neither the oily clouds nor the humans themselves. If the gravitation is permanently reversed, why doesn’t Venus disintegrate?  Was this one of the added ideas that the (very opinionated) Stanislau Lem declared ruined his story?

Lem’s original idea of an artifact encoded with an alien invasion plan is a good one. It’s interesting to note that all three of DEFA’s follow-up Sci-fis from the 1970s launch their stories with similar mystery messages or radio signals. The East Germans slammed American movies for pandering to the audience with vulgar commercial gimmicks like monsters, mass destruction, and grotesque deaths. But their own Sci-fi films also copy what had previously proved successful. Is that because because getting a risky new idea through the bureaucratic – ideological gauntlet was too difficult?

As for the claim of superior racial and gender politics, The Silent Star really isn’t that progressive. The sole female crew member Sumiko is mostly along for the ride. Until a medical emergency arises, she busies herself dispensing liquid food to the cranky spacemen. Julius Ongewe’s African Talua is not the captain of the Kosmokrator as he was in Lem’s original book. Yet he saves the ship like a genuine hero. Ongewe is also cinema’s very first black spaceman. Released six months later, Antonio Margheriti’s Italian thriller  Space Men also featured a black astronaut, played by American actor-choreographer Archie Savage.

Only a handful of movies from behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ were widely distributed in America. Those that did were often fantasies and children’s films, carefully shorn of ‘propaganda’ when re-voiced in English.

For interested viewers that have only seen the cut-down Crown / Grimaldi version First Spaceship on Venus, this is what to expect from the German original, other than the blatant anti-American dialogue passages mentioned above. It is a much different experience than the wall-to-wall needle-drop cues jammed into the U.S. version by import-meister Hugo Grimaldi.

The pace is more relaxed, with several time jumps marked with slow-fade transitions. The pre-launch activities are more elaborate. In addition to more and longer dialogue scenes, we see Sumiko break out some high-tech surgery gear when Professor Arsenyev is accidentally run over by the robot tank Omega. Talua’s final scene is more dignified in the German original. Left behind on Venus, he shouts a noble, heroic farewell to the disappearing Kosmokrator. In the U.S. re-cut he wails in terror, “Don’t leave me behind!”  The American editors also spoil the film’s finale, by removing the original trucking shot showing dozens of hands joining together in Socialist solidarity. It’s a very nice ending, and taking it out seems simply mean-spirited. People can’t hold hands — that’s Pinko behavior!

Eureka’s handsome remastered Region B Blu-ray of The Silent Star is the lead-off feature in the ‘Masters of Cinema’ collection Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA, the full run-down on which  can be read here. It is a Region B disc release that won’t play on domestic Blu-ray players. The other three features are equally well restored but less interesting; just this March, we covered two of them in Deaf Crocodile’s excellent  The Spectacular Sci-Fi Visions of East German Director Gottfried Kolditz.

As exclaimed above, The Silent Star looks and sounds great. It’s a 2K HD remaster, sufficiently bright and sharp to allow close examination of all those visual effects filmed without standard opticals. The wizardry involved deserves applause.

The visual quality is like night and day, with subtle Agfacolor hues and a nice range of contrast, plus a much sharper image overall.  The disc comes with a choice of German-language audio tracks, an original stereo track, and what is called a ‘DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround’ track. A stirring and mysterious music score under the main title becomes much less apparent later in the show.

Someone somewhere must have erred by saying that Der schweigende Stern was filmed in 65mm, as we’ve read that repeated bit of misinformation many times. The lens system Totalvision was a standard 35mm anamorphic process used on various European films, mostly sword ‘n’ sandal pictures. On this transfer the aspect ratio appears to be a correct 2.35:1. We do see shots that show an effect just like the ‘CinemaScope’ mumps. When the TV hostess pops up in close-up, she looks a tad squashed out horizontally. It’s hardly a bother.

The DEFA Film Library in Amherst Massachusetts is behind the disc set’s varied video and audio extras. Mariana Ivanova, the library’s Academic Director, provides an introductory essay for the insert booklet. The Bristol- based academic Dr. Claire Knight shows herself to be an articulate expert in Soviet cinema and visual culture, British-Soviet wartime relations, and Soviet film censorship. Red Skies, her long-form talk about DEFA and the four films in the set is excellent viewing … she has a first-hand knowledge of exactly what was happening during the production of Der schweigende Stern.

All the films in the set have audio commentaries by the University of Edinburgh’s David Melville Wingrove (sometimes just David Melville), who reads a script written by the same University’s Rolland Man, who saw the films back in his native Romania. From the DEFA archives come two newsreel short subjects with footage of a press visit to the set. We see the impressive forced-perspective launch site set. Unfortunately, none of the angles shows a camera that would reveal the film gauge … the Criterion extras for the  War and Peace disc give us many views of Soviet 65mm cameras, and they’re very distinctive.

The last extra is a cute 14-minute cartoon from East Germany, a politically-neutral comedy about two boys that kidnap a robot and use it to perform personal mischief. It’s animated in a cheerfully simple graphic style.

And finally, we really like the art on the hardcover outer box for this release. It’s credited to  Carly A-F. We also love the elegant graphic of the original Polish poster.  ←

The Silent Star
Region B Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Fascinating (Excellent for Sci-fi fans)
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent (original stereo, and ‘DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround’)
Supplements:
Red Skies new interview with Soviet cinema expert Claire Knight
Audio commentary written by Rolland Man and presented by David Melville Wingrove
Newsreel excerpt British Filmmaker Visits DEFA (1959) Anthony Asquith’s visit to the set of The Silent Star
Newsreel excerpt A Rocket in the Soviet Zone (1959)
Animated short subject The Robot (Klaus Georgi, 1968) produced by the DEFA Studio
Original trailer
Illustrated 60-page booklet with an introduction by Mariana Ivanova, and an essay on The Silent Star by Sebastian Heiduschke.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 21, 2025
(7205star)

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