The Beaverskin

Girls in Gingham (German: 'Die Buntkarierten'; literally, The Checkered Ones)—sometimes called Beaverskin —is a 1949 German drama film directed by Kurt Maetzig.

At 1884, Guste is born as the illegitimate daughter of a maid. She marries a worker named Paul; her mistress gives her a set of common, checkered mattresses as a wedding gift. During the First World War, Paul is called to the front, and she remains alone with their children and works in a munitions factory. When she realizes how the capital of the great industry magnates had caused the war in the first place, Guste resigns and begins cleaning houses for a living. When the Nazis take over, Paul is fired from his job for being a trade-unionist, and dies. At the Second World War, their children are killed in a bombing. Gusta's granddaughter, Christel, is the only family she has now. After the war, as Christel is about to attend university - the first member of the family to have ever done so - her grandmother sews her a new dress from the old mattresses and tells her to always fight for peace and freedom.

The script was adapted by author Berta Waterstradt from her successful radio drama,During the Blackout, which was broadcast in the Berlin Radio. Waterstradt's screenplay was rejected by DEFA at first. Director Kurt Maetzig decided to film her script only after he realized he will not be able to create a picture based on a novel by Eduard Claudius.

The work on Girls in Gingham was relatively free from censure. It was created at the time before the Tito-Stalin Split and the founding of the German Democratic Republic forced strict censure on DEFA; according to Maetzig, the Soviet occupation authorities were determined not to force a USSR-style system on their subjects, but to allow them to develop their own model of Socialism. Although the censors did criticize several points in the plot, like presenting the Proletariate worker Paul as rather passive, Maetzig and Waterstradt refused to make any amendments. The director also told he was influenced by Bertolt Brecht's disapproval from his last picture, Marriage in the Shadows, which the latter described as "utter kitsch", and wished to avoid making an overly didactic movie. Mark Silbermann claimed that the film was generally made in style reminiscent of Brecht's works during the 1920s.