Released in 1986, Novemberkatzen (November Cats) arrived during a fascinating period for West German cinema. The "New German Cinema" movement of the 70s, spearheaded by Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, was evolving. A younger generation of filmmakers was beginning to shift away from the heavily political and intellectual tones of their predecessors toward more personal, intimate, and socially critical narratives.
Sönke Wortmann, who would later go on to direct massive hits like Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern) and Der bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not), started his career with this quiet, introspective drama. It was a statement of intent: Wortmann was not interested in glamour, but in the grit of everyday life.
“Novemberkatzen” is a German-language television play (Fernsehspiel) produced by DEFA (the state-owned film studio of East Germany/GDR) and broadcast by Fernsehen der DDR (GDR Television). It aired in 1986.
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To understand the significance, we must first separate fact from folklore. “Novemberkatzen” is not a mainstream film, a bestselling novel, or a chart-topping album. Instead, evidence pieced together from user comments, forum threads (many since deleted), and cached Ok.ru pages suggests that Novemberkatzen 1986 refers to one of three things—or perhaps a hybrid of all three:
The most prevalent theory is that “Novemberkatzen” was a working title for a short animated or live-action film produced in late 1986 by DEFA (the state-owned film studio of East Germany) in collaboration with Mosfilm or Kievnauchfilm. The plot, as reconstructed from a single surviving Ok.ru description (machine-translated from Ukrainian), is haunting:
“A stray cat in Leningrad wanders through a November fog. It enters an abandoned radio station. The cat’s paws accidentally trigger a live broadcast to East Berlin. Two lonely operators – one on each side of the Iron Curtain – hear only meowing and static. They begin a secret, wordless friendship through the cat’s nightly visits.” Novemberkatzen 1986 Ok.ru
Why was it never released? 1986 was a pivotal year. The Chernobyl disaster had occurred in April, and by November, both the USSR and East Germany were in a state of fluctuating censorship. Some believe the film was deemed “too sentimental” or “potentially subversive” for suggesting unsupervised cross-border communication.
A second, more practical theory points to the world of magnitizdat—underground music recorded on reel-to-reel tapes or cassettes. “Novemberkatzen” may have been a Soviet synth-pop or new wave band that existed for only a few months in late 1986. Their demo tape, which included a track titled “Novemberkatzen,” was copied dozens of times and passed hand-to-hand.
In the early 2000s, a user on Ok.ru (which launched in 2006) claimed to have transferred one of these rare cassettes to digital. The audio, now inaccessible due to a private account or deleted file, was described as “melancholic, with a cheap drum machine, a detuned synthesizer, and Russian lyrics sung with a German accent.” The metadata on the original Ok.ru post read: “Recorded November 1986, Dnepropetrovsk. Only 30 copies.” “A stray cat in Leningrad wanders through a November fog
In the age of streaming algorithms and AI-generated content, the story of “Novemberkatzen 1986” on Ok.ru speaks to a deeper human need: the desire to rescue lost stories. Every year, thousands of Soviet-era films, radio plays, and music demos vanish because they were never digitized or were stored on formats that no longer function. Social media platforms like Ok.ru, for all their faults, have become unwitting digital museums.
The keyword is also a reminder that history is not only written by victors, but also by uploaders. A random user in Vladivostok or Minsk who decides to scan a grandfather’s photo album or transfer a moldy cassette can single-handedly preserve a piece of cultural heritage.