Two to One: Economic Lessons for the Old GDR

This based on-fact caper was undeniably inflationary and it necessarily involved stealing from the government. Yet, the perpetrators consider it a victimless crime. In fact, these Est Germans think of themselves as victims of Germany’s reunification. In some sense they are not wrong, but they might be blaming the wrong villains in director-screenwriter Natja Brunckhorst’s Two to One, which just opened in the UK.

All the Reunification agreements have been negotiated, including the former East Germany’s adoption of the Western Mark. The deadline for former East Germans to convert their financial holdings is fast approaching, but Maren and her neighbors converted their funds almost immediately. Of course, she and her partner Robert are fascinated by his uncle Markowski’s description of the resulting mountains of old obsolete money piled in the underground vaults where he works as a security guard. On a lark, the three pull off what they consider a pointless caper, making off with several duffle bags full of useless cash—or so they thought.

The next day, they are stunned to hear one of the opportunistic traveling salesmen from the West assures Maren and Robert he would be delighted to accept any unused East German Marks they might have lying around—so, sure they will buy a microwave. In fact, they will take whatever his has in his car and they might buy even more if he comes back tomorrow.

Obviously, every West German salesman quickly descends on their apartment complex. With the help of Volker, Maren’s recently returned ex, they organize the entire building into an army of small appliance consumers. They even include cranky old Lunkewitz, so everyone is involved and nobody snitches. Volker becomes their chief operations officer, despite the awkwardness of their shared history—especially since Volker wants a relationship with Dini, the biological daughter Robert raised as his own.

Brunckhorst maintains a distinctively bittersweet vibe throughout Two to One. There is a good deal of humor, but it also expresses the sadness experienced by a community forced to confront the deception and corruption of the system they bought into. Eventually, Robert and Volker start recruiting returning GDR diplomats to convert old currency on their behalf, because they were granted extended deadlines. Yet, they are disgusted by the Commuunists’ grotesque venality. Most of their neighbors swapped 500 East German Marks, but the slimy Ambassador Kulitzka believes he can safely exchange 500,000 without attracting suspicion.

Indeed, the ethics of Two to One grow increasingly complex. While it starts out lampooning Western commercialism, it ultimately indicts the hypocrisy and the exploitation of the supposedly “good old” Socialist system.

The Roots of Evil, on MHz Choice

Many American serial killer movies predictably depict the serial killer as a Jesus-freak. In this German thriller, the serial murderer was warped by Norse mythology. It is a case that involves two seemingly contradictory yet intertwined toxic belief systems: one is old and pagan, while the other is the recently discredited Communism of the bad but not so old GDR. Two cops, one from the East and one from the West, investigate the pre- and post-Unification killings in the six-episode The Roots of Evil, directed by Stephan Rick, which premieres Tuesday on MHz Choice.

The Cold War was not kind to Ulrike Bandow, because of her mother’s unsuccessful escape attempt to the West. She and her younger brother Marc largely survived thanks to her father, an honest cop, who was killed under mysterious circumstances. That left her to largely raise Marc on her own, when their mother’s second attempt succeeded.

Not surprisingly, she followed in her father’s footsteps, serving under his old partner, Jurgen Dubbe. She prefers to do her own lone wolf thing, but she must accept a new partner from Hamburg, Koray Larssen. Maybe she should be more suspicious regarding his willingness to work in the provincial former GDR, but she has issues distracting her. Marc has fallen in with band nativist thugs, to ingratiate himself with the stepfather of his new girlfriend, Sabrina. To make things even more awkward, Sabrina’s mother, Chista Schreiber, is Bandow’s estranged childhood friend.

When a ritualistic murder victim is discovered, Bandow is alarmed by the resemblance of her wounds to some marks found on Schreiber decades earlier. At the time, she claimed to be abused by a mysterious group of men somehow related to her state orphanage. Bandow’s father and Dubbe discredited her story. Not surprisingly, Bandow’s friendship was collateral damage. However, the disappearance of a second girl quickly convinces Bandow and Larssen they have a serial killer on their hands, one possibly related to Schreiber’s orphanage.

At least Ingrid Heisler, the weird girl from the prologue, probably will not be his next victim, even though she found the first victim. Her family’s rustic lifestyle and her knowledge of runes and “the old way” apparently creates a feeling of kinship for her heavy-breathing observer. Being weird probably does not hurt either.

Many of the themes and plot elements of Roots of Evil are very much like those previously developed in Divided We Stand. Both series focus an odd couple pair of cops from West and East Germany, investigating a crime that dates back to the recently fallen Communist regime. However, Roots has a darker tone that sometimes borders on serial killer horror. It is also less preoccupied with the politics of post-Unification and culture clashes between East and West—it is still there, but it is not as fully explored. The killer’s sinister paganism is the series’ driving engine.

Regardless, Henriette Confurius and Fahri Yardim are both quite good as Bandow and Larssen. They are rock-solid handling the procedural business, but as Brother Marc, Filip Schnack’s teen angst is abrasively annoying. Cloe Heinrich is excellent as peculiar Ingrid, but Rick just cannot find the handle for her scene stalking or being stalked by the killer. Instead of building terror, these sequences are confusing and uncomfortable, in a “what am I watching?” kind of way. That is somewhat surprising, because Rick rather deftly helmed the not-classic, but still impressively overachieving Val Kilmer B-movie, The Super.

In a Land that No Longer Exists: Striking a Pose in the GDR

Suzie Schultz was one of the few East German women to wear her country’s Haute Couture. That was because the GDR fashion industry produced its pret-a-porter collections solely for export to the West, in exchange for hard currency. They still had to drape the clothes over pretty models, so that was where she came in. However, she ran afoul of the Stasi because of her friendships with gay and otherwise undesirable colleagues in screenwriter-director Aelrun Goette’s In a Land that No Longer Exists, which is currently available on outbound international American flights.

It is early 1989. Viewers should know what that means. The Stasi is strenuously trying to prevent it, but obviously they will fail. Regardless, when the college-bound Schultz is caught with a copy of Orwell’s 1984, she is banned from university and assigned a menial factory job as punishment. From what her mechanic father hears from clients, she got off easy. That does not make her proletariat co-workers’ hostility any easier to take. Then one fateful night, “Coyote” a freelance fashion photographer takes a candid Bill Cunningham-style picture of her that Sibylle, the leading GDR fashion magazine, publishes.

The publisher is hesitant to sign Schultz to a full-time contract, but her gay assistant Rudi coaches her to walk and carry herself like a proper model. Coyote’s “celebration of labor” spread shot at Schultz’s workplace seals the deal. Not surprisingly, Schultz grows increasingly close to Rudi as a friend and Coyote as a lover. However, their “anti-social” tendencies could make further trouble for her with the Stasi. In fact, it will not be the dissident Coyote whom they demand she inform upon. Instead, they want her to dish dirt on Rudi, solely due to his sexuality.

Schultz is a fictional character, but her story is directly inspired by Goette’s own experiences as a fashion model in East Germany. It is a tragic and provocative narrative and a timely reminder of the pervasive homophobia of the Soviet-dominated Socialist regimes. Goette also captures the arbitrariness and the pettiness of the Stasi’s punitive measures. There is little nostalgia in Land that No Longer Exists, except for the giddily rebellious art shows staged by Rudi’s circle of friends.

Touristic Intents

Considering the Soviets repurposed concentration camps into gulags after WWII, it is hardly surprising East Germany found new uses for an uncompleted Nazi resort on the Baltic Sea. The nearly three-mile eight-building complex never had an explicitly military purpose while Hitler was in power, but the ideology guiding its construction and its subsequent use during the socialist regime make its current mixed-use (hotels, luxury condos, and a youth hostel) quite controversial. Mat Rappaport explores the structures’ history and significance in the documentary, Touristic Intents, which opens Monday in LA.

The “Colossus of Prora” was supposed to host up to 20,000 loyal vacationing Germans in equal egalitarian comfort. It was conceived by the National Socialist labor organization Strength Through Joy as a place where working-class German union members could vacation like the privileged bourgeoisie. It was never completely finished, but it served as temporary barracks for concentration camp support staff during the war. Although it would not have had high strategic value, it arguably still would have been a legitimate military target, had the Allies known of it.

Throughout the post-war years, the GDR regime put Prora to a variety of uses. Most notoriously, it became a camp for the conscientious objectors the Protestant Church had pressured the Communist state into excluding from armed service. One of the survivors, Stephan Schack, explains how the state systematically attempted to break him and his fellow dissenting conscripts while they were essentially imprisoned in Prora.

The best segments of Touristic Intents are those featuring Schack—by a country mile. The rest of the on-camera commentators lack his emotional resonance, but they are also quite reserved and mostly rather dull. Many of them are also largely in denial. Frankly, Strength Through Joy perfectly illustrates the socialism in National Socialism. It was literally a massive social welfare public works project spearheaded by a quasi-governmental union. Nevertheless, many talking heads argue it Strength Through Joy wasn’t really a union, because its dues were so high. And yet, so many people felt compelled to join.

Margarethe 89 (short), from Cannes to FS

You can say GDR socialism was unifying, because it brought together the Catholic Church and punk rockers—against the oppressive Communist regime. In 1989, Margarethe’s lover, Heinrich, regularly played with his band in a dissident Church. Tragically, she could rarely attend, because she was confined to an East German mental hospital, for punitive rather than medical reasons. German-born French animator Lucas Malbrun revisits the final dark days of the GDR regime in the short film Magarethe 89, which premiered at Cannes’ Quizane des Cineastes 2023 (a.k.a. Directors Fortnight) and currently screens for free on Festivalscope’s consumer-facing site.

Even in the prison-like psychiatric hospital, there are inmate-patients willing to inform on their fellow prisoners. However, Margarethe is determined to be free, at least in her mind, but hopefully also in physical bodily terms too. At least Heinrich is at liberty to play with his band, but he too must attend weekly “check-ups,” if that is what they really are. Regardless, since it is 1989, viewers will know the regime’s days are numbered, but for some, the act of informing is a hard habit to break.

Sam—a Saxon, on Hulu

The racism Sam Meffire faced in his own native country was so bad, he joined the riot police, for the protection conferred by their reputation. Then the Berlin Wall fell. Yes, he was an East German, but he wasn’t always treated like one. Things were even more complicated after Reunification. Meffire’s story is told, with a don’t-take-it-as-gospel disclaimer in creators Jorg Winger, Christoph Silber, and Tyron Ricketts’ seven-part Sam—a Saxon, which premieres today on Hulu.

For Meffire (the son of a Marxist Cameroonian exchange student, who died under mysterious circumstances), the GDR could be a pretty racist place. His wife Antje and her democracy activist friends understood that, but their first priorities were democratic reforms, like free speech. Consequently, they are shocked when Meffire enrolls in the riot police’s exam, having been inspired by a chance encounter with Major Shreier. As an athlete, Meffire easily passes the physical requirements and Shreier is honest enough to recognize his qualifications.

Of course, the Wall will soon fall, which will force Meffire to start over, but without his estranged wife and their young son. He gets another shot at a law enforcement career with the Dresden police, but it all seems futile when his corrupt superiors keep him sidelined with clerical tasks. However, everything changes with the rise of racist extremism in the former GDR. First, Meffire achieves some personal notoriety as the literal face of an ad campaign for racial tolerance in Saxony. Then he is tapped by the state’s justice minister to put together a task-force targeting the growing National Socialist revival.

Based (somewhat loosely, according to the opening credits) on Meffire’s memoir, Sam, a Saxon tells a tragic rise-and-fall story. Technically, Meffire is usually right on the issues, but his intransigence and his temper inevitably cause his downfall. In fact, he becomes a violent outlaw, not unlike the criminals he was trying to arrest. Yet, Winger, Silnber, and Ricketts never fully delve into the he-who-fights-monsters-becomes-a-monster irony of his story. Not surprisingly, identity (of the racial, national, East vs. West regional, and social-tribal varieties) overshadows everything.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of historical ironies in Sam, a Saxon, as when Meffire gets jumped by Nazi-identified thugs in the Workers’ Paradise or when former riot police recruits convert to far-right enforcers. This is an epic story, but the flow is a little clunky. The start of each episode tends to skip ahead a few months (or years), with little transitionary exposition, to explain how Meffire got there. It also shows him making the same mistakes over and over. Every episode we see Meffire alienate someone important in his life, because he is so consumed with his work. That might be true to how people are in real life, but the repetitiveness is a problem on-screen.

Regardless, Malick Bauer is terrific as Meffire. He nearly spontaneously combusts from his nuclear brooding, while his charisma truly pops out of the screen. It is easy to understand why he was chosen to be the face of the “I am a Saxon” campaign.

Back to School: The Silent Revolution

Kids are not any safer living under oppressive regimes and ideologies than their parents are. That is a lesson all students should learn sooner rather than later, for all our sakes. In 1956 East Germany, the Stalinstadt senior class always basically knew the Communist government was vicious and unjust, but dramatic events will prove it beyond all doubt in Lars Kraume’s historically-based The Silent Revolution, which is a perfect supplement for your schooling-at-home lesson plans.

It all started when two high school seniors wanted to see German bombshell Marion Michael in the risqué (for the time) Liane, Jungle Goddess, naturally only screening in the morally decadent West (this is pre-Wall, when travel between East and West was not strictly forbidden). However, before the feature, Theo Lemke and Kurt Wachter are amazed by a newsreel accurately reporting the Soviet crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Lemke is the class clown and Wachter is the son of a local Party official. Neither fits the revolutionary profile (or rather “counter-revolutionary,” according to Party propagandists), but they are both electrified. On returning, they listen to West German radio with their classmates to confirm their reports.

At school, they decide to observe two minutes of silence to honor the fallen Hungarian freedom fighters. Essentially, it was Wachter’s idea, but a majority agreed to it. The only vehement no vote comes from Erik Babinsky, who believes he is the son of a martyred Communist partisan. However, the entire class is in huge trouble when the ministry gets wind of their silent protest. Following Franklin’s advice, the two “ringleaders” try to keep the class hanging together, so they do not hang separately, but the Communists will ruthlessly exploit any and all of the young students’ weaknesses.

Silent Revolution is an absolutely terrific film everyone ought to see, just because its great cinema. It is especially recommended for students, who can surely identify with the teen characters. It can help explain the nature of Communism, particularly with respects to the Hungarian Revolution and the divided Germany. The tragically ill-fated 1953 Uprising also casts a shadow over the events it dramatizes. Yet, Kraume’s adaptation of Dietrich Garstka’s book also addresses worthy themes like personal loyalty, family love and sacrifice, the demands of integrity, and the corrosive impact of lies and propaganda on society.

Balloon: Escaping Socialism

Hot air rises, even back in the cold, dingy GDR. Unfortunately, the wind rarely blew in a northernly direction. That is one of the many reasons why escape using a hot air balloon was such a desperate and unlikely plan. Nevertheless, two families oppressed by the socialist state will risk everything trying to sail away to freedom in Michael Bully Herbig’s historically accurate Balloon, which opens this Friday in New York.

If this premise sounds familiar, it is because the Walt Disney company produced Night Crossing in 1982, based on the same historical episode. Directed by the Oscar-winning Delbert Mann, the previous film is quite under-appreciated, but this is definitely a story worth re-telling, especially by German filmmakers.

In 1979, Erich Honecker rules East Germany with an iron hand, at Moscow’s behest. Border guards have orders to shoot to kill anyone attempting to cross over to the west, because that is what defending socialism entails. The Strelzyk and Wetzel families are determined to escape the oppressive regime to give their children better lives, so they have been secretly stitching together a hot air balloon as a means of escape. Unfortunately, Gunter Wetzel, the engineer who designed the balloon has come to the conclusion it cannot support both families. Due to the Wetzels’ circumstances, they defer to the Strelzyks, whose flight falters heartbreakingly close to the border.

Unlike the Mann film, which build up the maiden flight, Herbig essentially starts with the initial failed escape attempt and then cranks up the tension as both families go back to the drawing board, mindful that the dreaded Stasi is closing in on them. Rather awkwardly, the Strelzyks live right across the street from the local Stasi section chief. At least, Baumann is a dim-witted blowhard. On the other hand, Lt. Col. Seidel, who is overseeing the investigation of the first balloon crash site and the resulting manhunt, happens to be a shrewd and ruthless predator.

Well-known for comedy in Germany, Herbig set out to make his equivalent of The Lives of Others with Balloon. That is a daunting film to invite comparisons to, but Herbig fares surprisingly well. While Balloon does not have the same tragic heft and inspirational uplift, it is a grittily realistic film that is also nerve-wrackingly tense.

Kino! ’18: In Times of Fading Light

At one point in his career, Wilhelm Powileit thought he was being dispatched to Mexico to help assassinate Trotsky. At least that would have been an accomplishment. Instead, his masters temporarily forgot about him. It was one of many disappointments in his career, but he has lived to a ripe old age while remaining fanatically loyal to the Communist Party, so his birthday is now observed by a parade of minor Party officials. However, everyone can sense history is no longer on Powileit’s side when they gather for his 90^th celebration in Matti Geschonneck’s In Times of Fading Light (trailer here), the opening night film of this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.

Probably nobody in the Powileit family has suffered more for their Communist faith than Powileit’s stepson, Kurt Umnitzer. Now a respected history professor, Umnitzer spent five years in a Soviet labor camp because troop transport train was sent in the wrong direction. Indeed, it was a costlier interlude in his life than he lets on. However, it is most likely why is so determined to convince his rebellious son Sascha to compromise a little, in order to get along. Alas, his counsel falls on deaf ears, as becomes profoundly clear when Sascha calls his father from the safety of West Berlin on the morning of his grandfather’s milestone party.

Right, super awkward. Unmitzer will try to keep the bombshell news under wraps, but it will be even more difficult when his bitter Russian wife Irina also ditches the party (with a small “p,” not the Party, with a capitol “P’), in favor of a bottle of vodka. Yet, Sascha’s defection just personalizes what all the guests already know—East Germany’s days as Stalinist colony are numbered.

Based Eugen Ruge’s family saga novel, boiled down to one pivotal day for dramatic purposes, Fading Light is a melancholy fin de siècle elegy, but it still has plenty of bite. The Powileit patriarch might be getting slightly dotty, but he is still vain, petty, and sometimes mean-spirited. His casual cruelty really comes out when he refers to Unmitzer’s workcamp confinement as “sawing logs in the forest.”

Without question, Bruno Ganz gives a ferocious lead performance as ninety-year-old Socialist ideologue, Bernie Sanders. As a portrayal of a true believing extremist facing the end of his era, it comes from a similar place as his legendary, often memed Hitler in Downfall, but it is quieter and sadder.

Ganz gets the showy parts, but Sylvester Groth gives it a messily human soul as the conflicted Unmitzer. Groth was an East German defector, who has played his share of Stasi agents and collaborators in films and series like Deutschland ’83 and A Pact, but the world weariness and self-contempt of Unmitzer is an even more representative expression of the GDR experience. It is a restrained, but deeply felt performance, whereas Evgenia Dodina blows the doors off their hinges as Irina Unmitzer. Good golly, can she make an entrance.

Fading Light shares a kinship with classic dinner party disaster movies like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Vinterberg’s The Celebration, but it has a Teutonic soul. It is a wryly sardonic, archly observed summation of all the denial and double-think required of GDR’s Powileit’s that is more bitter than sweet. Highly recommended, In Times of Fading Light screens this Friday and Saturday (4/6 & 4/7), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.

DWF ’17: Crossing Fences (short)

During the dark days of the Berlin Wall, the Baltic Sea was a lot like the Florida Straits. Thousands of liberty-seekers were fished out of the water and arrested, while over two hundred drowned or were lost at sea. Christine and Volker Schmidt were fortunate to survive their escape attempt, but they did not feel very lucky at the time. The harrowing 1974 incident is faithfully dramatized in Annika Pampel’s short film Crossing Fences (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Dances with Films.

Volker Schmidt aspired to lead a free life in the West, whereas Christine was determined to spend her life with him. Although she did not chafe under the Party’s restrictions of free expression and thought as much as he did, she still risked everything to join his desperate flight across the Baltic in a makeshift row boat. Sadly, they will not get very far. Arguably, the guards in the watchtower are the very model of socialist efficiency, but they are still sufficiently alert to notice the not so stealthy couple.

Yet, they may have a comparative stroke of good fortune when it is Captain Harold who intercepts them. The urbane officer seems to be curious about the thwarted refugees. In fact, he will even ignore a direct order to summarily execute them in the water, just so he can take their measure.

For obvious reasons, most movies about the former GDR have used the Wall as a focal point. It was indeed a forbidding obstacle and an ominous symbol of oppression. Films like Night Crossing and The Tunnel recreated real life efforts to go over or under, but the watery northern border has been largely overlooked by cinema and television. That alone would make Crossing Fences a valuable short film, but it also happens to be a potent human drama and remarkably well-crafted period production.

Nina Rausch and Christian Wolf make a convincingly loving but desperate couple. Yet, it is Philippe Brenninkmeyer who will really come to personify the film for many viewers. He is terrific as the commanding Captain Harold, but it is important to remember such humanistic officers were the exception rather than the rule under the Communist regime (frankly, it would not be surprising if his real-life counterpart had been purged shortly after his encounter with the Schmidts).

Crossing Fences makes recent history come alive and celebrates the resilient spirit of “ordinary” people like the Schmidts. It is also frighteningly timely, arriving at a time when Putin is openly coveting the Baltic nations. Very highly recommended, Crossing Fences screens this Sunday (6/4), as part of Competition Shorts Block 5, at the 2017 edition of Dances with Films.

NYFF ’16: Karl Marx City

Michael Tucker often serves as the d.p. on the documentaries he co-directs with his wife and creative partner Petra Epperlein, but he has an unusual co-cinematographer on their latest project: the dreaded East German Stasi. Archival surveillance footage from the bad old days of socialism eerily supplement and illustrate Epperlein’s painful family history in Karl Marx City, which screens during the 54th New York Film Festival.

Although she came from a loving family, it is hard for Epperlein to feel nostalgic for her childhood in what was then called Karl-Marx-Stadt. The city changed its name back to Chemnitz as soon as it could in 1990, but the painful legacy would live on, especially for her parents. Epperlein gives us the run down on the scope of the Stasi’s operations at the time of the Fall of the Wall: 90,000 active agents and over 200,000 registered informants. The latter is particularly relevant to the Epperleins, because her father started receiving poison pen letters accusing him of being a snitch shortly after reunification.

Eventually, the stress, guilt, resentment, or depression became too much for Mr. Epperlein to bear, so he committed suicide after burning all his letters and photos. Indeed, the extent to which he tried to erase all traces of himself is especially disturbing for his daughter, so she launches an investigation into her father’s relationship with the Stasi, if any. She will find her answers and they will be a bitter pill to swallow, but maybe not in the way we expect.

KMC is an unusually moving documentary that could even be called revelatory. However, it takes viewers a bit of time to adjust to Epperlein’s aesthetics. The black-and-white cinematography—stark and stylish in the case of Tucker, but just plain stark as far as the Stasi is concerned—is certainly apt and fittingly evocative. However, the rather surreal scenes of Epperlein carrying oddly large boom mics seem distractingly absurd until we realize the exaggerated filmmaker persona is part of a defense mechanism. Slowly, Epperlein lowers her mask, allowing us to viscerally experience her family’s pain—and it stings.

Tellingly, Epperlein takes great pains to call out Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others for creating a fictional good agent who protected his target, something that never happened in real life. While we generally take her point, it should be noted the purpose of Ulrich Mühe’s character was not to absolve the Stasi, but to indict it. This is what those 90,000 agents might have chosen to do, but they didn’t.

Regardless, KMC offers an absolutely fascinating look into lives of relatively average GDR citizens and documents how the Communist system continues to generate bad karma for everyone it touched. It is challenging on many levels, but immediately accessible. It is definitely one of the head-and-shoulders highlights of this year’s NYFF, along with I Called Him Morgan and Two Trains Runnin’. Very highly recommended, Karl Marx City screens this Friday (12/14) and Saturday afternoon (12/15) as part of the Spotlight on Documentary section at the 2016 New York Film Festival.

Deutschland ’83: Undercover in the West, On the Wrong Side of History

It must be a weird full circle experience for an East German defector like Sylvester Groth to now play a Stasi agent, but it is a role he would understand better than most. Groth’s Walter Schweppenstette is in fact the sort of spymaster who can dislodge poor Martin Rauch’s finger with perfect casualness. As a result, the shocked East German will now have an excuse for avoiding the piano while impersonating a West German General’s new aide-de-camp. Rauch did not ask for this assignment, but he will obey as best he can during the course of Deutschland ‘83 (promo here), which premieres this Wednesday on SundanceTV.

Rauch was a loyal Communist border guard serving on the Wall Pres. Reagan will soon challenge Gorbachev to tear down. His aunt Lenora is a high-ranking Stasi strategist, who is pretty freaked out by Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech and his decision to deploy Pershing missiles in West Germany. Rather cold-bloodedly, she picks her nephew to impersonate Moritz Stamm, an orphaned junior officer loner who will soon report for duty under Gen. Wolfgang Edel, a prominent NATO liaison. Of course, Rauch is reluctant to leave his almost-fiancée Annett and his ailing mother Ingrid, but Lenora promises to arrange a transplant for her if he agrees, not that he has a choice.

The first two episodes of D83 screened at the Berlin Film Festival and they hang together as an initial arc pretty well. We can see perhaps hints of doubt being sown when Rauch, the ardent Marxist first encounters a western supermarket. His superiors and colleagues are not exactly the reassuring types either, especially Aunt Lenora. However, it might be the freedom exercised by young West Germans that ultimately shakes Rauch’s convictions. After all, the peacenik chart-topper “99 Luftballoons” is a constant presence throughout the first two episodes.

As Lenora Rauch, Maria Schrader could well surpass Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood for stone cold Machiavellian villainy. Right from the start, she makes the show. Jonas Nay also shows promise as Rauch/Stamm, convincingly portraying his early overwhelmed naivety, while hinting at the resourcefulness and moral confliction to come. As Schweppenstette, Groth (best known for playing Goebbels not once, but twice in Inglorious Basterds and My Fuhrer) appropriately exudes malevolence and Ulrich Noethen quickly establishes Gen. Edel’s contradictory human dimensions. Unfortunately, Errol Trotman-Harewood seems to be trying for the cringiest ugly American stereotypes as blustery Gen. Arnold Jackson.

The period details of D83 are spot on, extending far beyond the music. Even in the early going, helmer Edward Berger keeps it tight and tense. The limited series also boasts a wealth of memorable performances from smaller but key supporting players, such as Lena Lauzemis as Rauch’s shadowy hotel contact. However, it is unclear how writer-co-creator Anna Winger will ultimately treat Pres. Reagan. There do seem to be indications we are supposed to sympathize with the resistance to his Pershing deployment. Still, there is no denying he shook things up.

Overall, Deutschland ’83 shows considerable potential judging from the first two episodes. It must be the first German programming to air directly in America since the History Channel broadcast Dresden so it is nice to see SundanceTV taking chances. Espionage fans should be advised, it commences this Wednesday (6/17) on SundanceTV.

The Tower: a Family and a Regime Come Undone

By the 1980s, most East Germans realized if they hadn’t finished building socialism by now, they never would. Dr. Richard Hoffmann sort of got the picture, but there were blind spots in his understanding. For instance, he does not recognize the pleasant—dare we say bourgeoisie—nature of his Dresden “Tower” neighborhood necessarily makes him somewhat suspect. Unfortunately, his son will become intimately acquainted with the GDR’s hypocrisy and vindictiveness in Christian Schwochow’s The Tower, which opens this Friday in New York.

Based on Uwe Tellkamp’s prize-winning novel, The Tower was original produced as a three hour German television mini-series that Music Box Films will release on VOD, along with the two hour (on the dot) American theatrical version. We have only seen the latter, but there are no gaping holes apparent, suggesting they used a scalpel worthy of Dr. Hoffmann at the peak of his powers rather than Harvey Weinstein’s meat cleaver.

Dr. Hoffmann is indeed rather pleased with his situation in 1982. He will be the recipient of a prestigious medical award and is widely seen as the likely successor to the clinic’s fuddy-duddy director. Somehow, he is successfully juggling his career, a family life with his wife Anne and his underachieving son Christian, while secretly keeping house with his mistress Josta Fischer and their illegitimate daughter. However, publically reprimanding an incompetent doctor with close ties to the central committee is not a smart strategy for promotion. In fact, it is the beginning of the end.

Shortly thereafter, Dr. Hoffmann is visited by the Stasi. Out of youthful ideological zeal, he agreed to be an informer during his student days, but tried to forget the old arrangement as he became disillusioned by reality. They now expect him to renew his snitching duties. Of course, the Stasi knows all about his secret life. They also have a damning report he submitted on his best friend and longtime professional colleague. Dr. Hoffmann tries to stall and prevaricate, but his position becomes increasingly sticky when Christian runs into the sort of ideological trouble at school that could permanently ruin his future.

There is something fundamentally appealing about a film that starts with Hoffmann and his cronies stealing Christmas trees literally tagged for privileged Party apparatchiks. While Schwochow largely skips over familiar issues of shortages and privations because of the characters’ relatively well-to-do standing, he vividly portrays the everyday duality of GDR life. Whenever the Hoffmanns need to have a serious discussion, they invite each other for a walk. When they do speak, ostensibly neutral code-words are peppered throughout their discourse.

As the Job-like Dr. Hoffmann undone by a ruthless state and his own moral failings, Dresden-born Jan Josef Liefers is riveting like car crash. It is a thoroughly grounded performance, but it takes on classically tragic dimensions. Yet, it is Claudia Michelsen who really anchors the film with her quiet authority. Frankly, there is not a lot of room for Streep-ish histrionics in The Tower, because that was an indulgence East Berliners could not afford.

Schwochow actually has two films opening this weekend in New York. West more fully explores the challenges of immigration frequently alluded to in Tower, but the Hoffman family saga has considerably more heft and bite. Both are recommended, but if time only allows for one, it should be The Tower (of course, the fuller VOD cut is probably even better). It takes a hard, honest look at what statism does to people, while pulling audiences into a sweeping Cold War drama. Highly recommended, the theatrical version of The Tower opens this Friday (11/7) in New York at the Cinema Village, whereas West opens at Anthology Film Archives.

KINO! ’14: West

During the late 1960s, the New Left popularized the slogan “the personal is political.” They did not do Nelly Senff any favors by doing so. When she crosses over to West Berlin, she cites “personal reasons” as her motivation, but the Allied security services are primed to distrust such evasive answers, for good reason. Senff quickly learns she might be unwittingly caught amidst a wider conspiracy in Christian Schwochow’s West (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 KINO! Festival of German Films in New York.

Senff was once a leading scientist in East Germany, much like her late Russian partner, Wassilij. He was an erratic presence in her life and that of their son, Alexej, but they still miss him dearly. Therefore, it is a bit of a shock when Senff learns her roguish lover was also a Stasi courier, who perhaps faked his death to escape their grasp. Keen to find out his whereabouts, the various agencies withhold Senff’s requisite approvals until she gives them answers. That means for the foreseeable future, she and Alexej will be stuck in the gray, institutional Marienfelde Refugee Center and not legally employable.

The respectable West is not nearly comparable to Petzold’s Barbara or Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, but it never seeks to excuse or deny the human rights violations of the GDR regime. From what we see and hear in the film, life in the East was pretty bad. There is a fair amount of moral equivalency going on, but the Americans emerge looking the best, thanks to the sympathetic presentation and portrayal of CIA agent John Bird, playing with finely nuanced sensitivity by Jacky Ido.

For similar reasons, the obvious comparison between Nina Hoss’s Dr. Barbara Wolff and Jördis Triebel is not favorable to the latter. She does a fine expressing Senff’s mounting paranoia, but she cannot reach the same levels of diffident defiance and quiet vulnerability.

Frankly, in terms of its structure and tenor, West is a bit erratic. Just when it is poised to become a Brezhnev era Third Man, it pulls back from the brink, settling for more domestic dramas. Still, it definitely convinces viewers government buildings are no place to raise a child. It also takes seriously the notion of Stasi persecution targeting GDR defectors.

Ultimately, West works towards a hopeful statement rather than an angry one, making it an interesting film to see in conjunction with Dercourt’s A Pact, also screening during the festival. It is a work of some merit, but it lacks the moral heft and tragic pay-off of its more heralded predecessors. Recommended with minor reservations, West opens this year’s non-MoMA KINO! with an invite only screening at the Museum of the Moving Image this Thursday (6/12), in advance of a forthcoming New York theatrical release.

KINO! ’14: A Pact

Is a former East German informer really the Devil? He is rather Mephistophelean. Yet, in their school days, Paul Meier sort of got the better of Georg Schmidt. Meier’s karmic bill comes due years later, with substantial compounded interest, in Denis Dercourt’s A Pact (trailer here), which screens during the 2014 KINO! Festival of German Films in New York.

The earnest young Meier was so smitten with Anna, he forged a supposed love note from her to him, in hopes of spurring the arrogant Schmidt to dump her. Surprisingly, it works. However, before stealing some other schmuck’s girl, Schmidt extracts a promise from Meier that will loom large. At some unknown point in the future, Meier must return his presumptive new girlfriend, should Schmidt duly request her.

One Unification later, Meier is reasonably happily married to Anna and the proud father of two classically German looking teenagers. Much to his surprise, the new boss of Meier’s investment banking firm turns out to be the very same Georg Schmidt. Initially, things are rather awkward between the two ex-friends. Of course, Schmidt is not exactly a touchy feely sort of fellow. He is, after all, the son of an East German cop, who knew how to drop a dime to further his interests. The doctored blackmail pictures Schmidt received of Meier in an apparently compromising position with his assistant do not help matters. Even worse, the international market turns against copper commodities, after Meier took a bullish position. At least he can still count on the firm’s security chief Daniel as a friend and ally.

Neither Meier nor the audience seriously considers his pal’s suggestion that Schmidt just might be Satan or some sort of djinn, but Meier’s paranoia will entertain just about any other possibility. Frankly, he is such a hapless victim, many viewers will probably start rooting against him. Still, it is hard to root for Schmidt, but Dercourt obliges with a third act, forehead-slapping game-changer.

A Pact is a tonal traffic jam that leaves dozens of question hanging unresolved, but it is never dull. It starts out as an East German Jules & Jim, detours through Jeffrey Archer territory and evolves into a payback thriller. Viewers who are easily annoyed by cinematic head-fakes will probably find more than they can take here. Still, it goes about its murky business with German professionalism. At times, Dercourt (the French expat) takes things over the top, but that is not such a bad thing.

As Schmidt, Sylvester Groth is memorably severe and calculating, setting the atmosphere of intrigue quite nicely. Poor Mark Waschke’s Meier is required to be a bit of a doormat, but Sophie Rois brings all kinds of barely submerged crazy as Schmidt’s fateful girlfriend, Yvonne. Likewise, Marie Bäumer is rather credibly ticked off with the disappointing men in her life, while Johannes Zeiler steals scenes in bulk as the resourceful womanizer, Daniel.

As in a great Hawthorne novel, the GDR past continues to exert a malevolent influence on lives in the present. Frankly, this is not a film a former East German apparatchik with a guilty conscience could enjoy. It clearly implies there are many who still remember the Communist era and are not willing to forgive. Recommended for those who enjoy psychological thrillers with the occasional melodramatic indulgence, A Pact screens this Friday (6/13), Sunday (6/15), and next Tuesday (6/17) as part of this year’s KINO! at the Quad Cinema.

This Ain’t California: Skate or Die & Unify

The architecture of East Berlin was a crime against art.  Yet, for skateboarders, all that monstrous concrete was practically a workers’ paradise.  The East German skater subculture gets the full documentary treatment and then some in Marten Persiel’s This Ain’t California (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Athletics were a big deal in the GDR, but a scruffy skateboarder like Denis “Panik” Paraceck was nobody’s idea of a Katarina Witt.  He was supposed to be an Olympic swimmer, but his rebellious nature and flair for daredevil stunts drew him to the skater scene.  Although the Stasi constantly spied on Paraceck and his cronies, the East German sports bureaucracy eventually tried to co-opt the movement when they discovered the burgeoning sport had its own circuit of international competitions.  It seems Paraceck initially tried to play ball, but he quickly chafed under their authority.  However, there is also a strong likelihood he never existed in the first place.

While TAC is structured as an elegy to Paraceck, a little digging raised serious questions about the film’s cross-its-heart-and-swear-to-die veracity.  Evidently, Persiel now uses the term “documentary tale” and speaks of the broadening meaning for the genre.  This is not an isolated case.  After garnering considerable festival attention, Michal Marczak admitted At the Edge of Russia was kind of, you know, staged.  (Considering I noted how surprising it was Russia granted a Polish filmmaker access to a remote military base as well as the cinematic look of his subjects, I would argue my review holds up pretty well in retrospect).

Regardless, the underground East German skater community is an established fact.  It seems safe to assume they were on the business end of Stasi surveillance and the PR conscious Party probably did try to recruit them for propaganda purposes.  As for the rest of TAC, you tell me.

In fact, some of the animated interludes are obviously intended to instill a fable-like vibe.  Had Paraceck really burned down the GDR’s skater training facilities, it is doubtful he would have lived to see unification.  Rather, Paraceck functions as a scapegoat-like creation myth of unification.  Supposedly locked in a Stasi prison cell when the wall came down, he missed all the festivities.  By the time he was released, Persiel and their cohorts had already moved on with their unified lives, leaving him behind.

There is definitely a measure of truth to TAC, but it is a fair question to ask how much.  If nothing else, Persiel captures the milieu of the GDR -era.  Paraceck or those for whom he serves as a composite did not want to become political activists.  Nonetheless, they became de-facto dissidents simply by careening about atop a small board with wheels.  Visually striking, TAC combines talking head reminiscences, stark animated sequences, and some impressive archival skating footage (that may well have been recreated by Persiel and a cast of contemporary skaters).  Recommended for those fascinated by the failed Communist experience (but as what I have no idea), This Ain’t California opens this Friday (4/12) in New York at the Maysles Institute Cinema.

Memo to the Academy: Nina Hoss in Barbara

Intimacy is based on trust, so is it ever really possible in police state like the Soviet-era East Germany?  Obviously, that is not the Stasi’s problem.  They are out to do everything possible to isolate and demoralize a dissident doctor.  Yet, in spite of her better judgment, she will develop ambiguously complicated feelings for her minder in Christian Petzold’s Barbara (trailer here), Germany’s official best foreign language Academy Award submission, which opens this Friday in New York.

As soon as Dr. Barbara Wolff applied for an exit visa, her brilliant career was effectively over.  Transferred from a prestigious East Berlin hospital to a provincial backwater, Dr. Wolff is all too aware of the eyes on her.  The most obvious set belongs to Andre, Barbara’s ostensive supervisor, whose role as the designated Stasi snitch is an open secret.  He has a surprisingly convincing good guy act though and he genuinely seems to care about their patients, particularly Mario, a young man suffering from a mysterious head trauma that defies diagnosis.  Yet, the case that resonates deepest with Dr. Wolff is that of Stella, a recaptured prison camp escapee suffering from meningitis.

Wolff is not inclined to meekly submit to the Stasi’s mounting harassment.  Having hatched an escape plan with her West German lover, she believes her time in East Germany is limited, which is why she is so surprised by her growing attraction to Andre and her emotional investment in their patients.

Barbara has been described as Petzold’s response to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s brilliant The Lives of Others.  That is true to an extent, but not in a polemical sense.  There is no nostalgia here for the Honecker regime, let alone a defense.  Petzold’s parents made the flight to freedom Dr. Wolff is anticipating, so he is understandably sensitive to the everyday tribulations endured by East Germans.  Indeed, the film is best at conveying the guarded nature required for even the most prosaic of conversations and the jarring sound of that dreaded knock in the night.

Barbara Wolff easily represents Nina Hoss’s best performance to reach our shores.  Outwardly diffident but profoundly uneasy beneath her facade, the good doctor might be the best woman’s lead role of the year (and most years prior).  It is a tricky proposition to convey her character’s roiling inner turmoil as well as her concerted efforts masking it from the world, but Hoss pulls it off remarkably.  It demands a full scale Oscar campaign.  Former East German Ronald Zehrfield also helps complicate audiences’ emotional responses as the flawed but perhaps still idealistic Andre, who might also be a victim himself, in that manner unique to captive citizens of police states.

Exercising a masterful control of mood and ambient sound, Petzold vividly recreates a sense of life in the GDR, in all its oppressive austerity.  It is a lean, tense narrative, yet Petzold derives much of the suspense from within his characters rather than through external cloak-and-daggering.  A very accomplished film featuring Oscar-worthy work from Hoss, Barbara is very highly recommended when it opens this Friday (12/21) in New York downtown at the Angelika Film Center and uptown at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

EUFF ’11: The Invisible Frame & Rabbit a la Berlin

For most mere mortals, the non-narrative experimental film and the travelogue rank amongst the least engaging of film genres. Yet, unlikely enough, a film that combined elements of both spawned a sequel of sorts. In the waning days of the Cold War, filmmaker Cynthia Beatt followed Tilda Swinton as she biked around the Berlin Wall in Cycling the Frame. With the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany, it made a certain amount of sense to revisit their trip twenty-one years later in The Invisible Frame (trailer here), with screens with the superior Oscar nominated documentary Rabbit á la Berlin at the 2011 European Union Film Festival.

Beginning and ending at the Brandenburg Gate, Swinton does indeed peddle around the Wall, or at least its remnants. We see the few odd standing fragments and looming watchtowers, decaying ghosts of a tragic period of German history. She frequently stops to examine the many monuments to the victims of the GDR regime, such as Günter Litfin, the first reported escapee killed by his Communist captors. In her voice-overs, Swinton occasionally offers some navel-gazing ruminations and recites some poetry (the most appropriate being some untitled verse by Soviet dissident Anna Akhmatova).

Frame shows viewers a whole lot of peaceful countryside, which might be pleasant, but also gets repetitive. Still, it is quite the contrast to our general mental picture of the Wall and its environs. At her most insightful, Swinton muses on the clarity with which one can see how dramatically the Wall divided people and neighborhoods, through its absence. Unfortunately, Frame makes a wholly inappropriate analogy in its final dedication to the people of so-called “Palestine.” For shame.

The Berlin Wall never saved a single life (quite the contrary), whereas Israel’s security barrier has saved hundreds, perhaps thousands. Relatively unobtrusive over most of its length, with regular established crossing points, it is protective rather than imprisoning, bearing no comparison to the Wall. Indeed, those committing acts of terror in Israel are much closer akin to the Communist guards, firing at fellow Germans like Chris Gueffroy, the final victim of the Wall, whose memorial is also found along Frame’s route.

Unquestionably, directors Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosolowski’s truly original Rabbit á la Berlin (trailer here) is the main event of the double bill. During the immediate post-war years, a hearty band of rabbits survived by raiding the garden patches on Potsdamer Platz. Much to their supposed surprise, sheltering walls were suddenly erected around the bunnies in 1961. With a nice grassy run, plenty of shade, and precious little human contact, the whiskered critters made like rabbits and multiplied. The East German guards even began adopting them to help pass the time.

However, for many West Berliners, especially artists, the rabbits’ ability to burrow beneath the walls made them symbols of something greater—coyote tricksters for their divided age. Then, as escape attempts became more frequent and daring, the rabbits’ peaceful lives were upturned. Their lush grass was destroyed so that fugitive footsteps would be more easily tracked in the exposed dirt. Formerly their protectors, the guards declared open season on the rabbits, like a red army of Elmer Fudds.

One of Rabbit’s many surprises is the extent and quality of the archival film capturing the Berlin rabbits in their former environment. Credible simply as a wildlife film (even featuring the smoothly placid narration of Krystyna Czubówna, a well-known Polish voice-over artist for nature docs), it also has a slyly subversive sensibility, particularly when it incorporates news footage of the likes of Fidel Castro and Yassir Arafat (take note Beatt) gawking approvingly at the Wall. Wistful without being nostalgic, it was one of the more inventive and entertaining documentaries to play in New York last year. Highly recommended (but Frame not so much), Rabbit screens Sunday (3/20) and Wednesday (3/23) as part of the EUFF at the Siskel Film Center in Chicago.

Red Prometheus

Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany 1945-1990
By Dolores L. Augustine
MIT Press

There used to be a joke to the effect of: “only Communism could make Germans lazy.” Lazy really is not the right word—inefficient or counter-productive would have been more apt. The blame fell squarely on the shoulders of a dictatorial system and those who served it as enforcers. As Dolores Augustine makes clear in Red Prometheus, East Germany’s engineers and technical professionals maintained a high level of professionalism and a resolute work ethic throughout the Communist era, but were consistently undercut by systemic failings beyond their control.

East Germany’s engineers were in a peculiar position. Having largely collaborated with the National Socialists, many were coerced into a kind of temporary servitude in the Soviet Union. Yet, many former collaborators found the Soviets and then the East Germans more than willing to sweep their Nazi history under the rug in return for their loyal service. Augustine explains:

“Due to their Nazi past, they were predisposed to get along tolerably well in the Soviet Union. They were accustomed to being the privileged but politically impotent helpers of a dictatorship, and to putting ethical concerns regarding military research out of mind.” (p. 32)

Once back home, East German engineers were able to lean on a well established professional ethos to maintain their prestige and sense of worth. However, Augustine details how their work was frequently sabotaged by poor planning, shortages of goods and foreign exchange, and in some cases, the deliberate actions of the Soviets themselves. Almost as asides, Augustine reports some fascinating incidences of scarcity in the East, as when: “the central planners allowed all the glue produced in the GDR in one year to be used to create the Venusian landscape for the country’s first science fiction film, The Silent Star.” (p. 228)

The Stasi was not particularly helpful either, although Augustine suggests confidential informants were at times able to use their handlers to address health and safety concerns. Still, there are plenty of horror stories like the case of Werner Hartmann, who championed microelectronics to a leadership intent on misallocating resources elsewhere. According to Augustine:

“Hartmann was scapegoated for failures that he had worked mightily to prevent. Taken into custody several times in 1974-1976, he was relentlessly questioned for days at a time by the Stasi.” (p. 179)

Hartmann was eventually broken, but belated efforts to step up East Germany’s microelectronic industry were doomed to failure. Espionage came to replace innovation as engineers were increasingly called upon to copy smuggled western technology. This caused manifold problems, as Augustine explains:

“First, patent infringements made it difficult to sell [East] German equipment in the West. Second, purely imitative ‘research’ demoralized personnel, whose work was robbed of creativity. Third, the costs and difficulty of copying foreign microelectronic components increased exponentially as miniaturization progressed.” (p. 309-310)

Reading an entire book on East German engineering may sound like a dare, but a film like Frank Beyer’s Trace of Stones illustrates the very real drama of engineering and central planning in the GDR. It was deadly serious. The professional tradition of German engineers often placed the field in an ambiguous position. The East German television tower which graces the book’s cover in many ways symbolizes the ambiguities in Augustine’s study. It was an unqualified success of East German engineering, but Augustine adds: “It should not be forgotten, however, that one of the most important aspects of the tower for its many visitors was the view it afforded of the entire city—including West Berlin.” (p. 212)

In truth, Prometheus does make dense reading, but that should not be considered a criticism of Augustine’s prose. She is actually a good writer, but there is a great deal of information compacted on each page, which requires some unpacking on the reader’s part. There is also, by necessity, a high concentration of acronyms. Yet it requires no prior knowledge of engineering, and should not be considered simply a specialized academic text. Augustine relates some fascinating Cold War history in Prometheus. She writes in an even-handed manner on the engineers, and of the regime which squandered their talents. The book is even attractive as an object, with a dramatic cover image, black and white photos throughout, and some color plates.

In reality, a history of East German engineering is probably a tough sell, but one hopes it finds its way into most academic libraries. Students of both the Cold War and engineering history may well find it rewarding reading as well.