<p> 1</p><p>The love lives of others. The discourse of love and the reconstruction of east German identity in post-unification cinema.’ [Slide1]</p><p>Seán Allan (University of Warwick)</p><p>In an observation that predates the phenomenon of ‘Ostalgia’ by some two centuries, the</p><p>Romantic philosopher and poet Jean Paul once remarked that ‘Die Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies aus dem wir nicht vertrieben werden können.’1 And in the so-called post- ideological era in which all grand narratives of history have been relentlessly called into question, it is hardly surprising that, following the collapse of the GDR and the end of the</p><p>Cold War, the focus of cultural analysis has shifted away from ‘history’ and towards</p><p>‘memory’ – a change of emphasis that some have caricatured as a move away from the assumed objectivity of conventional historical narratives and towards a more subjective approach rooted in theories of social psychology. Whereas in 1974 the historian Hayden</p><p>White argued in favour of bringing the tools of literary analysis to bear on historiography, complaining that ‘history as a discipline is in bad shape today because it has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination’,2 today the situation has almost been reversed. Now cultural studies – with a theoretical approach derived from fields as diverse as literary studies, anthropology, ethnography, and psychoanalysis – has created a set of analytical tools with which to embrace the plurality of different discursive constructions of memory.</p><p>In the field of German Studies, many of these ‘memory contests’ have – perhaps inevitably – focused on memories of the Third Reich and the legacy of the Holocaust; and the shift away from the more conventional paradigms of ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ during the 1980s, and towards an engagement with cultures of memory in the post- unification period, has been accelerated by what Sigrid Weigel has termed the</p><p>1 Jean Paul, ‘Impromptus, welche ich künftig in Stammbücher schreiben werden’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Norbert Miller, Munich: Hanser, 1978, section II, vol. 3, pp. 814-823 (p. 820, No. 29) 2 Reproduced in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978, p.99 2</p><p>‘Generationswechsel’ and, in particular, the emergence of a new ‘third generation’. In the context of the Third Reich, the clearly defined periodisation of 1933-45, makes its relatively straightforward to pinpoint generational transformations: crudely put, we are talking about a post-1914 generation, a post-45 generation and a post 1968-generation.</p><p>But one of the difficulties in tackling memories of the GDR, of course, is that this generational schema does not map very neatly onto the history of the GDR. In part, this is because the course of GDR history is often regarded – not only in the UK but also in the</p><p>Federal Republic – for the most part as a monolithic and undifferentiated historical narrative. Whereas prior to 1949, the Third Reich and the Holocaust constitute a point of departure from which we can start counting in generations, unless we choose to regard the founding of the GDR as a similar moment of historical trauma – not an approach I would endorse – such moments of trauma in the history of the GDR apear defuse and ill- defined. Were we to adapt Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory and apply it to discussions of the GDR for example, what are the moments of trauma that might constitute the ‘post-memories’ of subsequent generations? The failed uprising of 1953?</p><p>The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961? The 11th Plenum of 1965? The widescale recruitment of IMs by the Stasi from the mid 1970s onwards? Or indeed the collapse of the GDR itself (a moment of personal trauma that – albeit from the perspective of a left- wing west intellectual – was captured so eloquently in Oskar Röhler’s film Die</p><p>Unberührbare of 2001)? By the same token, while some historians would draw a parallels between the totalitarian character of the Hitler-regime during the Third Reich and the SED-regime in the GDR many – if not most – scholars find such undifferentiated approaches as highly questionable. But even if one accepts, at least in part, the view of the GDR as a totalitarian state the parameters of the perpetrator-victim discourse in the</p><p>GDR are considerably more blurred than that of the Third Reich. Who, exactly, are the 3 victims in the GDR? Indeed this problem of GDR ‘victimhood’ is one that we find documented in Jürgen Böttcher’s Jahrgang ‘45, sentimentalised in Margarethe von</p><p>Trotta’s Das Versprechen, satirised in Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee, and provocatively reformulated in von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen. Indeed the question of victimhood – and its relationship to east German identity both pre- and post-</p><p>Wende – is further confounded by the process of unification and the subsequent positioning of the ‘Neue Bundesländer’ within the political framework of the new Federal</p><p>Republic as a whole. Is victimhood to be restricted to just those who suffered at the hands of the SED-regime and, in particular, the Stasi? Or should all citizens of the former GDR to be considered as ‘victims’ of a process of economic and political ‘colonisation’ by the</p><p>Federal Republic? And finally, now that the GDR no longer exists, to what extent is it meaningful to talk about an east German identity in the post-Wende world? Now that a generation of children born to parents from the former GDR has come of age in the post-</p><p>Wende world, what exactly is their relationship to the historical past of their parents?</p><p>Loyalty, rejection, detachment, or nostalgic longing? </p><p>In an attempt to trace a series of shifts in the way in which memories of the GDR and constructions of the GDR-Alltag have been reflected in a range of films from the post-Wende period, I have chosen to focus on the changing discourse of love in these films and consider the ways in which the transformation of this discourse at different historical moments opens of a range of perspectives on east German identity. In its ideal form, love might be seen as a sphere from which relationships of power and operations of political ideology have been banished; yet as the films I will be discussing demonstrate, it is often precisely where ideology is denied that it is most pervasively at work. It is in this respect that the discourse of love – and its representation in film – has something in common with ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ generally. For as Martin Sabrow notes in the catalogue 4 to the 2007 exhibition ‘Parteidiktatur und Alltag in der DDR’ staged by the Deutsches</p><p>Historisches Museum: ‘Nun wird das Alltagsleben… schon längst nicht mehr in erster</p><p>Linie als Zone einer autonomen Sonderkultur untersucht, deren Entwicklung weitgehend unberührt von den politischen Umständen der Zeit verläuft.’ </p><p>The first film I want to consider – Jürgen Böttcher’s Jahrgang ’45 [Slide 2] – offers a historical snapshot of the GDR-Alltag in the mid-1960s from an insider’s perspective. Although partially completed in 1966, Böttcher’s film was banned in the wake of the infamous 11. Plenum of 1965, on the grounds that:</p><p>Personen und Umwelt sind vielmehr so gestaltet, daß sie eher der kapitalistischen als der sozialistischen Lebenssphäre zugerechnet werden könnten. Da der Film jedoch eindeutig vorgibt, einen Auschnitt aus unseren gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen zu reflektieren, wird er zutiefst unwahr.3 </p><p>As a result the film was not screened until after the collapse of the GDR in 1990, and it is this delayed release that invites us to see this 1960s ‘Gegenwartsfilm’ as a work of cinematic memory when viewed from the perspective of the post-Wende period. Set in the GDR during the mid 1960s, and filmed in an aesthetic style that underlines Böttcher’s debt to both Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague, Jarhrgang ’45 tells the story of a young couple, Al and Li, whose marriage is on the point of collapse. Having taken a few days off from the car repair shop where he works in order to sort out his impending divorce, Al aimlessly drifts around Berlin while his wife, Li carries on with her work in the maternity ward of the local hospital. </p><p>Böttcher’s film portrays a love relationship that, in its advanced state of decay, is the very antithesis of the teleologically-constructed love relationships that are so characteristic of early DEFA cinema in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1952, the director Kurt Maetzig had confidently proclaimed that ‘Unsere Liebe unterscheidet sich schon heute von der der untergehenden Bürgerwelt… Deshalb spiegelt eine echte</p><p>Liebesgeschichte von heute die Veränderungen unseres gesellschaftlichen, moralischen,</p><p>3 Schenk, p. 209. 5 körperlichen und intellektuellen Lebens wider.’4 This new vision of love during the founding years of the GDR was one that Maetzig had sought to realise in his film Roman einer jungen Ehe (1952) [Slide 3] a work of socialist realism which – as John Urang has pointed out – ‘makes the protagonists’ love contingent upon their politics.’5 Maetzig’s</p><p>Cold War classic traces the turbulent marriage of Agnes Sailer, an idealistic young actress from the East, and her husband, Jochen Karsten, an actor from the West, who is initially too weak to resist the temptations strewn in his path by unscrupulous theatre producers from the West. Yet the lovers’ reconciliation in Roman einer jungen Ehe comes about about from a combination of Jochen’s eventual recognition of the West’s moral bankruptcy, and the intervention of Papa Dulze, a paternalistic old socialist figure and one that, during the films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, had become an almost obligatory stock character. Despite the attempts of filmmakers such as Gerhard Klein and</p><p>Wolfgang Kohlhaase to break with the teleological aesthetics of socialist realism with more open-ended love stories in films such as Eine Berliner Romanze (1956) and Berlin</p><p>– Ecke Schönhauser (1957), the highly schematic, politicised love relationship of Roman einer jungen Ehe represented a model to which East German directors would periodically return in times of political crisis and, in particular, in a series of films made on or around the autumn of 1961.</p><p>The contrast between Maetzig’s Roman einer jungen Ehe and Böttcher’s</p><p>Jahrgang ’45 could hardly be more striking. Opening with a sequence in which Al steps out onto the balacony of his Prenzlauer Berg flat [Slide 4] – a kind of existential</p><p>‘Zwischenraum’ that features not only in Andreas Dresen’s Sommer auf dem Balkon</p><p>4 Kurt Maetzig, ‘Über die Liebe in unseren Filmen. Eröffnung einer Diskussion’, in Günter Agde (ed.), Kurt Maetzig: Filmarbeit. Gespräche Reden, Schriften, Berlin: Henschel, 1987, pp. 243-6 (p. 243). The article was first published in the GDR daily Neues Deutschland under the title ‘Warum gibt es keine Liebe in unseren Filmen?’ on 1 February 1953. 5 John Griffith Urang, ‘Realism and Romance in the East German Cinema, 1952-1962’, Film History, 18 (2006): 88-103 (89). 6</p><p>(2005) but also in Bernd Böhlich’s Du bist nicht allein (2007) – Böttcher’s film highlights thesense of alienation and ennui experienced by the second generation GDR citizens. What makes Jahrgang ’45 so different from other films of this period is the extent to which it reflects the experiences of a generation that, in the absence of firsthand experiences of fascism, was no longer able or willing to accept the anti-fascist agenda of the GDR’s founding fathers as a justification for the shortcomings of the GDR itself.</p><p>Indeed, in Böttcher’s film the protagonists remain fundamentally disconnected from the memories of the war-time past that, in other films, are repeatedly invoked in order to legitimise and bolster the historical mission of the GDR. Al’s elderly neighbour Mogul</p><p>[Slide 5] never talks about his experiences of fascism, but views life in material terms, constantly reminding Al that, ‘Du hast ja alles’. Similarly, the reasons for the absence of</p><p>Al’s father – a victim of World War II we are left to assume – is never addressed during the strained exchanges with his mother; while the relationship between Al and his Opa reflects a total breakdown in communication: ‘Er will mich nicht verstehen’, Al remarks.</p><p>If Böttcher’s film seeks to invoke memories of the past, then it is not through cross-generational dialogue, but rather through the Berlin landscapes against which the protagonists play out their daily lives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sequence where</p><p>Al and his friends lounge around in front of the partially burned-out and bullet-scarred buildings of Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt. The extent to which this backdrop has become de-historicised in the minds of the films’ East German protagonists is reflected in the nonchalant manner in which they lounge around in front of the buildings, and in the contrast that is set up by the arrival of a bus of western tourists photographing this site of historical memory. Yet as Böttcher’s film suggests – and here we are reminded of the tourists visiting the remains of the Berlin Wall in Böttcher’s post-Wende documentary</p><p>Die Mauer (1990) – there is something inappropriate about the way in which, from a 7 western perspective, history has been transformed into a spectacle for consumption.</p><p>[Slide 6 Clip A]. Seen in this light, Böttcher’s film explores the limitations of any attempt to instrumentalise history and memory both within and outside the GDR. For Al memories of the fascist past – memories that he seems unable to tap into – are not sufficient to dispel the sense of existentialist despair with which he is beset; but by the same token, [Slide 7] the vision of a new modern ‘Plattenbau’ estate with all the modern conveniences that so impresses his youthful friends, also fails to eradicate the moment of crisis in his life. Indeed what is so provocative about Jahrgang ‘45 is its relentless questioning of what, in the absence of a teleological view of the past and the future, might constitute a meaningful existence in the here and now of the GDR in the mid-</p><p>1960s, and it is in this spirit that Al resolves to re-commit to his relationship with Li.</p><p>Böttcher’s Jahrgang ’45 was by no means the only film released in the immediate aftermath of the Wende that mobilises the discourse of love in order to present a bleak account of everyday life in the GDR. In the last turbulent years of DEFA members of the younger generation of directors such as Peter Kahane, Herwig Kipping and Dietmar</p><p>Hochhuth presented a series of failed – and failing – love affairs to present a nightmarish vision of the GDR-Alltag. Ranging from [Slide 8] Peter Kahane’s melodramatic Die</p><p>Architekten of 1990 (a film in which the collapse of the young architect Daniel’s visionary housing project is compounded by his wife’s decision to leave the GDR) to</p><p>Herwig Kipping’s allegory [Slide 9] for the new production group DaDaeR Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen of 1992 (a love story set in the GDR of the 1950s in the aptly named village of Stalina) the films produced by this generation reflect the pent-up frustrations of a generation of film-makers who, by and large, had been denied any real opportunities by the DEFA Studios during the 1980s. Indeed the sub-title – ‘Demontage eines Alptraums’ – of Jürgen Böttcher’s 1990 documentary Die Mauer clearly reflects the 8 dominant key in which memories of the GDR were being presented by those schooled in the traditions of DEFA. But one consequence of the collapse of the GDR was, of course, the demise of the DEFA studio itself in the early 1990s and with it the loss of a production facility from which a distinctively GDR perspective on the GDR might be articulated. As a result, perhaps the best known cinematic representation of the GDR during the 1990s was that produced by the west German team of Margarethe von Trotta and Peter Schneider, namely Das Versprechen (1995). [Slide 10] While west German cinema of the 1970s and 1980s had focused much of its energy on exploring the Federal</p><p>Republic’s relationship to the past, it is striking that the GDR is a topic conspicuous for its absence on the agenda of the New German Cinema. However, following German unification in 1990, filmmakers from both East and West were faced with a very different kind of challenge, namely that of creating a new sense of German identity while at the same time exploring what it meant to be ‘east German’ in a world in which the GDR no longer existed. </p><p>In Das Versprechen, von Trotta presents the love affair between an East German couple who, for over thirty years, are separated by the Berlin Wall as a means of tracing some of the key moments in the history of the Cold War while at the same time offering a critique of everyday life in the GDR. As the film unfolds we follow the lovers’ fortunes from the early 1960s – when Konrad’s undone shoelace prevents him from fleeing to</p><p>West Berlin with his girlfriend Sophie – right up until the night of 9 November 1989, where the two are on the point of being ‘re-united’ in a moment of mutual recognition on the Glienicker Brücke following the opening of the border between East and West Berlin.</p><p>Das Versprechen contains many visual echoes of Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel</p><p>(1964), a film to which it specifically alludes on more than one occasion; but in stark contrast to Der geteilte Himmel – where the reasons for Rita’s decision not to follow her 9 lover Manfred to the West are clearly spelled out – von Trotta’s film is deeply ambivalent about Konrad’s reasons for remaining in the East (and at no point does he ever actively endorse socialism). Indeed there is a sense in which Das Versprechen can be read as a critical postscript to Der geteilte Himmel, as a tragic account of a love that – as its unremittingly bleak presentation of life in the GDR suggests – has been sacrificed in vain.</p><p>Not surprisingly the film’s reconstruction of the GDR-Alltag was to attract considerable criticism, notably from Corinna Harfouche, the East German actress playing Sophie who in an interview for Wochenpost remarked:</p><p>Herausgekommen ist für mich eine absolute Negativbewertung der DDR. Mein Land kann ich in diesem Film nicht wiedererkennen.... Dieser harte Ton der Gespräche, diese düsteren Bilder. Das stimmt schon. Aber es stimmt eben nur zum Teil. Wir hatten nicht nur Herbst und Winter, bei uns war manchmal auch Frühling und Sommer. Es gab durchaus Tage, an denen wir nicht mit der Staatssicherheit in Konflikt gekommen sind. Im Film sieht es so aus, als wären wir auf Schritt und Tritt verfolgt worden.6 </p><p>At times, the film’s portrayal of the love affair presents the protagonists not as individuals in control of their own destiny, but rather as passive victims of historical determinism, a view that seems to be borne out by Peter Schneider’s concise explanation of the key question addressed by the film: ‘Was macht die Geschichte aus Individuen, die sie gewissermaßen als Geiseln genommen hat.’7 </p><p>Schneider’s highly contentious concept of East German victimhood – together with the film’s dour portrayal of the GDR – was to be radically challenged both by the east German team of Leander Haußmann and Thomas Brussig in their film Sonnenallee</p><p>(1999) and by the west German team of Wolfgang Becker and Bernd Lichtenberg in their ground-breaking post-unification comedy Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). [Slide 11] The contrast between the new generation’s ironic and irreverent view of the process of unification and the older generation’s melodramatic portrayal of the collapse of the GDR</p><p>6 Interview with Corinna Harfouche by Manuel Brug and Frank Junghänel, Wochenpost, 10 February 1995. 7 Otto Matthies, ‘Interview mit Margarethe von Trotta und Peter Schneider’, in: Peter Schneider & Margarethe von Trotta, Das Versprechen oder Der lange Atem der Liebe. Filmszenarium, Berlin: Volk & Welt, 1994, pp.140-5 (p. 142). 10 could hardly be greater. Thomas Brussig’s explanation of the premise underlying</p><p>Sonnenallee – ‘Meine Kindheit hat in der DDR stattgefunden. Das macht die DDR nicht besser. Aber ich erinnere mich trotzdem gerne an die Kindheit’8 – might be read both as symptomatic of an ‘ostalgic’ attitude and as an attempt to normalise German-German relations on the scriptwriter’s part. Yet as Helen Cafferty and Paul Cooke have argued convincingly, it is precisely though the foregrounding of performances of ‘Ostalgie’ that</p><p>Sonnenallee enacts a critique of uncritical nostalgic tendencies. Accordingly when the central protagonist Micha attempts to restore his standing in the eyes of his beloved</p><p>Miriam by creating a set of (non-existent) diaries [Slide 12] that reflect the conflicts of his supposedly ‘dissident’ adolescence, he embarks on a process of ‘remembering’ in which he, quite literally, rewrites his own identity and with it, his attitude to the GDR.</p><p>Yet rather than portray this as a questionable act of revisionism, the sequence serves as a reminder of the way in which memory and the construction of personal and political histories are conditioned by the needs of the present and, here in particular, by the desires of their infatuated teenage author. And while the irony of the sequence arises, in part, from the discrepancy between Micha’s actual childhood experiences and his post-hoc construction of an childhood dogged by state oppression that he has not in fact experienced as such the sequence has a serious function, triggering as they do an important process in his personal development: ‘Ich machte mir über dieses Land</p><p>Gedanken’, he tells us via the voice-over, ‘Was es bedeutet, hier zu leben, und warum</p><p>Miriam so unglücklich wirkte.’ </p><p>However Brussig’s acknowledgement that, as he put it, ‘mir ging es nur darum, die DDR als Kulisse zu benutzen’ also serves as a reminder – as if one were needed – not to mistake the settings used in Sonnenallee for an objective reflection of GDR-Alltag. For</p><p>8 Sandra Maischberger, ‘Sonnenallee – Eine Mauerkomödie: Interview mit Leander Haußmann und Thomas Brussig’, in: Leander Haußmann (ed.), Sonnenallee. Das Buch zum Farbfilm, Berlin: Quadriga, 1999, pp. 8-24, (p. 12) 11 his words underline the very different agenda of a set of filmmakers who sought to</p><p>‘normalise’ the experience of the GDR by combining the boy-meets-girl plots of adolescent love affairs with the 1990s vogue for 70s retro-culture. For as Leander</p><p>Haußmann was to put it: ‘Wenn ein Junge zum ersten Mal ein Mädchen sieht – das ist etwas, was jeder versteht.’ Indeed, the notion of the GDR-Alltag as ‘Kulisse’ is one that– albeit in a much cruder form – been recycled Carsten Fiebeler’s Kleinruppin Forever</p><p>[Slide 13] of 2004, another teenage rom-com set this time in the 1980s in which the affections of a girl from the east convince spoiled brat from the West to remain in the</p><p>GDR despite its obvious material shortcomings. But as Paul Cooke has persuasively argued, the hyperrealism of Sonnenallee combined with the way in which it foregrounds perfomances of ‘Ostalgie’ make it impossible to read the film as a straightforward work of ‘Ostalgie’. By the same token, in Good Bye, Lenin! Alex Kerner’s observation that</p><p>‘Die DDR, die ich für meine Mutter schuf, wurde immer mehr die DDR, die ich mir vielleicht gewünscht hätte’, [Slide 14] also serves to remind the spectator of the artificiality of the ostalgic project that he is involved in. However, what is particularly striking about these films is the way in which – at this crucial political juncture and breakdown of national identity – everyday life in the GDR is presented in a performative mode, an approach that allows essentialist concepts of identity to be challenged and replaced with an alternative model of identity as something that is fluid and dynamic and thus capable of adapting toa world in flux. Yet in this respect too, the discourse of love plays a crucial role, not least in the contrast these films draw between, on the one hand, the attempts of the young masculine pratogonists to stage an elaborate performance of courtship, and on the other, the concept of love as a utopian space in which role-playing is superfluous and in which difference might be both accepted and celebrated and in which, consequently, a degree of individual authenticity might be possible. 12</p><p>This is, of course, particularly the case in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!, a film that revolves around two love affairs: on the one hand Alex’s love for his Russian girlfriend Lara and on the other, the unconditional bond of love between Alex and his mother. Although Alex embarks on his ostalgic project out of love for his mother and the belief that she needs to be protected from the new world order, it becomes increasingly clear that it is in fact he who cannot come to terms with the abrupt loss of his idyllic childhood (a loss symbolised by the collapse of the GDR). Just as Christiane’s temporary awakening from her coma provides the young protagonist with an extended opportunity to prepare himself for the eventual trauma of losing his mother, so too the ‘extra-time’ the</p><p>‘GDR’ enjoys, gives him an opportunity to make the transition from the old to the new world order. In psychological terms, the relationship between mother and son as a utopian realm of the imaginary from which all the contradictions of the symbolic order have been banished. And in a manner that calls to mind Jean Paul’s observation that ‘Die</p><p>Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies aus dem wir nicht vertrieben werden können’,9 Alex’s attempt to recreate the ‘GDR’ from his memories of the past is one that seeks to correct the contradictions of ‘real existing socialism’. Accordingly, his memory work assumes a utopian dimension as he seeks to construct an imaginary version of what a genuinely socialist GDR could have been like and, in the process, creates a monument to the hopes and aspirations of those who, like his mother, pursued an ideal only to be betrayed by the regime itself. Seen in this light Good Bye Lenin! is a rites of passage movie in a double sense; for the successful conclusion to Alex’s development takes place at both a personal and a political level. What we witness is a process of mourning for both his mother and for the GDR: at a personal level he succeeds in transferring his emotional attachment from his mother to his Russian girl-friend Lara; at a political level, he is able to come to</p><p>9 Jean Paul, ‘Impromptus, welche ich künftig in Stammbücher schreiben werden’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Norbert Miller, Munich: Hanser, 1978, section II, vol. 3, pp. 814-823 (p. 820, No. 29). 13 terms with the end of the GDR and thereby embrace the new future symbolised by the firework display on the eve of unification that he watches together with Lara from the rooftop of the hospital. This moment of transition is further underscored in the penultimate sequence in the film in which he scatters his mother’s ashes across both East and West using one of the model space rockets of his youth. At the same time, the elision of this sequence with the concluding section of ‘super-8 footage’ (an idyllic collage of childhood memories) remind the viewer that for any individual to make a genuine transition to a new future, he or she must be allowed to cherish the memories of the past.</p><p>Just three years later, however, the success of Good Bye, Lenin! was to be eclipsed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (2006). [Slide</p><p>15] While Das Leben der Anderen represented a radical break with the humorous portrayal of the GDR in both Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! the attempt to produce a serious film about the GDR past (and the Stasi in particular) was warmly welcomed even by those whose names had become synonymous with the earlier ‘ostalgic’ comedies.</p><p>Brussig himself conceded that: </p><p>Nicht die DDR-Komödien haben das DDR-Bild verzerrt, sondern das schlichte Nichtvorhandensein solcher Filme wie Das Leben der Anderen. Insofern bin ich über diesen Film schon deshalb froh, weil endlich dieses Manko behoben ist.10 </p><p>Moreover, just before the film’s release, it seemed that life was indeed imitating art when</p><p>Ulrich Mühe (the east German actor cast in the role of Wiesler) accused his former wife, the well known DEFA star Jenny Gröllmann, of having spied on him for the Stasi during their marriage.11 In the context of a workshop on GDR-Alltag, it might of course, be argued that there is little that is ‘everyday’ about either the relationship between Mühe and Gröllmann or the fictional relationship between the playwright, Georg Dreyman and</p><p>10 Thomas Brussig, ‘Klaviatur des Sadismus. Die DDR in Das Leben der Anderen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 March 2006. 11 These allegations were vigorously denied by Gröllmann, who insisted that the files referring to her had been falsified, and obtained a court injunction preventing Mühe from repeating them in public. 14 his lover, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. However, one of the most loudly trumpeted aspects of the film was the director’s attempts painstaking attempt to create a carbon copy of the GDR milieu in which the relationship of this elite couple is played out. Anxious not to repeat the mistakes made by Margarethe von Trotta in Das Versprechen, von</p><p>Donnersmarck engaged a team of expert costume- and set-designers (many of them from the former GDR) to ensure that – on the surface at least – his film was as authentic as possible. Indeed the publicity material for Das leben der Anderen places a great deal of emphasis on the film’s ‘never-before-seen-authenticity’; and notwithstanding some minor errors, reviewers from both East and West were almost unanimous in their admiration for the way in which, the selection of locations and props together with the use of a subtle palette of predominatly orange and brown tones succeed in conveying a sense of the look and feel of the GDR in the mid-1980s. </p><p>The realist aesthetics of Das Leben der Anderen are, of course, strikingly similar to those on display in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (2004). And in both films it is precisely this supposed historical verisimilitude and attention to superficial detail that is invoked to legitimise the film’s underlying – and in both cases highly contentious – ideological thrust. However, it was not von Donnersmarck’s attention to such details that prompted critics such as Anna Funder – the author of Stasiland (2003) – to describe Das</p><p>Leben der Anderen as ‘the first realistic portrayal of the GDR’,12 but its focus on the Stasi.</p><p>Not surprisingly, opinions were sharply divided regarding the radical transformation that takes place in the Stasi officer during his surveillance of the couple. In an attempt to justify his decision not to allow von Donnersmarck’s team to film on location in the</p><p>Stasi’s infamous Hohenschönhausen prison, Hubertus Knabe, the director of the memorial centre that now occupies the buildings, commented: ‘Der Stasi-Vernehmer als</p><p>12 Anna Funder, ‘Tyranny of Terror’, The Guardian, 5 May 2007. 15</p><p>Held: Das verletzt die Gefühle vieler Opfer und führt die Zuschauer in die Irre.’13</p><p>Moreover, as historians of the GDR were quick to point out, there was no historical precedent for Wiesler’s actions. Yet while the film pulls no punches in highlighting the abuse of power by figures like Hempf and Grubitz it is hard not to feel that von</p><p>Donnersmarck’s relentlessly bleak picture of the GDR is no less one-sided than the perhaps overly optimistic portrayal of the GDR in the earlier comedies against which his film is pitted. Indeed the extent to which the historical reality of the GDR can in fact be mapped onto the GDR as represented in the film remains something of an open question, and Das Leben der Anderen is perhaps best approached not as a historically accurate account of the GDR itself, but rather as a study of the potential of love as an instrument of resistance and redemption in an abstract totalitarian milieu. Seen in this light, the motivation behind von Donnersmarck’s act of poetic licence regarding Wiesler’s transformation is neatly encapsulated in Wolf Biermann’s observation that: ‘Wir sind alle wie süchtig nach Beweisen für die Fähigkeit der Menschen, sich zum Guten zu verändern.’14 </p><p>In his portrayal of the love relationship between Dreyman and Sieland, von</p><p>Donnersmarck offers us a glimpse of a potentially utopian space within the bleak and oppressive atmosphere of an Orwellian-like state. While the strength of their passion renders the lovers so vulnerable in their society, it is precisely this vulnerability that defines their essential humanity and which sets their existence in such stark contrast to the mechanical efficiency of the ruthless state security apparatus. Not surprisingly</p><p>Sieland’s role in the film attracted considerable criticism and, writing for the Goethe</p><p>Institut’s website, Claudia Lenssen noted that: ‘Einzig die Frau im Scheitelpunkt des</p><p>Dramas bleibt passiv, willfärig und labil, sie muss aus dramturgischen Gründen schwach</p><p>13 ‘Das problem liegt bei der PDS’, Spiegel Online, 15 September 2006. 14 Wolf Biermann, ‘Die Gespenster treten aus dem Schatten’, Welt Online, 22 March 2006. 16 bleiben, ist ein klassisches Frauenopfer, dass folgerichtig in den eigenen Tod läuft.’15 Yet while Lennssen is surely correct to criticise the film for its primary focus on the film’s male protagonists (in her view the only ones with narrative agency) the very</p><p>‘impossibility’ of Sieland assuming an active role in the film might be seen as a reminder to the viewer the essentially patriarchal character of all totalitarian societies. Yet what sets it apart from the other love relationships I have explored so far is the way in which, to adapt John Urang’s remark about Roman einer jungen Ehe, it makes the protagonists love not ‘contingent on their politics’, but rather their politics contingent on their love. As we watch Wiesler listening to Dreyman’s rendition of the ‘Sonate des guten Menschen’ following the death of his friend, the tear running down Wiesler’s face underlines his capacity to empathise with the musical expression of love and pain, while the significance of the moment is underlined by Dreyman’s remark: ‘Kann jemand, der diese</p><p>Musik gehört hat, wirklich gehört hat, noch ein schlechter Mensch sein?’ Dreyman’s observation perfectly encapsulates the faith of von Donnersmarck’s film in the redemptive power not only of art and music, but also of love, something that is further emphasised the next day when Grubitz greets Wiesler with the now ambiguous words</p><p>‘Wir beide haben an dieser Liebesgeschichte viel zu gewinnen… oder zu verlieren’. And although at the end of the film Wiesler might be said to have saved Dreyman (by concealing the evidence of the typewriter), ultimately it is the love affair between</p><p>Dreyman and Sieland that ‘saves’ Wiesler as a human being. Put another way, the discourse of love in Das Leben der Anderen is a crucial component of the film’s moral agenda in which no individual is shown to be beyond redemption. </p><p>At first sight Das Leben der Anderen would appear to commend itself as a key film for the new Federal Republic in the post-unification era, for it is a film in which the relationship between the lovers highlights both the inhumanity of a totalitarian regime</p><p>15 http:/www.goeth.de/ins/pl/lp/kue/flm/de2045379.htm 17 and yet holds out the possibility that, even in a totalitarian state, the discourse of love can triumph over the discourse of hatred that Wiesler initially espouses. Nonetheless, the melodramatic pathos of Das Leben der Anderen serves as a reminder of the stark difference between the conservative essentialist concept of identity that lies at the heart of von Donnersmarck’s film and the more radical performative model of identity that informs both Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin!. Indeed there is something almost</p><p>Expressionist about the manner of Wiesler’s rebirth in von Donnersmarck’s film, a throwback to the classical humanist agenda of individual moral regeneration through a combination of art and love. Seen in this light, the quasi-Christian moral agenda underpinning Das Leben der Anderen seeks to invoke an essentialist notion of humanity shared by all; by contrast, the comedy of identity in Good Bye, Lenin! suggests ways in which the complex positions of spectatorship that are themselves the product of an increasingly heterogeneous society might be negotiated in future.</p><p>All of the films I have looked at so far are, of course, unambiguously set at some point in the period 1945-1990; but I would like to end by reflecting on the extent to which films set in the post-1990s might nonetheless be said to be ‘east German’. In this context, the everyday Frankfurt/Oder setting of Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe (2002) [Slide 16] would appear to evoke many aspects of a way of life that is indelibly associated with the</p><p>GDR. By the same token Bernd Böhlich’s 2007 comedy Du bist nicht allein staring</p><p>Katharina Thalbach and the uniquitous Axel Prahl – another film set in an unmistakably eastern district of Berlin – explores the relationship between meaningful employment and a meaningful existence, and does so in a way that invites a critique of the different discourses of socialism and capitalism in which the protagonists’ lives have been caught up over time. And, it might be asked, in what sense might a film such as Andreas</p><p>Dresen’s Sommer vorm Balkon (2005) be regarded an ‘east German’ film? 18</p><p>In part the difficulty of categorising such films stems from the transitional identities of the films’ youthful protagonists, whose adolescent lives encompass the collapse of the GDR and the assimilation of the Neue Bundesländer into the new post-</p><p>1990s Federal Republic. The relationship of this new generation to the experiences of their parents and grandparents – experiences that, by and large, are rooted in the former</p><p>GDR – remains one of the most contentious issues in contemporary cinema, and it is an issue that informs the work of the young director Christian Schwochow in his highly acclaimed film Novemberkind of 2008. [Slide 17] Indeed the complex nature of east</p><p>German identities in a post-GDR world is encapsulated in the family history of the main actress, Anna Maria Mühe; for the premature deaths of her two parents (Ulrich Mühe and</p><p>Jenny Gröllmann) following an embittered relationship serves as a reminder of latent personal and historical trauma that, in some cases, lie just beneath the surface of many biographies of those belonging to the pre-1990 parental generation. </p><p>Such unresolved ‘memory contests’ play a crucial role in Schochow’s</p><p>Novemberkind, a film which, like Good Bye, Lenin! explores the bond between mother and child, but which unlike Becker’s comedy, does so from the perspective of its young female protagonist, Inga, and re-casts its subject matter in a minor key. Having been brought up by her grandparents in the belief that her mother died in a swimmimng accident when she was still an infant, Inga is forced to recognise that her granparents’ version of events is untrue, and that her mother abandoned her when she fled to the west in 1980. What is striking about Schochow’s film is the way in which it explores the relationship between memory and personal trauma in terms of both generational and historical structures. Indeed Novemberkind might be described as a film that addresses not so much the workings of memory, but rather the psychology of forgetting. For as Inga comes to realise when she reads the opening line of her mother’s poem – ‘Keiner lehrt 19 mich /Zu vergessen / Wär da ein Gruß von daheim / Und könnt suchen mich / Ich würd hoffen ein bisschen’ – it is precisely her mother’s inability to let go of her memories of the past that prevents her from establishing a new life in the West and prompts her to commit suicide after 10 years in a psychiatric institution. However, in Novemberkind it falls to the members of the third generation to tackle the repressed trauma arising from the feelings of mutual betrayal experienced by the first and second generations. Indeed it is in this respect that Schochow’s film does offer a glimpse of what post-memory might mean in a GDR context. For when Inga condemns her grandparents for having broken of all contact with her mother – ‘Ihr habt Eure eigene Tochter verraten, stimmt’s?’ – the extent to which she, the granddaughter, identifies with the suffering experienced by her mother is subtly suggested when we recall her earlier explanation of her familial set-up:</p><p>‘Ich habe Eltern. Sie heißen Oma und Opa.’ Seen in the light of this remark, the burden of suffering to which Inga is subjected embraces that of not one but two generations (and this is further underlined in the film by having the lead actress Anna Maria Mühe play the roles of both Inga and her mother). Yet perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of this film is the way in which – in stark contrast to almost all the post-Wende films I have referred to, it is a film in which female (rather than male) agency is finally reasserted. At the same time it is a film in which the importance of east German – rather than west</p><p>German – agency in tackling specifically east German memory contests is underlined too.</p><p>For when Imga insists that Robert – the west German professor of creative writing whose seminars her mother once attended – hand back the documentary in his possession, this act of self-assertion together with the closing sequence in which we see her beginning to re-write the story of her mother’s life serves as a reminder of the crucial importance of regaining narrative agency for those, whose victimhood remains concealed behind the contests and constructions of memory. 20</p>