Kino - german films

Film poster ”The German Chainsaw Massacre“
UNIFICATION: FOOD FOR FILM
The larger-scale feature films made about unification immediately
after events in the early nineties were primarily conventional comedies
with no political interest such as Go Trabi, Go (1990, Peter
Timm) or Superstau (1991, Manfred Stelzer). Christoph
Schlingensief was the only director to pick up a chain saw and a
meat cleaver in face of the jubilation over unification. The
German Chainsaw Massacre (Das deutsche
Kettensaegenmassaker, 1990) describes the brutality of the
first hours of reunification as a cannibal act: ”They came as friends
and were turned into sausage.“ During the first years in the documentary
field, primarily east German documentary filmmakers concerned
themselves with the problems of radical social change and
the new system. Volker Koepp, for example, completed his
Maerkische Trilogy (1990-1991), Thomas Heise made Eisenzeit
(1991), followed by, as already mentioned, Jammed – Let’s
Get Moving (1992).
After the German cinema film had lost its interest in the political
upheavals in Germany for several years, in 1999, ten years after the
fall of the Wall, films concerning the GDR and the consequences of
reunification came to fore. Sun Alley (Sonnenallee, 1999,
Leander Haussmann)
and Heroes Like Us
(Helden wie wir,
1999, Thomas Brussig)
relate the collapse of
the GDR from the
”eastern perspective“.
This was a perspective
which had seldom been
adopted in feature films,
with the exception of
the last, rarely considered
DEFA productions
such as Letztes aus
der DaDa eR (1990,
Joerg Foth), Banale
Tage (1992, Peter
Welz) or Jana and
Jan (Jana und Jan,
1992, Helmut Dziuba).
In Sun Alley,
Haussmann recounts
the life of a group of friends
as a revue of the
strangeness of Socialism,
the climax being the disappearance of the border. In Heroes
Like Us, the opening of the Wall is also the final, high point of the
protagonists’ youth, told as a time-lapse film using a wide range of
film material – documentary, animation, Super8, public and private
film recordings. These private stories demonstrate a distance
towards the political system and the contexts of political action
after the ”end of the great Utopias“ and the experience of ten
years of unification.
By contrast, No Place to Go (Die Unberuehrbare, 1999,
Oskar Roehler) tells of the trauma of the collapse of the GDR from
a ”western perspective“. This film about the last days of the writer
Gisela Elsner (based on the character of the director’s own
mother) visualizes something of the ensuing depression, the reverse
of the euphoria triggered by the fall of the Wall as was presented
in Federal German television. It is a brilliant visual realization
of the doubts in political Utopias and political isolation at the end of
the Cold War.
Films like Heroes Like Us and Sun Alley are indicative of the
tendency to turn the GDR into a museum that began directly after
its collapse. Looking back to everyday life in the GDR as a cabinet
of curiosities is a part of the ”success story reunification“. The period
following the Second World War is reorganized with a view to
the end of the GDR, and the ”fall of the Wall“ always represents
the happy and meaningful conclusion to this history as a symbol of
reunification. This ”finitization“ results in a leveling out of differing
perspectives on history and different political positions. Political and
historical events are often presented as the result of action by individuals.
The political processes are personalized and reduced to
simple, basic constellations. In the context of the changes successfully
brought about by groups of the GDR population, there is a
remarkable lack of media constructions showing politics as the
sphere of individual or collective self-determination. This ”ostalgia“
has no interest in grasping and visualizing structural constellations
and political processes, it is more a romantic review and an act of
self-assurance. Realities in eastern Germany after the new states
had joined the FRG may also be seen in a more interesting form as
the finely sketched background to films such as Forget America
(Vergiss Amerika, 2000, Vanessa Jopp) or alaska.de (2000,
Esther Gronenborn).
kino 4 focus on politics in german film
2003 7
Scene from ”Jammed-Let’s Get Moving“
Hannelore Elsner in ”No Place to Go“