Posted on 07/26/2003 8:20:33 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The hit movie Good Bye Lenin! relives it, there's a new TV show idolising it, and they're even planning a theme park in its honour. Suddenly, East Germany is the height of fashion
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's corrections and clarifications column Friday July 25 2003
In the article below we claimed that the 1996 film Son of the Great Bear, was so popular that 10 million of East Germany's population of 70 million saw it on its release. In 1996, the population of the GDR was just over 17 million. Reunified Germany's present population is 82,440,300 (Federal Statistical office, December 31, 2001).
'The GDR lives on!" So runs the tagline for Good Bye Lenin!, Wolfgang Becker's film about a young man, Alex, whose mother falls into a coma in the late 1980s, only to reawaken a few months later after the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany. In order not to shock his still fragile mother, Alex recreates an ersatz East Germany in her apartment, providing her with socialist radio shows, disgusting communist coffee and troops of visiting young pioneers singing songs about the workers' paradise. "It is not a comedy, although the film has its comic side," says Becker. "But it's only comic when you look at it in the modern context. It is also a tragedy that highlights the brutality of the old regime."
Nostalgia for the German Democratic Republic has been around in the reunified Germany long enough for it to have been given its own nickname: "Ostalgie". Good Bye Lenin!, released in Germany to acclaim and great box-office success, finds it at the height of fashion. Books telling of East German childhoods are in the bestseller lists, T-shirts bearing the GDR logo are the height of fashion. There are even plans for a GDR theme park.
After an initial binge on the forbidden fruits of capitalism, the East Germans are feeling a vague dissatisfaction with it and are returning to their roots. Germany may be reunited, but with unemployment at 19% in the east, nearly double that of the west, the country's two halves are still not fully integrated.
This autumn, Katherine Witt, the 37-year-old Olympic skating star and an icon of the east, will host a new TV programme called The GDR Show, which will idolises East Germany's socialist past. Witt, known in Germany as "the beautiful face of socialism", will interview famous actors and dissidents from East Germany as well as the politicians and sports stars East Germans grew up with.
Among her first guests will be East German heartthrob Gojko Mitic, who moved there from Serbia as a young actor, and sprang to fame with his first film The Son of the Great Bear. In it, Mitic plays the po-faced Red Indian Tokeiihto, and the film initially looks like exactly the sort of conflict (between Dakota Indians and the American pioneers) that connoisseurs of western cowboy films would recognise. Except that in East German cowboy films, the Indians were the good guys, and in the inevitable shootouts it is the pioneers who tumble from their horses at each shot while the Indians ride about unscathed.
The film was a huge success in its day: 10 million of East Germany's 70 million population went to see it when it was released in 1966. Mitic went on to make another 11 Indian films as well as acting in TV dramas and appearing on stage.
On the back of the Ostalgie, films such as this have been given a second lease of life, with "Ossies" - East Germans - becoming disillusioned with western culture and yearning for their childhood favourites.
"Even after all these years I still have people come up to me and say, 'You gave me my childhood,'" says Mitic. "It is tempting to say that everything was bad in the east - the restrictions on travel, the unfulfilled promises - but now we can also see the positive things: the social insurance and the fact that everyone had a place. It was not all so bad."
The Son of the Great Bear and several hundred other movies from Defa, East Germany "Hollywood behind the wall", is distributed by Icestorm, which has seen the demand for East German classics soar in the past few years. Set up in 1997, Icestorm has put more than 400 East German classic films, as well as cartoons and TV programmes, on to video tape and DVD. These are distributed through rental shops and have produced record breaking rental figures last year of more than 5m euros (£3.5m).
"About two thirds of the people watching these films are East Germans, but there is growing number of West Germans watching them too," says Icestorm's Brigitte Miesen. "East German culture has become cool and some of the films had already achieved cult status before the wall came down".
Not only have the classic films received second wind, previously banned films are seeing the light of day for the first time. The company has been rooting around in the Defa archives and plans to release a string of never-before-seen movies that were censored by the old regime. One of first to be released is Die Schönste (The Most Beautiful), the parallel stories of a young westerner and easterner who compare their mothers' lives. Altogether too risque for the communist authorities the film was immediately banned after it was completed in 1956. German film critics greet each release of these banned films as if they are newly-minted premieres.
People don't only miss the movies. In Berlin there are now East German shops selling everything from noodles to sweets from com- munist factories that a whole generation have grown up on.
Young Berliners with little memory of the former regime have also taken to the east, albeit for different reasons.
Jorg Davids was born in the west to railway workers who used to live in the east and had kept their strong socialist convictions. Several years ago he started to produce T-shirts sporting East German logos from his apartment and has seen sales grow to the point where he now runs a burgeoning company with a turnover more than 100,000 euros a year and customers across the country. "It is not about politics, although by their very nature these symbols have a political dynamic to them," says Davids. "For young people it has also become a fashion statement. They want to rebel. They want to be hip and chic - to say that they are apart from the state, the system, on their own."
"There is a tension between the east and west," says Becker. "An East German could not make this film [Good Bye Lenin!] as they always have to face the question of what they should have done to change the system. We in the west don't have the same burden of guilt. We don't have the inbuilt fear of criticising the system as we never participated in it."
There you have it, socialism in a bottle. Restrictions on freedom and being lied to are acceptable trade-offs for a place to stay and a little food. Social insurance? Means everyone is equally miserable but equally acceptable of it.
If that is the desired life, one could live in a free country without all the restrictions. Simply live very frugally (not well) and save your money so that you can continue to live that way after you can no longer work. No investments, no risk, no competition for goods, services, or status - just the same old mundane life day after endless day.
If you like the life Communism promises you, you can have it without all the downside to central control. Just do it. Besides, the television is better here, as bad as it is.
Gestapo policed 80 million Germans with 40.000 Gestapo agents. Stasi kept tabs on 17 million Germans with 102.000 Stasi agents.
Stasi had a size of roughly one fifth of the Soviet KGB (around 500.000 employees total). They also did stuff that is unheard of among other agencies, as far as I know - such as storing vast numbers of smell samples from people, so that they could readily be tracked by dogs.
Katarina Witt prominently among them.
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