That Was the GDR - A History of the Other Germany (Das war die DDR - Eine Geschichte des anderen Deutschlands) (review)

In the past several years, strong, cleverly made feature films on the former German Democratic Republic have collected international audiences and awards. Life under communist rule in the old Eastern Bloc states continues to hold strong interest for American audiences, particularly when recounted with such skill as in award-winning art house hits as Good Bye, Lenin! and The Lives of Others (the latter winning the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature).

Das war die DDR - Eine Geschichte des anderen Deutschlands (That Was the GDR - A History of the Other Germany) is an epic documentary, originally made for television in Germany. Made soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1993 series is now available with overdubbed English narration (done previously in 1998 for, one assumes, British broadcast). The film focuses on capturing a moment in time, an oral history of living in the German Democratic Republic, through interviews with East Germans from a broad range of social strata. Composed in seven sections by different directors, this documentary captures the unique perspective of a citizenship that watched its nation vanish into history. The seven sections, "I Was a Citizen of the GDR", "From 'Zone' to State", "From Economic Plan to Economic Collapse", "For the People's Welfare", "Mind and Might", "Shield and Sword", and "We Are the People", all follow a similar format and are remarkably consistent in quality. Indeed, watching the sections in succession, one cannot help but be amazed by the breadth of the project and the range of interviewees available to the filmmakers. The memories are all fresh, since the events they recall happened, quite literally, just yesterday for the participants. Emotions have not always caught up with those events, however, and despite their general clarity, the speakers sometimes seem a little disoriented. One can hardly blame their bemusement. After all, it's not every day that one's country is politically, economically, and socially dissolved.

In all sections of the documentary, the prevailing disposition projected by the speakers is disillusionment. Particularly powerful are accounts of the experiences within the intellectual and artistic community. Says Inge Hunziger, a sculptor, "I thought being a Communist was different...an aggressive, offensive, brave march...struggle on several levels including intellectual debate...not being jittery every time someone coughs wrong." Many of the intelligentsia interviewed had emigrated back to the East after the war in the hope of helping to build a socialist society. Over time they saw their ideals come into conflict with the increasingly autocratic dictates of the state. Notes one musician, "I still think about it. I reflect on all of our effort and the emotions...our self-sacrificing quest to adapt...to harmonize with the official tune. We tried to put Socialist Realism to music. Hanns Eisler was frequently quoted as crown witness, but claimed he did not know "how to render a flute sonata in a Socialist Realist key." The section from which this quote is drawn is titled "Mind and Might" (rendered synonymously as "Intellect and Power" on the DVD case). That the two concepts cannot legitimately co-exist, and that inevitably one must defer to the other, was the lesson learned so bitterly by the film's participants, expressed perhaps most movingly in interview excerpts with writers Stefan Heym and Christa Wolf and singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, who had his GDR citizenship revoked while touring in West Germany. For other extraordinary footage of this sort, it is worth searching out Hava Kohav Beller's 2004 film The Burning Wall: Dissent and Opposition Behind the Berlin Wall.

Equally intriguing are the melancholy reflections by ordinary citizens. Many recount the social emphasis on relationships developed in the workplace and the centrality of the workplace to...