Mary-Elizabeth OBrien - Post-Wall German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent

As the people of the centre in every sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to themselves: they escape definition, and are thereby alone the despair of the French. It is characteristic of the Germans that the question: What is German? never dies out among them.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

O N 3 O CTOBER 1990 THE C OLD W AR officially ended on German soil. With the demise of the German Democratic Republic and the emergence of a unified state in the form of the Federal Republic of Germany, not only the Cold War but in some ways also the Second World War faded into history. The fall of the Berlin Wall and unification allowed the postwar era to take on the contours of a completed historical period that occupies the immediate past and provides an epochal buffer zone between the present and the Third Reich. The year 1989/90 marked a profound shift in international relations and allowed the postwar era to supersede the Third Reich as the defining moment in recent German history. The signing of the 4+2 treaty implied that the international community had formally pardoned Germany and, to more cynical minds, had lifted its sentence of postwar division as retribution for the atrocities committed under National Socialism. International approval of plans for unification implicitly paved the way for a redefinition of Germany as a reasonably contrite former combatant and morally acceptable modern state. But how can a divided country whose common jingoist, genocidal past has rendered nationalism deeply suspect begin to conceive of itself as a viable and future-oriented unified nation?

Divided Germany, more than any other country, marked the battle lines between the competing superpowers. In official rhetoric, the FRG imagined itself as a prosperous, peace-loving democracy repelling the Bolshevist threat and pitted against the rival GDR, which in turn saw itself as the showcase of the socialist planned economy and the bulwark against capitalisms fascist legacy. Little of the GDRs political and social institutions, artistic heritage, everyday culture, and value systems, or even material goods and architecture survived the unification process, which some critics have labeled an annexation. The refurbishing of the Reichstag with a reflective glass dome signifying a more thoughtful, open political process, coupled with the transformation of no-mans-land surrounding Potsdamer Platz into the shimmering steel and glass facade of a shopping arcade and entertainment center, exemplify in concrete terms several of the most persistent, if contested, aspects of the Berlin Republics self-image: democratic political representation, a free market economy, the promise of prosperity and amusement, and a balance between preserving memory and living in the present.

The term Vergangenheitsbewltigung, originally referring to the psychological work of a nation coming to terms with its immediate past of a horrific, nearly incomprehensible fascist dictatorship, has taken on new meaning in the Berlin Republic. With the collapse of the GDR, a radical shift has taken place in what constitutes the immediate past. 1989 has replaced 1945 as designating the primary caesura of recent German history. This shift reflects what Hayden White has described as the essential mechanism by which we distinguish historical epochs, namely a shift in moral regimes. As long as the GDR existed, Germans in both the East and the West could take solace in the notion that there was at least an attempt to bring about a utopian vision of Germany as an alternative to individualistic, alienating, and consumer-driven capitalism. And despite the reality of a generally conservative unified Germany (governed for all but seven years by the Christian Democratic Union), this dream of a socialist alternative continues to be a strong undercurrent in the Berlin Republic. Comments made by acclaimed West German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger are emblematic of this stance. In a 2008 interview with