Barend Schutte (Southampton) p.5-19
2005 Issue 2
Special Issue: Cultural Transformation in Eastern Germany after 1990.
In conjunction with the Association for Modern German Studies (ags.ac.uk)
Abstract
After the political unification of Germany in 1990, image-makers and creative minds in Germany set to work to come to terms with the past. In the first months after unification, former GDR directors attempted to capture the attention of a new German audience but failed due to their use of GDR imagery and language. Following this early phase, the feature films of the next ten years revealed a predominantly negative retrospective portrayal of the GDR; image-makers focused almost entirely on the oppressive SED dictatorship and all its abuses of human rights. At the turn of the century, a new development occurred in the retrospective image of the GDR when Leander Haußmann’s film Sonnenallee (1999) introduced a sense of normality to the portrayal of life in the GDR; people are finally shown to have lead average lives that were not dominated by an overwhelming fear of the regime. Along with Wolfgang Becker’s award winning film Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), the films made ten years after unification mark a definite turning point in the discourse relating to the GDR in that the films not only include, but also actively propagate a sense of nostalgia about the GDR.