SOME OF THE FILM DOCUMENTARIES made in 1989–1990 capture the events of those years in ways that diverge significantly from the usual media portrayals of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and the reunification of Germany, providing what Marc Silberman calls a “counterbalance to television.”1 Many of these documentaries were made by DEFA, the East German film studio, or by students at East Germany's film academy, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen (University for Film and Television, now the Film University Babelsberg).

What distinguishes the documentaries made in 1989–90 is, as Reinhild Steingröver has noted, their immediacy: they respond directly to events that have happened recently or are still in the process of happening. They do not have a preordained plot or message. They give a sense of openness and possibility, not of closure and finality—unlike many television images from the West, which, as the media scholar Hilde Hoffmann has observed, quickly engaged in a process of “constituting and historicizing political events—in other words, in negotiating and inscribing the way they are interpreted.”

The filmmakers who created the against-the-grain documentaries of 1989–1990, by contrast, attempted to capture the feelings and challenges of a particular moment that everyone concerned—both the documentarists and their subjects—recognized as historical but fleeting. The title of Kurt Tetzlaff's 1990 documentary Im Durchgang: Protokoll für das Gedächtnis (In Transit: Report for Posterity) could be the overarching designation for many of the documentaries made in the GDR at this time. The documentaries were clearly intended as a historical record. The word Protokoll in the German title of Tetzlaff's film is the same one used to designate what in English are called “minutes,” that is, a written record of a meeting. And the word Gedächtnis in the same title literally means memory in the sense of brain power or storage capacity, implying that without such a Protokoll, or minutes, the events, thoughts, and feelings of 1989/1990 could disappear from the historical record.

The documentarist Andreas Voigt and his colleagues explicitly invoked what they saw as their urgent duty to make a record of the extraordinary events occurring in the GDR in the fall of 1989 when the country's documentary filmmakers met in October of that year, in the midst of an ongoing revolution.