THE NOW VANISHED German Democratic Republic is both there and not there. The GDR cinema, too, haunts films of the present, but there are many ways in which the GDR was already a spectral apparition even while it existed. Of course, a country that no longer exists leaves behind a spectral presence—in histories that seek to uncover its “true” existence; in culture, where portions of its past reality persist, often invisibly, in the present; and in film, which is fictional even when it tries to “document.”

In a variety of ways both the films made during the GDR’s existence and those produced since its collapse in 1989 and subsequent merger with the Federal Republic of Germany (formerly West Germany and West Berlin) in 1990 have an aspect of unreality.

During its existence between 1949 and 1989, the GDR state presented such an abstract and rigid ideological construction of society that real life under such circumstances already entered the realm of fiction, often in surreal or fantastic ways. This posed an insurmountable challenge to GDR filmmakers. They could never dare to fully expose the truth of ideological charades but worked in a realm of tension between fiction and reality both in terms of political context and cinematic representation. The films were double-images of the desired world and the world as it may actually have been, and the cinema could only inadequately trace the specific difference between the two.

GDR cinema was thus partly a phenomenon of modernity but with a strong dose of postmodernity inherent in its multiple identities. The GDR was postmodern even before the term began to be applied in the West, in the sense that citizens lived in multiple levels of reality: individuals dissembled conformity while the state dissembled unanimity and general well-being.1 Much experience thus existed at two levels, requiring constant code-switching, depending on whether one was pretending to agree that socialism was working or whether, in more private settings away from state scrutiny, one was recognizing its failures. In the economic sense, too, GDR citizens lived in two realities. One was the planned economy with strict socialist controls, and one was the international one, based on Western currency (for those who could get it) and the market system; in the global sense, of course, even the state had to compete in the international market system.