IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 1990s, German filmmakers began moving toward more dramatic popular forms for narrating the story of 1989 and 1990. These popular forms gave accounts of the GDR's collapse and the fall of the Berlin Wall that could appeal to the tastes of broader film and television audiences, both domestically and internationally. The move toward popularity and standardization in the second half of the 1990s required a number of changes.

From the perspective of popularity and audience appeal, there were several problems with fiction film narratives and documentaries made in the early 1990s about the momentous events that had recently occurred in eastern Germany. First and foremost, most of the fiction film narratives created prior to 1994 lacked an exciting narrative arc. Andreas Dresen's Stilles Land, for instance, showed a group of people in a small provincial town waiting aimlessly while history happens elsewhere. Dresen's depiction of stasis at a moment of radical political change, as authentic as it may have been, was hardly designed to appeal to large numbers of film viewers looking for excitement and entertainment.

Helmut Dziuba's Jana und Jan, meanwhile, featured as protagonists two juvenile delinquents who had no interest in German or world history. The film's protagonists were more concerned with their own personal situation, in particular their budding love for each other. Peter Timm's comedy Go Trabi Go did not, for the most part, even take place in Germany and was not about the collapse of the GDR. Its sequel, Das war der wilde Osten, directed by Wolfgang Büld and Reinhard Klooss, also did not address the collapse of the GDR but rather constituted a comic sendup of land speculation and corruption in the post-unification period. Das war der wilde Osten hit a sensitive target in its humorous spoofing of land speculation in the post-unification period. With a protagonist specifically configured as an ordinary eastern everyman and more than its fair share of farcical humor, however, the movie failed to present recent German history and the newfound freedoms of Easterners in a heroic and uplifting way. Even in its critique of corruption, the movie was not very serious.

MY GOAL IN THIS BOOK is to explore a brief period of time in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and reunified Germany—1989 to 1990—as well as the subsequent cultural memory of that brief era. This period witnessed the GDR's collapse in 1989 and Germany's reunification in 1990. It began slowly, with seeming normality. Most people assumed that the GDR would probably last for the foreseeable future and continue more or less as before.

As late as June of 1989, less than half a year before the Berlin Wall fell, the West German writer Peter Schneider, a respected expert on German matters and the author of a well-known novel about Berlin's division, Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1982), opined in the pages of the New York Times Magazine that the Wall was likely to remain for the foreseeable future, and that the thought of German reunification was unrealistic: “there is no ‘human right’ of German reunification and there will continue to be two German states.” At the time Schneider's reflections represented the consensus of mainstream opinion on what was known as the “German question.”

Although it began slowly and with seeming normality, the 1989– 1990 period ended rapidly, with a series of radical changes that completely transformed the lives of East Germans. These changes included but were not limited to the end of the socialist economy, the introduction of western currency, the sudden threat—and reality—of unemployment, free and fair elections, the reconstitution of the former eastern Länder (states) Thuringia, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Brandenburg (which had been eliminated in the GDR decades earlier in order to enable a higher degree of central government control), and ultimately official national reunification on October 3, 1990, less than a year after the previously unimaginable opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

The most common response at the time of the Wall's opening was “Wahnsinn” (insanity). The word expressed just how unimaginable such an event had previously seemed. What happened in East Germany in 1989 was not supposed to be on the cards. As the philosopher Jürgen Habermas later described it, these events surprised even a West German government whose publicly stated goal was ultimate national reunification. They caught the Federal Republic “with its pants down.”

THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS of this book dealt with the immediate culture of the German reunification period, while the last three chapters explored after-the-fact attempts to address the 1989/1990 period culturally and politically. The middle chapter, Chapter 4, examined literature: three novels by writers who were either young men or adolescents at the time that unification took place. The three coming-of-age novels show how talented writers employing an autobiographical mode can try to make sense of what happened to them in earlier years. The novels still contain some of the apparent authenticity and intensity of immediate personal experience, and yet they also benefit from the wisdom of age, maturity, and structuring. They are idiosyncratic and highly individual but at the same time accessible to other people in other places and times. They have the potential for a staying power that other media do not always have.

The structure of the book, with its two-part division between the actual culture of 1989/1990 and post-facto remembrances of that culture, makes it clear that what is remembered and talked about now, over three decades after the events in question, was not necessarily what was considered important or even worth mentioning at the time. What we talk about and believe we remember now when we imagine the years 1989/1990 is by no means identical to what was actually talked about and commented on at the time. The difference is striking.

The most obvious example of the difference between then and now is the Stasi, which was not prominent in discussions or depictions created in the immediate unification period, but which, over the intervening years, has come to take on an overwhelming symbolic importance. The Stasi has come to stand for the entire GDR, and current depictions of 1989/1990 tend to impute to it a power that it did not have at the time. Its mission, after all, was to serve as the “shield and sword” of the ruling socialist party. It abjectly failed at that mission. 1989/1990 was the moment of that spectacular failure. Chapter 6 described the gradual development of what I call the “standard depiction” of German reunification in film and on television, which relies heavily on the Stasi as a dramaturgically useful antagonist.

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.

THERE IS NO CONSENSUS in Germany on how the events of 1989/1990 should be remembered and commemorated. Indeed, as the historian Martin Sabrow has suggested, the entire GDR constitutes a “battleground of memories” (Kampfplatz der Erinnerungen) that continually produces an “ongoing public conflict” (öffentlicher Dauerkonflikt). Although a central memorial to the events of 1989/1990 is likely to be opened in Berlin by the end of 2023, the process of deciding on the details of the memorial took up more than two decades of back-and-forth arguments and stalling. The long and involved evolution of the memorial revealed at least as much about national disunity as about unity. Furthermore, the proposed federal memorial to 1989/1990 in Leipzig, site of the decisive anti-government demonstration on October 9, 1989, is currently stalled. Indeed, it seems likely that a federal memorial to the events of 1989/1990 in Leipzig may never be built at all.

Germans have thus far exhibited considerable disagreement on the need for a central memorial to the events of 1989/1990 as well as on the question of what might be the appropriate venue for such a memorial. In addition, citizens have passionately disputed exactly what, if anything, should be commemorated in a memorial to the events of 1989/1990. Ironically, in spite of all good intentions on the part of memorial organizers, the effort to create a central national memorial to the events of 1989/1990—in other words, to German unification itself—has revealed above all a notable lack of national unity and consensus. This casts doubt on Hope Harrison's contention that, over the course of the past few decades, something like a master narrative in German memory culture of 1989/1990—a “new founding myth” for the nation, as she calls it—has evolved. While there can be little doubt that efforts to cement such a master narrative are underway, it is by no means clear that such efforts have succeeded. Contemporary German memory culture of 1989/1990 is in fact remarkably local and regional. As the historian Jon Berndt Olsen has shown, there is “enormous diversity […] in vernacular memory regarding how the concepts of freedom and unity should be represented in the German context.”

The East German punk scene was active and creative throughout the 1980s. It shaped the counterculture of the decade, right up through and beyond the collapse of the state and the reunification of Germany in 1989–1990. Punk developed in the GDR in the late 1970s, a few years after its emergence in Great Britain and the United States. East German punk also imitated the styles and tastes of punk in the West. In the different context of state socialism, however, punk inevitably acquired a different meaning. It became, as chronicler Tim Mohr has argued, “something uniquely […], even stridently Eastern.”

By 1989, when the East German revolution transformed the country, punk was the most visible, in-your-face countercultural style among East German youth. It did not by any means represent a majority of the youthful population, but it constituted a powerful and culturally influential minority whose impact went well beyond its immediate practitioners. Punk provided the nonconformist backdrop to the large-scale political, social, and economic transformations in East Germany. In many ways, as Peter Ulrich Weiß has argued, punk “dominated the subcultural wing of the GDR opposition movement until the demise of the GDR.”

Of course there were other countercultural scenes and movements in the GDR, including the peace movement, environmental groups, churchbased nonconformists, gay and women's rights advocates, samizdat publications, and independent art galleries, but, because of its open rejection of social and political norms, as well as its highly visible presence on the streets of cities, towns, and even villages, the punk scene was particularly prominent. The East German secret police complained about punk's “outward appearance, which is intended to make a public impact.” Punk also entered into productive alliances with other countercultural phenomena, including samizdat publications, independent galleries, and underground moviemaking, as well as with high culture and the Protestant church. However, punk was usually treated more harshly by the state than these other groupings.

BY NOW THERE ARE MANY NOVELS that describe the collapse of the GDR, German reunification, and the first months and years of eastern Germany's existence in the expanded Federal Republic. Throughout the 1990s, German literary critics demanded such novels, but relatively few works actually addressed the topic. It takes time to write and publish a novel, after all, and many of the authors who ultimately chose to tackle the issue were at the beginning of their careers in the early 1990s or had not even begun. Peter Richter, the author of 89/90, for instance, was only fifteen in 1989. Most reunification novels have appeared after the turn of the millennium.

The most prominent example of a reunification novel published in the 1990s was Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995), which sought to deal with the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German state by using outrageous dark humor. In this novel the narrator—and protagonist—claims to have forced the opening of the Wall by exposing his monstrously enlarged penis—the result of a transfusion of blood from SED leader Erich Honecker—to GDR border guards on the night of November 9, 1989. Helden wie wir mocked what by then were fixed, heroic, and uncritical depictions of the events of October and November 1989. Brussig's protagonist, far from being a hero, is a sexual pervert and Stasi operative. East German citizens in the novel are not blameless conquerors of dictatorship and tyranny but rather conformists and tattle-tales. Precisely because of its irreverence and humor, the novel became a massive success: the best-known depiction of 1989 in the literature of the 1990s.

Brussig was to publish many more novels addressing life in the GDR and German reunification. Indeed, dealing with this topic was to become his literary mission. His novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (On the Shorter End of Sun Avenue, 1999) was an affectionate depiction of an East German adolescence. Precisely because of its presentation of a relatively normal development, it counteracted widespread discourse in the 1990s about GDR abnormality and totalitarianism.

RELATIVELY FEW contemporaneous German fiction films addressed the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the reunification of Germany. Most German fiction films dealing with these issues were created many years after the events that they depict. The situation with fiction film is thus significantly different from the situation with documentary film. As Chapter 1 demonstrated, at least ten documentary films were made in 1989–1990 that addressed the political events occurring in the eastern part of Germany during those years. Many of those documentaries were made by East Germans themselves. By contrast, not a single East German fiction film made in 1989–1990 addressed the political events of those years, and very few eastern German films made shortly thereafter (by 1994) directly addressed those events.

There are two major reasons why fiction film was slower to deal with political events in East Germany than documentary film. The first is that fiction film generally takes longer to plan and create than documentary film. First someone has to write a treatment and ultimately a script, and then the project has to find a producer and a director. The project has to be discussed and approved in committees, and it needs funding. Actors and a cinematographer must be located. This process usually takes years.

By contrast, a documentary filmmaker with access to a movie camera can quickly travel to Leipzig or Dresden, if he or she chooses, and a documentary film about current events as they are taking place requires little in the way of crew or equipment: just a few people to handle lighting, sound, and camera work. No actors are necessary, nor is there a need for a script or story boards. Instead, a filmmaker such as Andreas Voigt found the material for his documentaries on the streets of Leipzig and in interviews with people whom he singled out from the crowd. Thus Leipzig im Herbst, Voigt's film about the revolutionary events in Leipzig in the fall of 1989, was actually filmed in the fall of 1989, and it had its premier only a few months later, at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 10, 1990, at a time when the GDR still existed. Such speed is virtually impossible for conventional fiction film.

THE COLLAPSE OF the East German state coincided with a dramatic rise in radical right-wing and neo-Nazi activity, especially among young people. The political scientist Gideon Botsch has called this “one of the most striking secondary consequences of the historic change that came to Germany in 1989.”

The neo-Nazi boom was by no means a phenomenon that western observers retroactively attached to the period as a way of explaining subsequent destabilizing trends, such as the popularity of the Alternative für Deutschland party (Alternative for Germany, AfD) three decades after reunification or the racist murders committed by Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU) terrorists in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, careful observers of the East German scene—including the Stasi itself—had been noting the rise of the far right throughout the 1980s.

Between 1983 and 1987, GDR police registered a five-fold increase in radical right-wing criminality. In 1987, the Stasi reported an unprecedented rise in extremist brutality, with incidents including attacks on soldiers, assaults on punks in Berlin, and young racists chasing Mozambicans through the streets of Dresden. In subsequent years things got even worse. In 1988, officials initiated 44 criminal proceedings in response to right-wing crimes. In the first eleven months of 1989, prosecutors were forced to initiate 144 such proceedings—a rise of over 300% in rightextremist criminality in less than a year.

An East German police report issued toward the end of the country's existence noted that the 1980s had been a fruitful decade for neo-Nazis:

The radical right was on the move in East Germany during the second half of the 1980s. According to a study completed in 1988, about 2% of East German young people identified as skinheads, with twice as many, 4%, actively sympathizing with skinheads. That meant that about 6% of GDR young people were either skinheads or skinhead sympathizers. Almost a third of young people declared at least some understanding for the skinheads.