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ostalgie!
the persistence of the “good, old
gdr” on the internet and at the movies
The GDR ceased to exist as a political entity on 3 October 1990, its dissolution
willed by its own citizenry, or at least a majority thereof. But for
a suicide case, the GDR has enjoyed a remarkably positive afterlife in our
individual and collective memories, imaginations, and cultural products.
For example, a host of young Germans born in the GDR have projected their
national schizophrenia onto paper in the form of memoirs and novels; literary
critics have begun talking about a “Generation Trabant.” Museums of
GDR memorabilia have sprouted from Malcow to Pforzheim and Holland, not to
mention the plethora of the virtual sort on the internet. Gojko Mitic,
the star of twelve DEFA Indian films between 1965 and 1983, still enjoys a
large and loyal fan base. And for the record, this phenomenon is not
confined to Germans or indeed to those who know what the GDR was or where
it could be found on a map: London teenyboppers, only sperm when Honecker
quit, buy tattered FDJ shirts in Camden’s second-hand shops for twenty quid.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
The following looks at two broad areas of visual culture in which a rosy
nostalgia for the GDR has manifested. It first surveys the internet
for key sites and trends in on-line Ostalgie before turning to cinema and
examining how the “GDR Retro-film” has shaped the landscape of German film
in the last few years. What keeps an imagined GDR fixed on our screens?
Internet
A tour of the web’s Ostalgie offerings might begin at www.ddr-im-www.de,
an exhaustive site with regularly updated features on recent GDR-related books,
music, and film. The site also maintains a comprehensive list of links,
just in case you wanted to buy a 1970s GDR referee’s jersey, download worker
songs on MP3, or find the “official website of the GDR government in exile,”
(which boats to be banned in Colorado).
A large number of sites are devoted to the joys of day-to-day life in the
GDR and its unique mass culture. At www.ddr-alltagskultur.de one can
sift through various consumer goods found once upon a time in the East: instead
of Marlboro there’s Sprachlos and Karo, Swyt and Milwok for Persil, and the
Wartburg as antidote for the BMW. In addition, the pages include pictures
of East German mouse traps, party grills, pocket calendars, hand cream, and
yogurt machines.
Other sites are concerned with linguistic peculiarities. Recognizing
GDR neologisms as what made East Germany so “unmistakable,” the GDR dictionary
(www.ddr-woerterbuch.de) is an on-going project that solicits “typical GDR
terms and coinages” in order to build a database to preserve this “dying language.”
Or, for a few GDR-style laughs turn to www.ddr-witz.de, the address for over
500 GDR jokes. Joke #494: Als Walter Ulbricht gestorben war, sprach
sich das natürlich im Himmel herum. Marx, Engels, Lenin und Thälmann
warteten 2 Wochen lang auf ihn. Dann gingen sie zu Petrus, um zu fragen,
wo denn Ulbricht solange bleiben würde. Darauf meinte Petrus:
„Tja Jungs, Ulbricht hat Himmelfahrt abgeschafft nu muss er loofen.“
One of the stranger sites I found was run by the fans of Gojko Mitic, “DEFA’s
Chief Indian” (www.gojkomitic.de). Besides updates on Gojko news, Gojko
interviews, and messages from the chief himself, the site allows fans to make
comments and address concerns. One woman thanks Mitic for inspiring
her to join an “Indian Club,” where she met her husband; they now have a son
together. A girl from Königs Wusterhausen asks Mitic to appear
at her school because she has to prepare a report on Native Americans. The
webmaster has to cool down fans who have become so caught up in the Indian
films’ rhetoric that they have written long diatribes against U.S. foreign
policy and pronounced racial epithets directed at Patrice Brice, Mitic’s French
colleague.
This is merely a small sampling of on-line Ostalgie. One could say
though that in sum the sites mix their nostalgia with a kitschy irreverence
and a mild to moderate anti-Western sentiment. Still, many seem at least
remotely cognizant of the crimes perpetrated in the name of real, existing
socialism. This sometimes creates odd juxtapositions, such as when links
to webpages about Stasi victims are placed alongside the “Save the Ampelmännchen!”
address. These incongruities recur in visions of the GDR at the cinema
as well.
Film
The great wave of GDR retro-films from 1999-2001 was preceded by a small
blip of features in the years immediately following reunification treating
contemporaneous problems in the East. Letztes aus der Da Da eR (1990)
was one of the final films produced by DEFA, which would outlive the GDR by
two years. The film involves the clowns Weh (Hans-Eckhardt Wenzel) and
Meh (Steffen Mensching), who act out exemplary situations from the reunification
period like Sophocles on acid—tragedy and trauma punctuated by bittersweet
caricature and humor. Peter Timm’s Go Trabi Go (1991) and its sequel,
Das war der wilde Osten (1993), address the experiences of East Germans in
the post-wall period with more conventional narrative forms and a straighter
recourse to comedy. Go Trabi Go follows a family from Saxony on their
first trip over the Alps to Italy. The journey southwards not only proves
to be an eye-opener for the naïve Saxons, but also wakes a latent sexuality
in the mother and daughter. The paradigms offered by both films, the
traumatic yet bittersweet recollection of the GDR (Letztes aus der Da Da
eR) and the “innocence lost” scenario from Go Trabi Go, are in some sense
previews of coming attractions.
The indisputable granddaddy of the “GDR Retro-film” is Leander Hausmann’s
debut Sonnenallee (1999). Rather than dealing with contemporary issues
of East Germans in the manner of the aforementioned films, the makers of Sonnenallee
created a fantasy 1970s GDR in the Babelsberg studios. Similar to later
retro-films, Sonnenallee obsesses with dramaturgy and GDR iconography: one
need only look to the prominent role of sets, costumes, uniforms, to determine
the importance of mise-en-scène to the film. In fact, the characters
themselves are preoccupied with questions of cultural authenticity: think
of Wuschel (Robert Stadlober) and his quest for the Stones album. Sonnenallee
is Ostalgie in its purest form, its obsessive attitude towards the shapes
and colors of GDR mass culture not at all unlike the various websites seen
above or the British teenagers clad in FDJ shirts.
Thomas Brussig, who co-wrote the screenplay for Sonnenallee, has showed
that it is possible to make a career of Ostalgie. His other effort
from 1999, Helden wie wir, is part of a group of Ostalgie comedies that refer
explicitly to the phallus as a signpost in the GDR experience. Helden
wie wir chronicles the GDR’s answer to Forrest Gump stumble through history
and topple the Berlin Wall with his enormous penis. On the other end
of the scale is Hedwig and the Angry Inch (USA, 2001), a musical comedy about
an East Berlin transsexual whose sex change operation is botched; Hedwig is
left with a one-inch reminder of his manhood. In the American film,
East Berlin is represented as a site of innocence, Hedwig very much ensconced
in a comfortable phallic/oedipal stage.
Go Trabi Go director Peter Timm returned in 2001 with Der Zimmerspringbrunnen,
based on Jens Sparschuh’s novel of the same name. The story revolves
around Hinrich Lobek, an unemployed East German who has not been able to get
his act together since the reunification. Timm’s satire depicts the
various caricatures of post-Cold War Germans and in so doing revives and
pokes fun of the very peculiarities (like the “typical GDR coinages” from
the GDR dictionary above) that Ostalgie invokes. In this way its address
is thoroughly ironic and of all the post-Sonnenallee retro-films, it most
nearly continues that project that Letzes aus der Da Da eR and Go Trabi Go
started.
Other films from 2001 have less rosy memories of the GDR. Olaf Kaiser’s
Drei Stern Rot (2001) locates the GDR as a site of trauma. It tells
the story of a border guard, who after a psychotic episode on the set of a
film about the GDR narrates his life from a psychiatrist’s couch. Through
its many flashbacks, the film most fears the continuity of power before and
after the reunification and alludes to the poor taste of those who profit
from the “marketing” of GDR memories in the entertainment industry.
Still, the film itself has an over-the-top, larger-than-life quality and displays
an embarrassing fascination with GDR iconography and typologies. One
wonders to what extent it performs what it criticizes in a naïve way.
Berlin is in Germany (2001) cannot be said to espouse the facile Ostalgie
of the 1999 retro-films—after all, the film depicts a prisoner unjustly imprisoned
for murder in the GDR—buts its disillusionment with the reunified Germany
forecloses other options. Somehow, the film posits, everything was
simpler and more comprehensible back in the good, old GDR. Finally,
by Wie Feuer und Flamme (2001), the story of a teenage girl from West Berlin
who falls in love with an East Berlin punk, the GDR begins to function as
little more than yet another venue to recast the Romeo and Juliet narrative.
The teenager drama has more to do with Nichts bereuen, Crazy, Engel &
Joe, and alaska.de than Sonnenallee.
The next dose of Ostalgie premieres at the Berlinale on February 13.
In Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) Daniel Brühl plays 21 year-old Alex, whose
mother suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma shortly before the fall
of the Berlin Wall and sleeps through the triumph of capitalism in the city.
When she awakes miraculously after eight months, Alex’s task is no small one—how
to hide the immense changes outside the 79 square meter apartment so that
his mother’s weak heart doesn’t relapse. Previews suggest the film
will be a rosy romp in the spirit of Sonnenallee. One wonders, however,
whether this film isn’t mise-en-abyme for the entire genre’s project—how to
resuscitate a GDR Disneyland on the size of a movie screen, 90 minutes at
a time.
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*
In The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR David Bathrick
argues that the GDR’s ideology of progress was based on a critique of cultural
modernity in both its avant-garde and mass cultural forms, the only alternative
to which was a rejuvenated national culture. And yet during the lifespan
of the GDR, the national culture project was always undermined by the vision
of Western mass culture and consumerism. Curiously then, it is the surface
signs and symptoms of the GDR’s national culture that Ostalgie most fondly
recalls: the uniforms, the circumscribed choices for consumption, the stars
of thinly-veiled propaganda films.
This is not to say that Ostalgie on the internet or at the movies is a pernicious
phenomenon. It is clear that most have a tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Others like those few bad apples blowing steam on the Gojko Mitic fan club,
however, run the risk of taking themselves too seriously and letting reminisces
of GDR mass culture stand in for serious discussions of social problems in
Eastern Germany or worse, fall prey to becoming forums for nationalism or
racial intolerance themselves.
[matthias frey, berlin]
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