Up The Arts

NOVEMBERKINDER: THE GOETHE-INSTITUT GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL

October 27, 2009 – 5:35 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

NOVEMBERKINDER: THE GOETHE-INSTITUT GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL

November 2009 – some thoughts on Germany East and West

Yes, I am a rampant Germanophile, but it’s my blog![1]

I suspect that somewhere in the German hinterland (if I had to guess, Düsseldorf perhaps) is a secret breeding project where Berlin creates the succeeding generations of delightful, affable and non-threatening Deutschlanders that are regularly dispatched to all points of the compass to staff the international offices of the Goethe-Institut. The delightful Christoph Mücher, Director Goethe-Institut New Zealand, should be mass-produced as a cuddly toy – the man has the patience of a saint to answer my emails. In a world where people still tend to associate Germany with that vile and peculiar Charlie Chaplin impersonator whose initials are AH (who was actually Austrian, lest we forget), these charming and generous people have the thanklessly difficult task of revealing the richness and diversity of contemporary German culture to the rest of us ignorant lot. This year that munificence comes in the form of a cinematic celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Wall. Films will screen in the four centres – though the majority only in Auckland and Wellington (cue quiet grumble from the South Island, the misunderstood Bavarians of New Zealand).

The Christchurch media launch – though under-attended – was very nice and held at the Bismarck.[2]

What does it all mean (he said, quietly humming “Embassy Lament” from Chess)?

“Zur Nation Euch zu bilden, Ihr hoffet es,” wrote the great nineteenth century playwright Friedrich von Schiller, “Deutsche, vergebens; Bildet, ihr könnt es, dafür freier zu Menschen euch aus”: ‘Germans, you hope in vain to make yourselves into a nation / develop yourselves instead – you can do it – more freely into human beings.’ At the time Schiller was thinking of the fractured states of Catholic south and Protestant Prussian-dominated north prior to the1871 Kaiserreich unification. Still, the sentiment echoes through the arches of history. Germany is a country that’s been put together and taken apart more often than the Lego set I was still playing with when I was seventeen.

In the post-war East-West lolly-scramble, Germany was carved up as spoils for her abominations. In novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s long poem Prussian Nights, invading Russian soldiers are depicted marvelling at the quality of Faber-Castell pencils; just as Stalin feared – envy of the capitalist lifestyle. Thence the chain-reaction that leads to the Wall – ostensibly to keep the West out, but really to keep the East in. Schiller’s sentiment seemed just as valid in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down – die Wende, ‘the turning point’ – and everyone in the streets sang “Wir sind ein Volk – ‘We are one people’. The impulse was kindled and fuelled by hope; Perestroika, Glasnost, liberation writings like Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (1953), and that Red Army tanks did not immediately roll into Poland in 1982. Francis Fukuyama thought this meant the end of history (which came as a bit of a surprise to genuine historians, who thought history also included things like ethnic and religious tension and the territorial ambitions of minor powers, and they keep rolling along). Meanwhile the rest of Europe fretted about being straddled by an efficient Teutonic superstate[3] forged from the capitalist giant of West Germany and the most economically successful of the Eastern Bloc satellites. As if the Warsaw Pact hadn’t suffered enough with Communism – now Eurovision, poor bastards.

Today the besser Wessis (know-it-all West Germans) make fun of the jammer Ossis (whinging East Germans) and vice versa (doesn’t that sound a little like Australia and New Zealand?). Modern Germany, the largest economy in Europe, is even now lumbering on under the burden of a 7% tax (the Soli) to fund infrastructure in the collapsing singularity of the former GDR even though 65% of former East Germans have moved west for jobs – a topic of conversation that will keep your average Wessi like my dear friend Gunnar (late 30s, software development in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony) grumbling genially for hours. Something like €1.25 trillion had been transferred east by 2005 and even now the East is only around 70% at parity with the West. As early as 1991, Die Zeit reported former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt saying “The worst mistake was that the government gave the impression that German unity could be more-or-less financed out of petty cash.” There will be no second Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’) like that born of the reconstruction funded by the Marshall Plan after the war.

I have occasionally wondered why the Bundestag of the New Germany never considered adopting a variation of the Länder solution – the celebration of regional diversity and identity that keeps the Bavarians and Hessians in line with Berlin (can you detect my inner South Islander coming out there) – but in truth (and with echoes of provincial resentment that linger from loony Ludwig II’s concession to the Prussians, and the all-important desire for an identity based on homeland) unified Germany would rather revive the allegiances and rivalries of the old order and erase any memory of the East (Germany is burdened with too much terrible history – something not often appreciated by New Zealanders burdened with too little). That wisdom may be for the best, but it is by no means universal. Perhaps this is why in a 2004 survey, out of 2000 Germans polled, 25% of the Wessis and 12% of the Ossis wanted to put the wall back. It has taken a generation or so for younger Ossis to cast off the chains of the warped Stalinist education system and adopt those of dog-eat-dog capitalism. More worryingly, now that the Ossis have access to all the baubles of consumerism, mass unemployment means not all can afford them, and out of frustration Neo-Nazism in the East is on the rise, as Nobel laureate novelist Günter Grass had predicted ten years earlier (and he should know; Grass – who campaigned for decades for Germans to accept Vergangenheitbewältigung[4] ‘conquering the past’ – finally came clean in 2006 about having been in the SS).

Sturm und Drang indeed. But even after all the sunny optimism of 1989 has dissipated, this is still the story of families and histories reunited; the reconstitution of Heimat (homeland – the less-threatening version of Vaterland) the anxious ideal which has always been core to German identity since Hermann kicked the arse of the Romans. There is also the memory of the more than a thousand escaping East Germans mown down on the wall by Kalashnikov fire ( in contrast the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper in 2000 reported that about 750,000 West Germans applied to move East between 1949 and 1989 – but most were rejected, unsurprisingly suspected as Western spies). There are also the former East German political prisoners still in ill health from years enduring the brutal conditions of the gulag. For younger Ossis (like my friend Jenny, in her early 20s and born in Wolfen, Saxony-Anhalt) though not unmindful of the past, the only differences become apparent when they compare childhood notes about pop culture with their Wessi confreres.

The German Film Festival celebrates twenty years since the wall came down and the twentieth century history went into reverse gear. Supported by the hard-working Goethe-Institut (who, let’s face it, have one of the most difficult PR jobs in the world), the German Federal Government, DHL and Lufthansa (old planes, average meals, lovely flight crew), among others, this will be the first major festival of German cinema to take place in New Zealand, viewing these momentous historical changes through the lenses of a new generation of German filmmakers. It focuses those lenses on a Germany that, like a recovering stroke victim, is slowly regaining the use of a limb after many years of it being controlled by a Nomenklatura rubber-stamping orders arrived via the Caviar Run from Moscow. The reunification after forty years of separation in two ideologically opposed states has revived the whole issue of what it actually means to be German – first broached in the days of the wars against Napoleon, and taboo with the memory of Nazi nationalism. Is Deutschtum (‘German-ness’) a unifying characteristic over and above a common language? –  (which is, after all, shared with Austria, parts of Switzerland and even small communities in the New World like the expatriate community in Argentina and the Amish of the United States). One really has to ask whether this reunification is a state of Gemeinschaft (an organic community) or Gesellschaft (individuals aggregated together only out of material interest), or even a Gleichshaltung (enforced amalgamation – depending on who you ask – drawing anaemic comparisons with the Austrian Anschluβ).

Anyway, here is a plug for the Festival and the Goethe-Institut (though it is unlikely Kris Kringle will leave a Merc or Beamer in my Weinacht stocking – and I am open to offers from Alliance Française, the British Council, the US State Department, and , oh, anyone really. Ta). Really it just gives me an excuse to go off on a big ramble on my favourite hobbyhorse – German culture and people, and why they are infinitely more fascinating than most people seem to think.

Films like Good Bye Lenin! (2003) and Berlin is in Germany (2001) toy with the idea that when economic times get tough and life complicated, some bewildered Easterners pine for the old days, which has become known as Ostalgie (a composite of Ost, ‘East’ and Nostalgie, ‘Nostalgia’), much as some older Kiwis fondly remember a rose-tinted version of the Muldoon era. This grim determination to cling to an obsolescent identity reminds me a little of the signs in the Liebfrauenkirche in Munich that proclaim Diese Kirche ist kein Museum (‘This Church is not a Museum’). In fact, there was a lot in common between East Germany and New Zealand under the iron thumb of Premiere Robert Muldoon, in terms of controlled economy, frightened media, conservative drabness, censorship and lack of choice – though without the secret police, the Stasi (of the thoroughly Orwellian Ministry for State Security) and their infamous plastic bag executions. Other films, Coming Out (1989), Winter Adé (1988) and Das Leben der Anderen (2006), relive the social cruelty that the GDR was for more than a few. Yet others like Scultze gets the Blues (2003), Alle Alle (2007) and the documentary Nach dem Fall (1999) unravel the coming to terms with the New Germany, often with hope, humanity and great heart.

In 1991 some sharp and sympathetic wit modified Ludwig Engelhardt’s well-known statue of Marx and Engels in Berlin’s Marx-Engels-Forum, spray-painting WIR SIND UNSCHULDIG (‘We Are Innocent’) on the pedestal. Communism wasn’t in principle to blame. The East wasn’t all as grim and grey as received wisdom would have us believe. Films like Sonnenallee (1999), Here We Come (2006) and Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (2008) celebrate the richness and distinctiveness of Ossi culture. A common sentiment among older Ossis I have spoken to is that in many ways the former East was more comforting in its certainties than the New Germany, and that within marginalised groups like homosexuals and experimental artists and filmmakers, there was a greater sense of creativity, innovation, political earnestness and supportive community. Every story has two sides.

Few places in Germany show the scar-tissue of reunification as much as the capital Berlin, sutured together like a pantomime horse, where there are two of everything, one side mirroring the other: two public libraries, two opera houses, two universities. Inevitably many of these films are set in the capital – the social fault line. It is then perhaps fitting that Berlin receives an entire section of the programme to itself. East Berlin has its own distinctive iconography that acts as a kind of visual shorthand, where the most unassuming thing can be as charged with memories as Proust’s madeleine. The little man on crossing lights that lets you know when it’s safe to go is called the Ampelmann in German. When the wall came down, the Westerners quickly set about converting the crossing lights of the East (where the Ampelmann has a coat and hat) with the Western version (which was rather bland and uninteresting). The matter caused such a furore that it eventually came before the Bundestag, and the Easterners were permitted to keep their Ampelmann. But today the underground trains stop at the ghost stations they once glided through without stopping, and that’s the important thing. Trillions of Deutschmarks and Euros have been raised to revive an entire third of what is still one of the world’s largest economies – and that’s a fairly heroic achievement.

Judging from some of these films I have seen before, certain imagery will reoccur: Alexanderplatz is a vast paved desert of a space in East Berlin, dominated by the famous TV tower, the Fernsehturm or Telespargel – the ‘toothpick’(the tower was known by locals as the ‘Pope’s gift’ because at certain times of day it reflected the light in the shape of a cross over the officially atheist GDR). Alexanderplatz still looks much as it did when communist guards paraded in it, except now it sprouts billboards for Coca-Cola, Burger King and Panasonic. Even today, very occasionally, you may see what the English-speaker calls a ‘mullet’, but which in Germany is VoKuHiLa –Vorne Kurz Hinten Lang (one of those typically German descriptive names, ‘Short front, long back’). Sometimes this is teamed with the Rotzbremsen (the ‘booger barrier’ moustache) and Pornobalken (‘Porno handlebars’) sideburns. The bogan is a universal concept (and in German, if memory serves, is a munter. Along Karl-Marx-Allee you can still see the kitschy politburo-severe apartment blocks, now protected by heritage order. On the other hand the former eastern neighbourhood of Kreuzberg (shabby chic, but no more-so than Charlottenburg in the west) is integral to Berlin’s vibrant art scene. This seems to work in the slightly kitschy bricolage of Berlin – the contrast is even more striking in nearby Potsdam where the Baroque splendours of the Prussian kings stand shoulder to shoulder with Soviet constructivist-brutalist concrete towers enlivened with an occasional communist-utopian mural, mosaic or sculptural relief.

Even after the cold, pale light of glasnost, the culture of the East is filtered through so many layers of irony that it is very difficult to understand without having first internalised the Kafkesque system of bureaucracies, circumlocution and Aesopian encryptions required to even think and dream freely in a totalitarian state where the creative imagination was seen as a threat to the state and had to adopt contortions akin to a Piranesi prison in order to remain undetected. To the Westerner a society where art and literature could be seen to have that much power is unthinkable (with the possible exception of those old enough to have lived under Europe’s fascist regimes, the South American dictatorships or McCarthyism in the United States).

There is another place where the scars of schism still prick intensely. North-east Bavaria (where my good friend and informant Jörg – mid-twenties, political scientist – was born) is best known for towns like Wagner’s Bayreuth, and Wunsiedel, famous as Rudolf Hess’ burial place and notorious for Neo-Nazi rallies. It was the Zonenrandgebiet (border area) because of the GDR’s iron curtain to the north and Czechoslovakia’s to the east. The locals called it the Arsch der Welt (like what the Rolling Stones called Invercargill) and were long given handouts by Berlin to sustain their capitalist outpost at the end of the western world. In 1989 trains from Czechoslovakia stuffed with refugees from the East arrived at the stations at Hof and Marktredwitz. The locals invited them to their houses to stay for the first days and people still get quite sentimental. Now the region is the heart of Europe, but there lies the village of Mödlareuth, nicknamed “little Berlin”, where there was also once a Wall down the middle with a Todesstreifen (death penalty),  and where the memories remain as intense (if not more-so) as in the capital.

In twenty years the scars have not quite healed – but they are healing. The hope has dulled somewhat, and in general the impression I have from my last visit in 2008 (thanks to Creative New Zealand and – disclosure – the Goethe-Institut) is the Germany has settled back down to business. You can still have your photo taken at the remains of Checkpoint Charlie with someone dressed in a guard’s uniform, and you can by a East German officer’s hat from the stall run by nearby Turks (though in all probability it was made in China and trimmed with dog hair). Germany is back – and while it may suffer from too much history, New Zealand suffers from too little.

 

 

 

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[1] As an aside, the recent antics of Auckland Grammar boys at the Auckland Museum can probably be passed over (with appropriate scolding) as adolescent stupidity in the poorest imaginable taste, but the behaviour of the Lincoln students is unforgivably appalling in a university context. The Lincoln students got off very lightly – in several EU countries including Germany, they would have been arrested. As for some of the disgusting comments that appeared as letters to the editor in various newspapers, one can only be horrified by the lack of historical understanding and the failure to register that Nazism took over in a western democracy not entirely unlike our own and over six million people were slaughtered like cattle on the flimsiest of populist political pretexts. I used to think that the proliferation of Holocaust memorials, museums and institutes outside of Europe occasionally bordered on excessive – now I am not so sure, especially if the level of ignorance bred by distance in New Zealand is anything to go by. As I hinted in my earlier essay “Good Germans and Bad History”, there is no reason to complacently think that such things couldn’t happen here under certain circumstances. That’s not liberal PC guilt, that’s a basic understanding of politics, history and the frailty of human goodness. Philosophically-speaking, the Nazis allow us to recognise modern evil when we see it.

[2] Genuine German sausage was served, and yes, I do feel better with some German sausage inside me, but if you misconstrue that as sordid you have a dirty mind and should be ashamed of yourself.

[3] Is it wrong to find that faintly arousing? Yes? Oh.

[4] Now you know why texting has never really caught on in Germany. Vergangenheitbewältigung is a perfect iambic pentameter of a word – what a super last line for a sonnet – try saying it three times fast.