DEFA Filmmakers Remember the Fall of the Wall

As part of our countdown to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are now featuring monthly vignettes highlighting how filmmakers and others involved in East German film experienced the events of 1989 - 1990.  Read perspectives from Ulrich Weiß, Andreas Voigt, Christine Becker, Jörg Foth, Stefan Kolditz, Ralf Schenk, Helke Misselwitz, Claus Löser, Detlef Helmbold, Rainer Simon and Evelyn Schmidt.

Ulrich Weiß

September 14, 2009

Still, I can’t manage to render a STATEMENT on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

HOW COULD I?

Was it a turning point that led to German unity?
Or to re-unification?
Was it a revolution, a peaceful one?
Or was it a restoration? And, if so, what was restored?
In 1989 and since.

200 years earlier, in 1789, began the French Revolution.
It wrote liberty, equality, fraternity on its banners.
It spread liberty spread over all of Europe—thanks to Napoleon.
Fraternity too? What about equality? In a war?
Those who came up short in the distribution, the poor, sought their luck in America.
They settled on Native American land and brought liberty along.
Liberty for whom?
Did they also bring equality and fraternity?
The European proletarian revolution after WWI strove for equality—a social equality.
But how was it with liberty and fraternity?
Does optimizing one involve diminishing the other?
Can unison emerge from the triad that sounds so promising in French:
liberté, egalité, fraternité?
For a moment, it seemed believable when the borders opened in Germany.
1989.—

“We are the people” became “We are one people” and “Germany, united fatherland.”
“Insanity!”—the collective call.
And then soon: “We were the people.”
“We had been the people.”
“Had we been the people?”
(If you emphasize a different word every time, it shifts the meaning of the whole. Try it.)
The Cold War, which followed closely upon the hot one, left its marks—
the destruction of the language, the loss of the ability to make oneself understood in it without enduring misunderstandings. Texts lost their contexts, contexts their texts.
Language confusion. Language delusion. Language distortion.
Twenty years later the first attempts to rediscover it, the language.  

You might almost wish to go back two and half millennia,
when people strolled in Greece’s flourishing landscapes
and began to reflect on thinking. And on how it could be expressed.
Someone who makes films, cinematography, might ask:
“Does everything move based on the images?”

This morning I read the paper:
“Snacking without a calorie counter: Researchers puzzle over chocolate of the future.”
“Tower of Bremen: For 3 weeks Bremen will be the world capital of languages.”
“Obama wants stricter bank controls.”

WHAT NEXT?

Maybe we should invent a new language.
After we have strolled in our groves, where we will have once again reflected on our thinking.

 HOW ELSE?

Translated by Hiltrud Schulz, DEFA Film Library

Night of Nights… November 9, 1989

by Andreas Voigt

I was in the middle of possibly the most exciting shoot of my life. We had been filming the Monday demonstrations on the streets of Leipzig since October 16. It was a film we named Leipzig im Herbst (Leipzig in the Fall), which later became the beginning of my Leipzig Series.

Already months before, when all this was not foreseeable, I had received an invitation from the West. My films Leute mit Landschaft and Alfred were to be shown in a movie theater in Bochum. Of course, I wanted to go. And I had gotten a permit from the DEFA Studio for Documentary Films, where I worked.

The event was on the evening of November 9. Christoph Hübner, a West German colleague whom I knew, was also at the theater. After the screening he said, “Come on, we’re going to my place to have a glass of wine.” When we arrived at his place, the Tagesthemen news show happened to be on. It was exactly that scene that has since become historic, in which SED Politburo member Schabowski pulls a note out of his pants pocket and—in answer to a question from a Western journalist about when the relaxed travel regulations announced by the GDR government would go into effect for citizens—said, “I believe right away.” I saw that at about 10:30 pm. By then thousands of East Berliners had already made their way to the border crossing at Bornholmer Bridge and then streamed into West Berlin. The Wall had fallen.

The premiere of Heiner Carow’s film Coming Out also took place that night. My wife was at the premiere. I knew that. My daughter, who was 12 at the time, was home alone. I must have tried to call her a dozen times but it always rang busy. Back then there were very few telephone lines between East and West Germany, and the cell phone wasn’t invented yet . . .

Sometime very late that night I got through. My daughter answered immediately. I said, “Hey, Mira, they opened the Wall.” And she: “Wow, Dad—To think that I lived to see the day that the SED opened the Wall!”

The next day I was in a car driving to Berlin with people I hadn’t known before. I wanted to get home right away. In the opposite lane, heading West, was a line of Trabis and Wartburgs more than 60 kilometers long. Bumper to bumper.

An officer at GDR border control took stock of our car and me. We were the only ones driving East. He looked into my blue East passport and said in broadest Saxon dialect, “This won’t do at all. You left by train and through a different border crossing when you went to West Germany; you have to re-enter Berlin, the GDR, through the same checkpoint.” To which I said, “Or I could just enter the GDR here, then go over to West Berlin, and from there drive back into East Berlin.” The East border guard paused a moment and said, “Well, maybe that’d work…” and let us through.

Translated by Delene White
DEFA Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst

We Didn’t Understand It—Memories of November 9th

Written by Christine Becker, August 2009

There was nothing to smuggle that day. Other than the usual groceries, cheese, fruit and a TV magazine, we had nothing in our luggage. And we weren’t invited to a party, which meant I could come back by midnight. It was only a regular visit with family in Berlin-Mahlsdorf; and this was why I got my way and we crossed the border at the Heinrich Heine Strasse checkpoint, which was near our apartment in Kreuzberg.

Jurek hated this checkpoint because the guards there were particularly meticulous. If he had something to bring to the boys that shouldn’t be found in the car, he traveled with his East German passport and used Checkpoint Charlie to enter East Berlin. As a citizen of West Berlin, I had to use the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint. Then one of us had to stand around looking stupid, waiting for the other. I didn’t like this separation at all. If we wanted to go to a party, we would chose the Sonnenallee checkpoint, so I could stay until 2:00 am with my West Berlin ID card.

No party, no smuggled goods—that meant Heinrich Heine Strasse. And, as the saying goes, everything was the same as usual when we entered the GDR late in the afternoon. It was the ninth of November.

Once we arrived in Mahlsdorf, we unloaded the car. The television magazine came out from under the spare tire or the floormat— sometimes Jurek changed the hiding place again just a few meters before the checkpoint. Once he pulled the magazine out of its hiding place and put it back into the glove compartment—and, on that particular day, we were not checked. In the sunroom, Rieke— Jurek’s first wife— served us jet black coffee, as usual, and cake—although it was only an hour until dinner. Nikolaus, Jurek’s oldest son, and his girlfriend were already there. Leon arrived too late—also as usual.

But the conversations were different. Nikolaus had taken some risks and gotten pictures of the demonstrations on October 7. It was an eventful time for the whole family.

The heated conversations were suspended only for the news. Even today what happened that evening by the television in Mahlsdorf—or rather what didn’t happen—is incomprehensible to me. Five official East German citizens watched and listened to the press conference together. My presence in that circle was negligible, as interpreting official statements of the GDR authorities was not my thing. But what did the others understand that evening? Schabowski said, a law would go into effect that would make it possible for every citizen to leave via a checkpoint. But starting when? What I understood was that it was right away—„forthwith,“  was the word.

For obvious reasons I wonder why the other five people in attendance that evening were in agreement that it was only a possibility. An eventuality that GDR citizens might possibly, and only after submitting an application, one day be approved to cross through one of the checkpoints. So, why shouldn’t we have dinner in peace?

And that’s what happened. The television was turned off and the conversations continued. Jurek started to get anxious around 11:00pm, which was completely normal. He knew that any departure in the family dragged on forever—one wished each other this and that, one was handed this or that, simply because one wanted to be nice. But because it was important to him to get me back over the border before midnight, he exuded unease. We started with the goodbyes at 11:15pm, saying we’d be back in three or four weeks.

It turned out that Jurek’s discomfort was justified. As we got to the border crossing around 11:45, it was apparent that the line of people exiting the country was much longer than usual. The whole of Heinrich Heine Straße was full of parked cars—of Trabants.

And again I wonder: What did they understand—the East German man and the West German woman in their car at the end of the line?

Nothing. We hadn‘t grasped the events that were in motion here. The fall of the Wall, perhaps? Nothing of the sort was in our minds as Jurek moved into the opposite lane at five to twelve, pulled ahead of all the Trabants and we crossed the border. On the West Berlin side of the Wall, Moritzplatz was full of people. A police officer stopped our car and asked, “How is the atmosphere over there?” “How should it be?” He wanted to know if things were peaceful. We hadn’t noticed anything un-peaceful in the long line of Trabants, so the police officer let us go—two ignorant people on their way home. Unfathomable why we didn’t suspect what was about to happen. It’s almost superfluous to say that we went to bed—without turning on the television. We slept through a momentous event.

For our little family, the next day was to become one in which rapturous messages were acknowledged with disproportionate bleakness.

The doorbell woke us. Jurek thinks this was at 6 am. The boys say they would have let us sleep till 10.

When Jurek opened the door and saw his family on the landing, he didn’t make much of an effort to show his excitement. The family still talks about it. (Ten minutes later, at the breakfast table, Jurek decided the time was right to tell his sons they’d be getting a little brother. Following in their father’s footsteps, they both were able to conceal their joy about that.)

Soon, however, everyone explained what they’d experienced that night. Nikolaus had listened to the radio and, at 2:30 am, his mother and the girlfriend, who had gone to bed with henna in her hair, loaded into the car and drove to West Berlin. Leon, who lived in Berlin-Mitte, had crossed the border on foot. And in the early morning hours, unbelievably, they ran into each other on the Kurfürstendamm. They had bought breakfast rolls and set out to surprise us. Surprise a success. Luckily, everything would never be the way it had always been.

Jurek had difficulties with the new times. German unification had not been on his wish list, and not only because he was certain it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime. The existence of two German states, he thought, was the guarantor of peace, which might have had something to do with his background. That he hoped the GDR would become a democratic state after the fall of the Wall—that had to do with his sense of justice. The collapse of real existing socialism was nothing to lament. The West, however, no longer promised people solidarity, but merely more consumerism. Sales rise “until our word lies in rubble,” wrote Jurek in December 1989. At least here he had shown a little foresight.  But otherwise, it was our disgrace that We hadn’t understood it.

Translated by Hiltrud Schulz and Delene White, DEFA Film Library

"Womp-bomp-a-loom-op-a-womp-bam-boom"

Written by director Jörg Foth, August 2009

“Hello Jörg.  What’s going on?” Thomas Plenert asked me on the telephone.  He sounded as if he were just around the corner, but he was calling from the USA, where he was on tour with Helke Misselwitz, his wife Gudrun and their film Winter adé.  It was a little before 10:00 pm and I didn’t know what might have been going on.  “Over here, the Americans are saying the Wall is open.” “No, no,” I said. “The Prussians don’t shoot as fast as the tabloids print.”  I then told him about Schabowski’s pants pocket and how he pulled a small piece of paper out of it shortly before 7:30 pm, then mumbling maybe only what he thought might have been written on it, and only confirming it when a journalist asked.  Leaving the country without a statement of purpose – effective immediately, everywhere… even in Berlin.  And I told Tommy that civil rights activist Sebastian Pflugbeil made the point five minutes earlier at the beginning of the 9:45 pm news on ZDF [West German TV station] that the new travel regulations only applied to citizens who had wanted to leave the GDR for a long time and not to mere tourists.

It was probably too embarrassing for the GDR to have its citizens fleeing the country by way of Budapest and Prague.  Tommy was reassured that he wasn’t missing anything.  My wife and I went to sleep and then to work the next day.  But before we got up on Friday the 10th, the telephone rang yet again.  Our friend Petra who lived above us – and who had left the country a year ago – asked us over a pile of static why we weren’t on the Kudamm and dancing. All Hell had broken loose there.  My wife and I took care of the kids and drove to work just like every other day.  We had an evening date at the Gethsemanekirche to become members of the Neues Forum in Prenzlauer Berg at their founding meeting there.

Whoever lived in Berlin, worked in Babelsberg and didn’t own a car rode the double-decker train nicknamed “Sputnik,” in the south around West Berlin.  It would take 2 hours in the morning and then another 2 in the evening, or even 3 during the winter or a storm.  The drive through West Berlin would have taken only half as long, meaning only 2 hours in the car instead of 4. If you didn’t count the weekends, holidays and vacation time in a 365-day year, that left you with 230 working days with 2 hours of unnecessary travel time per day, for a total of 460 hours.  The Berlin DEFA feature film crew had to travel 19 full days of each year on account of the Cold War.  But I liked the view from “Sputnik” of the irrigated fields south of Berlin.  Flowers, ducks, deer, foxes.  Rough, prickly nature changing in all kinds of weather every hour of every day, week after week, year after year, again and again.

When I was a child, I listened to a program on a small transistor radio named "Sternchen" AFN with a handful of friends Monday to Friday from 5:00-6:00.  The right music – meaning pure rock n’ roll – could only be found at the fair and on AFN [American Forces Network] in the 60s, the stomping grounds of the Halbstarken, and the Berlin frequency of the US between 5:00 and 6:00.  We always ran out of school on Wednesdays so we could still make it after the “Pioneer Afternoon.”  In 1964, I got a Stern 4 as a Jugendweihe [initiation ceremony] present, which had 2 antennae and took 6 batteries.  My portable radio was heavy, loud and divine as it sat on my arm while I carried it through the streets for hours.  The craziest thing was that you couldn’t buy this music, nor could you read about it in the magazines, which meant you didn’t know exactly what certain songs were called or how to spell the singers’ names.

I had a Scottish penpal – Kathleen Rennie at 15 Hyslop Crescent, Colmonell Ayrshire.  She would write down the Top Ten list from her radio station for me and even sent me her Beano Book, which somehow made it through customs.  I sent her whatever we had available.  One time, I got a package with a 45 Single of Bud Ashton & His Group, Robot / Foot Tapper and a confiscation report. The GDR customs had confiscated Little Children by Billy J. Kramer & The Dakotas. I finally bought the CD in 1992.

Rock n’ roll was like an unreachable siren’s song which had bewitched me always and forever.  He or she who followed it would be shot at the Wall, or at least socially and professionally ruined.  “Rivets in studded jeans unwelcome!” was on signs posted at some dancehalls, often where “Swing dancing forbidden” had stood 20 years earlier.  But my songs were so restless, so light-hearted, fun-loving, cocky and defiant.  Not to listen to, but to move by.
Thank you, Chuck Willis, for “Don’t Hang up My Rock n’ Roll Shoes.”
Thank you, Thurston Harris, for “Little Bitty Pretty One.”
Thank you, Larry Williams, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Drifters, Coasters and AFN.

There was nothing that even came close to AFN Frolic at Five.  Much later, BFBS [British Forces Broadcasting Services] started to play kindergarten songs from Liverpool from 6:00 to 7:00, and the German West Berlin stations might as well have joined the 1965 ban on “beat” music in the GDR.  In September 1965, SFB [Radio Free Berlin] Tuesday Evening Hit Parade Music Box still refused to play “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” despite popular demand.  The host explained they would wait for the Rolling Stones’ next release and then the editorial board would decide whether or not the band could continue being broadcast.  This was the reason I sent a protest letter without a return address bearing the weekly-announced pseudonym address to the SFB concerning the matter, and then I began to listen to Radio Luxemburg on my Stern 4 next to my bed the same evening.  It was pretty grim from a receiver-technology angle, because the station faded in and out - sometimes disappearing entirely – and the songs themselves had to glimmer through the hiss.  The darkness of the evening, being alone in bed with this static-filled sound made the music all the more unreachable, but all-the-more powerful.
When Radio Luxemburg broadcast Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” it hit me like a punch.  I liked his stuff earlier but – with this song – he leapt into the circle of my most sacred Rock n’ Rollers.

In 1967, Pete Seeger visited the East Berlin Volksbühne theater.  He sang in a plaid shirt, baggy flannel pants and black work boots and had a somewhat rundown guitar.  We had been and still were excited about when he suddenly sung “Peat Bog Soldiers” in German.  It was odd for someone outside of our music scene and our lives proper to sing a song from our flag ceremony, in which it had already devolved into an empty phrase.  Following the concert, we waited at the stage exit on Linienstrasse.  I asked Pete Seeger for an autograph on the cuff of my parka’s sleeve and gave him a letter for Bob Dylan to take with him, because I was very worried about him since his motorcycle accident.  In this letter, I told him how important he was to us in the GDR and how it would do him well if he played here sometime.  Pete Seeger signed my sleeve, but then reacted very angrily to my love letter to Bob Dylan.  He refused to take it with him and said that Bob Dylan had gone crazy.  At home, I wrote a letter to Pete Seeger, in which I explained to him again the urgency of the letter to Bob Dylan, included the letter to Bob Dylan into the one to Pete Seeger and then I gave them both to a girl named Angela, who was one class above me and was apprenticing as a reception desk secretary at the Hotel Berolina.  She had told me Pete Seeger was staying the night there, and would put my double-letter into his box at reception.  She later was expelled from school on account of reportedly having written the RIAS [Radio in the American Sector].  I didn’t know back then if I had succeeded in reaching Pete Seeger’s hotel mailbox, but I had the great feeling that I’d done everything possible for Bob Dylan.  And when – to our surprise - he played on an East Berlin field in front of the Soviet memorial at Treptow on September 17, 1987, I wept many tears and knew that – even though it took 20 years – my letter had worked.

This unbelievable life between two worlds came to an end on November 9, 1989.  The unreachable siren songs of my childhood are now alphabetically sorted in the music stores or are available online.  In the 90s, I searched for, hunted for and found all the really catchy songs and one-hit wonders stuck in my head.  From “You Can’t Sit Down” by the Dovells to “Stranded in the Jungle” by the Cadets, from “Bop-A -Lena” by Ronnie Self to “Walk Right in” by the Rooftop Singers.  There is nothing more to be done.  But the longing, the inaccessibility of a world that only existed in the air, in the ether and in your ear was more mysterious and pretty.

On November 10, 1989, I met up with my wife after work at the Gethsemanekirche, where the founding meeting of the Neues Forum in Prenzlauer Berg was lost in the sensational events of the previous night and in the coming days.  It was to prove unnecessary in light of the greatest domestic German chess move ever – the opening of the Wall by the GDR government.  No longer could something be brought to an end within one’s own borders.  We made a date with our West Berlin friends Thomas and Gabriele Draeger for Sunday and planned on going over there not through some existing border checkpoint, but rather through one of the new, wild, recently broken holes in the Wall with both our daughters, Lola and Sarah.  We went to Oderberger Strasse – because it was the closest – got in line in front of the hole in the Wall, received a stamp on a flap clipped on the back of our passport next to a People’s Police truck, climbed over fallen concrete slabs into the No Man’s Land strip, looked to the left and right the death strip and the barriers with our daughters, and then just stood there, kissing each other dearly for a long time.

In 1993, I received some 8mm reels of the Family from Family Klohn – a part of my wife’s family who had fled in July 1961 – so I might eventually use parts later used in my film Prenzlauer Berg-Walzer.  Arrived in the West, aunt Lilo climbed the tourist platform on Bernauer Strasse and took footage of the death strip vis-à-vis Oderberger Strasse.  In 1961, with a long, slow pan, Lilo filmed exactly the spot where my wife and I kissed each other on November 12, 1989.

In those days, virtually all of East Berlin was hauling back boxes of laundry detergent, shopping bags and hi-fi stereo systems, since there was "welcome money" to be had in the West.  100 marks for everyone - for every baby, every child, every woman, every man, every senior citizen.  17 million times 100.  Anyone in the East who later reported their identity card as missing and got a new one, or who had a passport at their disposal in addition to their card, could get another 100 marks again, or even two more times.  So it was more like 30 million times 100.

Suddenly - or coincidentally - everything in the stores cost exactly 99 marks.  The fall of the Wall was a magical moment for shelf warmers and discontinued merchandise.  You could already get welcome money before 1989 if you were from the East and permitted to attend a West German relative's momentous birthday or other family occasion.  That way, GDR citizens could act a little more independent or could fulfill their desires without having to lay their relatives in the West on the table.  But in 1989, the welcome money became a kind of "cash for clunkers" program for your own life.  Whoever was ready to forget their previous life would get 100 marks for a new one.
For about a year, sample packages of margarine, weekly newspapers and sanitary napkins were hung on the handles of our apartment building doors.  West German products were prostituting themselves in the East German stairwells.  They courted each GDR citizen as a future customer.

After 40 years of free healthcare and boredom in the East, the majority chose the risks of life in the West and prosperity.
But more people than anyone can remember today had tried to deal with the GDR at some point, somewhere, somehow, instead of thoughtlessly ignoring it. But it didn’t make any sense at any point.  In January 1990, GDR passports were being given out at the Immanuelkirchstrasse police station for everybody.  We went there, got in line and learned while waiting that you could apply for an one-year pass for 10 marks, or for a pass for 10 years for 30 marks.  Without a second of hesitation, we applied for 10-year GDR Passports, which we did indeed use to travel to as many countries as possible for as long as it was possilble with them -- meaning until 1995.

The Wall was built in 1961 because too many people wanted to go to the West from the East.  It was opened in 1989 because too many people still wanted to go to the West from the East.  And today, 20 years later, the exodus from the East to the West is bigger than ever.

August 13, 1961             2004

Images courtesy of Jörg Foth

Translated by Evan Torner

Screenwriter Stefan Kolditz remembers...

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue."
 (Oscar Wilde)

"You can believe it! Comrade Schabowski said so. Ask Comrade Schabowski." The couple – in their late 50s, stocky, typical Berliners – stood at the infamous Palace of Tears by the Friedrichstrasse station, the sluice to and from West Berlin. They waved their ID cards around excitedly in front of the officer, who was a head taller and looked down upon them, expressionless. It was shortly after 7 p.m. I passed the couple on my way from the station to the streetcar stop for the number 46, which would take me to Pankow, the northern district of East Berlin where I lived. I had no idea what had happened at the press conference a few minutes before, but I knew right away that something unimaginable had occured. 

Nobody was home. My partner was at the apartment of a well-known civil-rights activist in a rundown 19th-century building on Kavalierstrasse, where she and others were studying the reports of demonstrators arrested on October 7. Stunned by the accounts of abuse, slander and humiliation they were reading, they didn’t realize that the wings of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History were beating – a mere 100 meters away at the Bornholmer Bridge crossing to West Berlin. No one in the apartment had noticed. No television or radio was playing, and there was no telephone.

My partner first heard the news from me when she came home around 11. At that point, the Wall wasn‘t yet open; but I had seen that couple. Something was going to happen. The odd thing was that we, who had long dreamed of experiencing another country, of being able to travel, were suddenly dumbfounded. No euphoria, only emptiness. Throughout the 1980s we had felt like strangers in this country, in which we had lived for 30 years. We‘d debated with friends whether it would be better to leave. Now, of all times, the GDR arose again in its final hour. Differently than we‘d expected. That night, while euphoric images of the opening Wall went around the world, we went to bed depressed.

Four weeks earlier, on October 7, we had each gone our separate ways on Alexanderplatz. It was a sunny, warm fall evening. My partner drove to the Staatsoper to see Mozart’s "Magic Flute" with her friend. I walked with our 7-year-old son past the television tower and to the Palace of the Republic, where an aged Party leadership applauded itself in its dream world. Shortly before, during the offical celebration of the GDR’s 40th anniversary, a demonstration had been broken up with violence. Now Alexanderplatz lay there, as good as extinct. We were almost the only people on the street – except policemen and young plainclothes Stasi men. I wanted my son to grasp and memorize the ghostliness of the situation.

We got on the train at the Hackescher Markt – which at that time still tauntingly bore the name Marx-Engels-Platz – and went back to Pankow. During supper, I heard on the RIAS station that more and more protesters were gathering at the Gethsemane Church, in Prenzlauer Berg near Schönhauserallee. I put my son to bed and headed off.

In and around the church, more and more people were arriving. It was already dark, but still warm. A peculiar atmosphere reigned: nervous and happy, angry and euphoric. The police tried to seal off the Gethsemane Church, but I got into the perimeter easily, through the courtyards for which Berlin is famous and which link the streets. A solemn vigil was taking place inside the church; people were giving talks and reading calls to action – exactly what had been happening for weeks  in many churches.

At about 11 pm, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with my partner. On her way home from the opera, she had seen the crowds at the Gethsemane Church from the elevated  train that rides the almost 80-year-old steel viaduct above Schönhauserallee – and decided to get off on the spur of the moment. We stared at each other in amazement. Neither of us would have ever expected the other person to be here.

A little later, trucks pulled up and men of the Berlin Workers‘ Combat Group got out. Old men, with uniforms taut over their bellies and looking anything but happy. The atmosphere was getting more and more heated. Shouting, emotional conversations, and loudspeaker announcements echoed across the avenue, now empty of traffic, and bounced back off the viaduct.

We looked at each other; our son was sleeping alone in his bed. It was almost midnight; we had to go home. Just a few minutes after we left, the protesters were rounded up; those who couldn’t escape were loaded into trucks and taken to prisons. Luck is often only a question of the moment – we had gotten away with only minutes to spare. Our son would have woken up the next morning alone, and his parents would not have come home all day. 

Before the weekend was over, reports about the arrests and humiliations of the protesters made the rounds. On Monday we drove to see Bärbel Bohley, a well-known civil-rights activist, in her apartment on Fehrbelliner Strasse to sign the Neue Forum‘s petition. There was a car in the shadows in front of the building; a friend stuck a copy of the petition in her tights, as we assumed we’d get arrested, or at least checked when we left. But nothing happened.

After that, we went back to the Gethsemane Church. Candles burned in the windows of the surrounding apartment buildings. The conductors in the trains passing up on the viaduct switched the lights on and off and sounded their whistles.

I transcribed the Neue Forum petition that night and copied and distributed it the next day – like thousands of others.

Less than four weeks later, this lonely couple stood at the Friedrichstrasse station, holding their ID cards out towards the officer. A few hours later the GDR collapsed. The GDR – the hope of so many after twelve years of Fascism, and yet only a forced birth of the Cold War. Like a sandcastle at the beach, submerged by a wave that, receding, leaves only a few misshapen lumps behind.


Written on June 15, 2009

Film Historian Ralf Schenk remembers...

A very special invitation was sitting on my desk: an invitation for the premiere of Coming Out, the first East German gay film, to be held on November 9, 1989 at the “International” movie theater in East Berlin. Heiner Carow, the director, had fought for permission to make the film for many years. It was to be a spectacular event and I wanted to be there.

But I also had a convincing reason to skip the premiere. The prestigious East Berlin publishing house for art books, Henschel, had asked me to write a book about the most famous love stories in film history. It was an exciting project and I had not hesitated to take the offer. And I took advantage of the opportunity that a project like this involved: I applied for a 2-month pass  to visit West Berlin, to use the libraries and see the films I wanted to include that were not available in the East. As it turned out, I had received a visa for the months of October and November 1989.

But to be honest, on November 9th 1989 I went to none of these.  Instead, I went to West Berlin to celebrate the birthday of my Italian friend, Cristina. It was around 6:00 pm when I went from one world into the other. Cristina, whom I had met in Hungary many years before, had just moved from Milan to West Berlin and wanted to celebrate her birthday in a garden restaurant in Tempelhof. We had red wine and a delicious dinner. Of course nobody had a radio, and the TV in the restaurant was turned off. So we missed the legendary press conference announcing the Wall was open.

Hours later, a belated birthday guest arrived and announced the still confused news about the Wall. At that moment, a sudden ambivalence overcame me. On one hand, I felt happiness that world would be open for us East Germans... and not only for a few privileged ones, like me with my special visa. On the other hand, a queasy thought passed through my mind: everything, possibly everything that made up East Germany might disappear as fast as the wind.

Based on what I knew at the time, I did not want this at all. I had the same dream as many other people – including countless intellectuals – of at last creating a democratic East Germany. Socialism for and with the people – without the Party claiming sole power, and with the voice of all people included. Not an annexation to West Germany, but rather our own way. Honest and hard-working, with a sovereign people. What we had demanded a week earlier, on November 4, at the huge demonstration in Berlin.  A vision.Aa utopia. But also perhaps a fallacy, as it turned out – most of the people did not want to participate in the intellectuals’ dream of a reformed socialism. Instead, the people decided, without mercy, for the West.

Thinking about it now, I think I had an uneasy notion of all this already on the evening of November 9. My subconscious countered the general exaltation with barbs. When I went back from the West Berlin Bahnhof Zoo, station to the East Berlin Friedrichstrasse station, as instructed, thousands of deliriously joyous people passed by, heading West from the East . At the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, the legendary ”Palace of Tears,” I was almost the only person entering the East. Everybody else swarmed in the opposite direction.

I took a taxi home. Anne, my wife, had gone to the premiere of Coming Out with my invitation. Afterwards, she had driven home, unsuspecting, and was already asleep. I woke her up.

Next day, was Friday. We went to work as usual and on time – perhaps a very German attitude. On Saturday, the first free day of the weekend, we walked from our apartment in Treptow over to Kreuzberg, the closest West Berlin district. We walked through old streets with grey houses and rather unspectacular pubs. Anne, who had never been in the West before, asked: “This is the West?” And I answered: “Yes, this is the West.” But the West we discovered at the time is by now also history, just like the  late GDR.

Written on May 27, 2009

Director Helke Misselwitz remembers...

On November 9, 1989, I was at Mount Holyoke College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Film editor Gudrun Plenert, director of photography Thomas Plenert and I, the director, had been on tour in the U.S. with Winter Adè since October 15. The documentary had had its world premiere a year earlier, at the Leipzig Festival for Documentaries and Animated Films in November 1988. When the US distributor Zeitgeist acquired the distribution rights, Barton Byg, professor of German Studies at UMass Amherst, had spontanously invited us to come to the US.
 
We had left the GDR with mixed feelings on October 15, 1989. It was every East German’s dream to visit the USA. But we were also worried about our children, as we were leaving them at home in a situation that was full of uncertainty.

On October 11, we were still filming interviews about the events of October 7 at the Gethsemane Church in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, for our documentary Bulk Waste (Sperrmüll). I had given the film material to the lab to be developed; but I had left the sound material with my friends, Christiane and Christoph Hein, as I wanted to prevent the Stasi from accessing the material and protect the people I had interviewed from being harrassed or threatened.

No one knew what would happen during the next round of demonstrations – whether they would use tanks and shoot, or not.  I was afraid that my 15-year-old daughter might be there; she had wanted to stay home alone, instead of with relatives or friends. I begged her not to go out onto the streets and asked her teacher to keep an eye on her.   

Barton had done an amazing job organizing things and surprised us with a marathon tour that took us to the University of New Hampshire, Bowdoin College, the Harvard Film Archive, Tufts University, the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, the Pacific Film Archive, the University of Wisconsin, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the American Film Institute in Washington DC. Our last stop was the Amherst-Northampton area. 

Meanwhile, we were constantly calling Berlin and following the news on TV and in the papers. We started enjoying our tour when the news about East Germany moved from the last to the front page . . . and wished we were on Alexanderplatz on November 4th.

On November 9th, some Mount Holyoke College students started screaming and shouted to us to come to the television, where many had already gathered.

We could not believe our eyes! Kennedy in Berlin and his legendary words: "Ich bin ein Berliner."  And Ronald Reagan’s words: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!" Then Günther Schabowski announced that East German citizens would now have permission to cross the border whenever they liked; when asked when this new regulation would go into effect, he looked at his notes and replied, "As of now!" We thought this must all be fiction. So we drove to the nearby mega-mall, where Tomy Plenert bought a shortwave receiver. We listened to the news on Deutsche Welle and heard that the East Berlin crowds had brought about the opening of the Wall.

Upon hearing this, my first reaction was: "Now I‘ll have to go back to being a freelance filmmaker again." (I had just gotten my full-time position as a director at the DEFA Studio for Documentary Films on September 1, 1988!)

The next day, on November 10, 1989, we held the last screening of Winter Adè at UMass. We started late, because so many people came that they had to sit on the stairs and in the hallways. When the name Schabowski was mentioned - in a scene set at the train station in Altenburg - there was a liberating kind of laughter. We got standing a ovation at the end of the film and celebrated with students, professors and other viewers in the aisles until early the next morning. We all sat on the floor, drinking the champagne they had brought with them. Everyone said they had never experienced such a nice, relaxed and cheerful atmosphere at the University.

On November 15, after the four weeks away, my friend and my daughter brought the Trabant to pick me up at the Berlin-Tegel airport. My daughter proudly showed me some scrapes on her hand: "Look, Mom! I climbed the Wall!"

When we passed through the checkpoint into East Berlin, I dutifully pulled out my GDR passport and white "counting card." But the border guard waved us through. "Stop!" I shouted; "I have to hand in my card, otherwise they won’t know I came back." My friend just answered: "Nobody cares about that anymore."


Written on March 31, 2009

Film historian, curator and journalist Claus Löser remembers...

"My November 9, 1989"

Written on March 2009

Artist Detlef Helmbold remembers...

“Actually, I Wanted to Go to Bed Early... ”

I was living in Prenzlauer Berg at the time. I was home by myself for the first time in days.  Ines, my girlfriend, was with her sister at a restaurant, talking over recent events over a glass of wine – the possible and impossible things that might happen. In the last couple of months it was rare for anybody to hang out alone; we spent all our time in small or larger groups, at pubs or hanging at friend’s places.  We talked for hours, put together pamphlets and flyers, gave lectures. We felt that the time had come to change the world, and that only one‘s own perspective was the right and true one.  It became almost impossible to keep track of - let alone think about dealing with - all the events and changes raining down on us daily. We were all also still impacted by the huge demonstration that had taken place in Berlin on November 4.  Almost one million people had gathered at Alexanderplatz and listened to speeches by people like actors Ulrich Mühe and Steffi Spira and authors Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller.

Friends and I later came to the conclusion that the lowest common denominator and a cross-section of East German society had been present.  Christians, leftwing liberals, middle-class intellectuals, hard-line communists, social and Christian democrats, the not-yet-visible new rightwingers and the hypocritical democrats . . . everyone pulled together, and it all happened under the sharp eyes of the „good old Stasi.“  All these people were unified by one collective wish for change – for democracy, in the sense of bringing prosperity, and by the desire to travel, the hatred of the old structures of the East German society. And many demonstrators were still filled with the hope that it was possible to combine socialism and democracy.
We had all woken from our lethargy, from our private sleep in our private niches – because of the thousands of people who left our little country, because of the impertinent denial of the realities by the government and officials in top-level positions. We started taking a stand and openly expressing our own thoughts. We woke up from our self-satisfied mental sleep.
On November 9, 1989, I sat by alone watching the news on TV that was seemingly being shown round the clock.  My thoughts were spinning, refusing to come clear.  I thought about my sister, who had fled East Germany and who I hadn’t been allowed to see since. Or I thought about the speeches I’d heard, while keeping an eye on what was airing on TV. Ines had intended to come home around 8:00 p.m., we were planning to go to bed early. Our bodies needed rest, as they hadn’t been getting much in the last couple of months. And there was no sign of anything big in the news.

Then the GDR TV station, which I had hardly watched for the last three weeks, broadcast a live press conferece with Günter Schabowski, of the SED Politburo. Ricardo Ehrman, the Italian ANSA press agency’s GDR representative, asked: “Don’t you think it was a big mistake to introduce the new travel regulations?” Schabowski answered that it was very complicated, as there had been the risk of riots. He continued, “And so today a decision was made, as far as I know. [...]Today we have decided to insitute a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic to leave the GDR at any of the border crossings.”
My jaw dropped.

When Ehrman asked when it would go into effect and if it also applied to West Berlin, Schabowski stuttered that he’d been told this regulation would be implemented immediately and without delay... and that it also applied to West Berlin. When this press conference was over, I switched to the West German stations I usually watched, like ARD and ZDF.  The first station reported that people were starting to gather at about checkpoints in Berlin to test the new regulation, but that the border was still closed.
When Ines came home around 8:30, I was ready to go to bed – I’d read a little or watch some more TV and then get some shut-eye; but first, I had to tell her about the press conference.  Ines - spontaneous as always and the opposite of me – of course, wanted to immediately go try a trip to West Berlin via the Borholmer Strasse crossing.  Reluctantly, I said that it didn’t make any sense yet, as the border was still closed; the TV reports were showing that nobody could cross the border yet.  But to no avail; she wanted to go and if I wouldn’t come with her, she told me in no uncertain terms that she’d try her luck alonee.  This was not what I had meant!  I immediately imagined the woman I loved, wandering alone in the “evil, capitalist” west part of Berlin. Maybe some member of the bourgeoisie would try to rip her off – and that was a best case scenario!  I was even more worried by the thought that she might end up in the arms of a rich capitalist and spend some time with him.  So, cranky at the prospective failed adventure, I got dressed and we walked in the direction of the Wall, about a mile from our house.

When we hit the street, I noticed there were a lot of other people out too – but it was very quiet and the night was enshrouded in silence. I could only hear the sound of footsteps. Very quietly, as if nobody wanted to be heard, people were walking, or sitting and looking out of the streetcar window.  Everybody knew the next guy’s plan – but nobody wanted to admit it to themselves, let alone say it aloud.  Everyone got out of the streetcar at the corner of Borholmer and Schönhauser Allee.  It was very dark; only a few streetlights illuminated the streams of people. A mass of East German citizens, like shadows, walked along the street in the direction of a huge spotlight: the checkpoint. I was afraid of what might happen if the border guards hadn’t yet been informed that Mr. Schabowski, on account of his stupidity, had opened the border at 6:53 p.m.  Even if they did know about it, the situation might escalate because the mass of people looked threatening. Like insects attracted by the light, people walked toward the border crossing. Thousands of East Berliners were already there and were trying to convince the border guards with peaceful discussions and loud chants like “Open the gate!” and “No violence!” It seemed absurd to stop the avalanche caused by the press conference. Left to their own devices by all their higher-ups, the border guards on duty only succeeded in slowing down the mass pressing toward West Berlin; but they were not able to stop them.

When we got closer to the crossing, something happened that we would never have expected: the guards gave up their seemingly helpless resistance, the barrier opened and thousands of Berliners poured over the border. When the “illegal border crossers” took stock of the situation, they started to cry and scream, to laugh, to wildly dance around and shake their heads, to run or walk around. People who had never met hugged and kissed each other, and the word “crazy” was on everyone’s lips. Ines and I were swept up in the swirl of the masses and were more-or-less carried by others into the West.

On the other side of this hitherto insurmountable border, the citizens of West Berlin and their friends stood in cordons to welcome us.  Everybody tried to catch an “Ossi” and show him/her the west part of the town. They patted our backs and welcomed us with champagne.  Ines and I were fished out of the crowd by a West Berlin architect and his girlfriend from Bremen.  After an affectionate welcome and a brief exchange of names and professions, we found ourselves sitting in their car, driving to the Kurfürstendamm, the best-known street in West Berlin. It looked like the people there had not yet realized what was going on.  In that short moment, we could feel how this part of the city, this island ticked. Our hosts walked with us along the quiet streets, showing us famous corners and places, such as the place where Cabaret was shot with Liza Minelli in 1972.

Gradually, the news of the opening of the Wall spread throughout West Berlin, and the first Trabbis and Wartburgs arrived, honking their horns and flying flags. Manfred and Birgit, our “tour guides,” took very good care of us.  They treated us to food and drinks at restaurants. Ines, far-sighted as always, had quickly grabbed a 10-mark bill before our “flight” – just in case. But we soon noticed that this amount didn’t help us much at all. We walked through the night and the glittering world of a European metropolis looked like I had imagined it. There was the abundance, the glamor, the wealth that we will never fully recount, the big chic cars, the women offering their services on street corners, homeless people and beggars lying on subway airshafts, trying to escape the night’s cold. And we also saw other things for the first time: the ruins of the Gedächtniskirche, the Europa Center with the fascinating “water ball” – a fountain designed by Joachim Schmetau – or the Zoo Palast, where we felt like we are at home in our city.

It was around 2:00 am, when Manfred and Birgit took us to a Greek restaurant. There were a lot of people there, but it wasn’t crowded. The restaurant owner came and welcomed us when we sat down. Manfred told him we had come over from East Berlin and he immediately said that dinner and drinks were on the house . . . and gave us his autographed picture. Later, we learned that his name was Kostas Papanastasiou, a famous actor who had played the role of a Greek restaurateur in a well-known TV soap opera. An hour later, the restaurant was completely full, but the waiters kept setting up more tables and chairs. The place kept getting louder and customers walked from one table to the next, talking about only one topic: the open Wall.  A young boy was selling the latest issue of the Bild Zeitung with the wonderful headline, “We Made It – The Wall Is Down.”  Everyone tried to get a copy of this special black-red-and-gold issue, but it was sold out in seconds.

As the atmosphere became increasingly exuberant, the first round of customers started dancing between the tables.  At that very moment, the door opened and a group of people entered the restaurant; another table was added next to ours, and the famous East German writer Stefan Heym sat down next to us.  We couldn’t believe it.  Ines and I approached him and thanked him for his unwavering political engagement in the last years. He was one of the East German authors who had always drawn attention to political circumstances, despite being persecuted himself.  The works of the communist Stefan Heym had now become a part of history, because they had helped to bring down the GDR system. Time passed so quickly.  At one point, Ines said she wouldn’t even be surprised if Manfred Krug – the famous actor and singer who left the GDR in the late 1970s – walked through the door.  We knew that he lived close by. And it wasn’t long before he in fact DID come into the restaurant!

Everybody was simply ecstatic – dancing, drinking, talking, wanting to savor this moment forever.  It seems like such moments of happiness – the happiness of a whole night – don’t happen very often.  The 9th of November – the day of the Wende - made history for the German nation, and it became a day laden with positive meaning. Our hosts, Stephan Heym, Manfred Krug and all the other customers celebrated until the wee hours of the morning. And then we thought that it might be time to go home or, as a German saying goes, “quit while we were ahead.” Manfred and Birgit took us back to the Bornholmer Straße crossing, where people were crossing in both directions – people who had partied all night heading back East, and people who had slept through the night to end all nights were heading West.

After the boundless happiness of the last few hours, I had a moment of doubt and fear: “What if the border guards don’t let us back to East Berlin?” But it proved unfounded. Ines and I went home, overwhelmed by the events of the previous night. We took a shower, ate breakfast and, as if nothing happened, we went to work.  But we were almost alone at the office, because a whole city wanted to see the other part of town and a whole country was crossing to the other side of the Wall.  In one night, Germany had begun to overcome its division.  It would be a long and difficult journey, but at least it had begun. Walls and borders can be taken down quicker than the walls in the minds of people. The next time we went back to the West was a month and a half later. By that time, it already felt normal to live in a nearly unified Germany.


Written on February 2009

Director Rainer Simon remembers...

That evening I had an old friend over. He was an astrophysicist, a world-renowned expert in sun physics, whom I had known for many years. Despite this, East German higher-ups did not allow him to travel to the West, neither to attend international congresses, nor to meet colleagues. He was not what was called a "travel-cadre." To the point of despair, he asked himself why not. Later, he read in his Stasi files that he was denied the right to travel because of his contacts with "suspect" artists ... such as the authors Christa Wolf and Günter de Bruyn, the sculptor Wieland Förster, and filmmakers Rainer Simon and Lutz Dammbeck.

We "suspects" were allowed to represent East Germany in the West, however. In 1988 I had shot The Ascent of Chimborazo, a film about the cosmopolitan Alexander von Humboldt, in Ecuador, Spain and France. This film had premiered two month before this particular evening – but who was interested in the life of a scientist – although a man who had wanted to live a responsible life – in these apocalyptic times in East Germany?

Usually, we didn’t watch television when we got together; but these days, the TV was always on.  That’s why we heard Schabowski – a member of the Politburo, and one of the younger people in the "Greisenkabinett" (the Old Men’s Cabinet, as we said) – babbling confusedly that the next day East German citizens would be allowed to travel to West Berlin and West Germany . . . with merely police permission. Everyone was allowed to apply for this document. Did this mean that the Wall was open?

"What will happen to East Germany?" was our first question. If the social circumstances in Poland changed, it wouldn’t affect Poland’s existence. But if there were no more Wall, why would there still be two German states. How would this work?  Actually, on that evening it was already clear to us that this meant the end of East Germany.

Of course, we couldn’t predict that it would go so fast. And most intellectuals could not imagine that the East German people would vote for Helmut Kohl, instead of Oskar Lafontaine . The civil rights activists – "Neues Forum", "Demokratischer Aufbruch", "Bündnis 90" – deserved to get elected; they had earned it. But extra-parliamentary rebels were as suspect in the West, as they were in the East. Which is why the pragmatists among them, who wanted to gain power, climbed into the crypt of one of the two major parties. As we later saw, this made it possible to climb the ladder all the way up to the Federal Chancellery.

The WEST – the kingdom of unlimited possibilities, flowering landscapes, bananas that grew straight into the mouths of the people and stuffed them up. Jeans and Mallorca for everybody. Even unemployment compensation would cover such expenses. It was a situation that we could still not imagine.

The next day, my girlfriend, her son and I, along with thousands of others, swarmed and  pushed our way to West Berlin – without permits, as these had become superfluous in the meantime. The city was filled with „Ossies“ – the nickname for people from the East that was apparently created that day. There were long lines in front of the banks, as people tried to get their 100 marks „welcome money.“ A West Berlin couple treated our child to pizza at the Ku’damm Center. When we tried to get home at midnight, there was still an avalanche of people rolling through the narrow, barricaded alley of the checkpoint at Invaliden Strasse. It was so packed that the boarder guards had to use a ladder to haul us up over the Wall, back into the East.

Ten years later, I again watched the television coverage of these evenings. And I noticed something for the first time: The television reports in the West were filled with horror.
Who will pay for all the people coming here from the East? What will the impact be on us? How much will this cost? Everything was about money. When the Wall came down, I was preparing my film The Case Oe (1991), which did not deal with East and West. The film was about Sophocles, the ancient world and antifacism – about not being able to escape crimes and neglect in wartime. Shortly thereafter, a West German television editor questioned the value of this project and recommended that a current topic would make more sense. But in 1990 we produced the film, in Greece. There we were, in a location in which we had dreamt of making a film  . . . and everyone in the crew was worrying about their jobs back home and the state of their savings after the currency reform. And, in the end, the film was current, because the Gulf War started in Iraq.

But who was interested in that in Germany? We had our own problems. And this would be the case until the world went under.

Written on December 2008

Director Evelyn Schmidt remembers...

I had marked the date in my calendar: November 4, 1989. Everybody knew about the call put out by New Forum (an oppositional alliance founded in September 1989), artists, and other organizations – a call to demonstrate for democracy on that Saturday. I didn’t want to miss this special event – I wanted to demonstrate for a new, reformed country. I decided that my son should also be part of this day, which might possibly be life-changing for all East German citizens.

A few days before November 4th, I sent a note with my son to his teacher at the elementary school, asking that he be given the day off. I thought everybody was excited about this demonstration and wanted to be part of it. So I was surprised and astonished at the teacher’s answer: “The topic of our lesson on Saturday will be deciduous trees; I am not sure you want to be responsible for your son missing deciduous trees… .” My son did miss this lesson. And he was the only one in his class who didn’t go to school that day. As we later found out, that day saw the largest demonstration in East German history.

A few days later – it was November 10th – I dropped my son off at school and I drove to a meeting with American film students in Potsdam. There were an unusual number of cars on the road and, for a second, it crossed my mind that the commuter trains were perhaps delayed or not working. I arrived at the hotel where the students were staying and remember that we had a long discussion about filmmaking.

When I went to the bar, I met a woman in the elevator. This woman wore a sandwich board advertising Maggi bouillon cubes. I had seen this way of advertising products in old films set in the 1920s and 1930s. But I had never seen anything like it in reality  – I thought maybe DEFA was shooting a film. She looked so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing. The students couldn’t understand why I found it so funny, as they explained it was something common back home. My simple answer was not very convincing: “How can someone make such a monkey of themselves.”

After the meeting I drove my Trabbi to Berlin. There was one detour after another! I had to take roads I didn’t even know existed. I stopped to ask a policeman why we had to take all these detours? He answered that there was too much traffic in Berlin, that all streets to Berlin were blocked! Finally, after five hours, I arrived in Berlin. My son was waiting and couldn’t wait to excitedly tell me: “Mom, I was the only one at school today! There wasn’t even a teacher! They all went to West Berlin! Was this why I went to the demonstration?”
For a second I couldn’t speak. Now, what I had heard so briefly on my car radio all seemed to make sense. The Wall is open….” In the following days, we couldn’t stop watching TV. But we let weeks go by before we went to West Berlin.
  
The above photo was taken during the film series “Rebels with a Cause: the Cinema of East Germany” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005. Evelyn Schmidt’s film The Bicycle was part of this program.

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