Berlin, Divided Heaven: From the Ice Age to the Thaw
Touring Film Series

Love Divided

Since love stories and their conflicts have always supplied narrative structure to films, the division of Berlin has provided an inexhaustible source of drama to the genre. Films that map the political division of Berlin onto love affairs not only contribute to this tradition in film, they reveal aspects of the social and sexual fantasies of the Cold War and the irresistible attraction of the "other." Like historical memory, human desire erupting in films constantly threatens to explode all the efforts of society to contain it. In early films, the disruption is contained by stability and Stalinism; later avant-garde impulses and rock 'n' roll youth culture attempt to make room for it within a more tolerant socialism. Even SOLO SUNNY's early scripts called for Sunny to choose between conformity in the East and a lover in the West rather than her dream of singing with a rock band. 

SOLO SUNNY
Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel)
A Berlin Romance (Eine Berliner Romanze)

Suggested further viewing: 

The Promise (Das Versprechen)
1994, Germany, color, 116 min.
Dir.:  Margarethe von Trotta.
Script:  Peter Schneider, Margaretha von Trotta, Felice Laudadio.
Camera:  Franz Rath.
Editing:  Suzanne Baron.
Music:  Jürgen Knieper.
Cast:  Meret Becker, Anian Zollner, Corinna Harfouch, August Zirner.

A chronicle of Berlin and the Germanys from the building to the fall of the Wall, while framing an epic, bittersweet love story.  A young couple intends to escape East Berlin via the sewage system.  She is successful; he hesitates and is caught by the police.  Their promise to always stay together meets with historical and political challenges, many of them overcome too late. 

East of the Wall (Westler)
1985, West Germany, color, 94 min.
Dir.:  Wieland Speck.
Script:  Egbert Hörmann, Wieland Speck.
Camera:  Klemens Becker.
Editing:  Gabriele Bartels, Wieland Speck.
Music:  Engelbert Rehm.
Cast:  Rainer Strecker, Andreas Bernhard, Harry Bär, Christoph Eichhorn, Sasha Kogo, Hans-Jürgen Punte, Sigurd Rachmann, Frank Redless, George Stamkowski.
Distributed by Frameline

While Felix, a West-Berliner, is showing his American friend around East Berlin, he meets Thomas, an East-Berliner.  They fall in love.  Although they live only a few kilometers apart, it is as if they are from different worlds.  Their blooming romance seems doomed by the Wall that separates them - but they find a solution . . .

Related reading:

Anderson, Edith.  Love in Exile:  An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin.  South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1999.

Davey, Thomas.  A Generation Divided : German Children and the Berlin Wall.  Durham:  Duke University Press, 1987.

Joyce, Steven.  “The Politics of Love: Ideology and Romance in Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel.”  New German Studies. 13.1 (Spring 1985) 31-49.

Meurer, Hans Joachim.  “The Split Screen:  Cinema and National Identity in a Divided Germany (1979-89).” Diss. University of Stirling, July 1997.  

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