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Berlin, Divided Heaven: From
the Ice Age to the Thaw
Lights from Afar
(Lichter aus dem Hintergrund)
Suggested further viewing:
Domino A story
in which it isn’t clear whether a part of the narrative has its origins in the divided
city. A recorded moment of the odd events in the day of a society between
affluence and unemployment, between the fear of war and festivals of peace - this
is a Berlin film. Before it
seemed to her the most natural thing on earth, then it suddenly became her profession:
switching from one role to the next, speaking strange words, thinking strange thoughts,
having strange feelings about strangers. She has become an actress.
But in these twelve days, the last of the year, everything suddenly changes, where
in the end not a stone remains the same and nothing is as it was. The train
has barely arrived at the station and a man is already talking about mental hospitals
and work camps; suddenly her door is locked and she has to crawl out through the
window to the street. Unexpectedly, a letter arrives recommending she abandon
her usual job for a risky future. One thing after the next - she doesn’t know
what to make of the world anymore. She sees things she never saw before –
or have these things only recently appeared? She hears repeatedly, everywhere,
what she hadn’t heard before: War. Unemployment. Was she sleeping
before or is she dreaming now? One thing is certain: a new game has
begun, and she doesn’t know the rules.
Awarded the Silver
Leopard’s Eye at the 1983 Locarno International Film Festival.
Berlin - Shooting
Place (Drehort Berlin) Reidemeister weaves
a portrait of Berlin from self-portrayals of Berliners on both sides of the Wall
and their views on the divided city. A mother with a
strangely vacant expression cannot accept the present because of the refusal of
her family to come to terms with their complicity with the National Socialists during
the war. Her story is illustrated by the picture of the heaps of rubble and
debris that have remained uncleared on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters.
In the background the Berlin Wall, and beyond that the East Berlin House of Ministries,
can be seen. A retired seamstress reflects on freedom and the Wall; she does
not want to leave the Kiez, the neighborhood in East Berlin she calls home.
A pensioner from the western part of the city expresses her German nationalist views.
The fan of Frederick the Great, who tries to make ends meet by running a newspaper
kiosk with his wife, describes his hobby, his lifestyle and his interpretation of
history. These are but a few of the telling interviews that map the character
of Berliners and their relationship to their unique space and history. The
concluding scenes show the frozen Havel River and ice floes, then buoys marking
the German-German border on the water. Of the many German
films during the mid-eighties that attempt to capture the atmosphere of city and
urban life, Helga Reidemeister’s film stands out in its originality - a poetic documentation
of the hard realities of daily life balanced on the cutting edge of East-West relations.
Different perspectives of the city are linked within a mosaic-like structure.
The city and its continual political conflict, manifested in the Wall itself, are
presented from new and, at times, unusual perspectives. At the same time,
it is not always possible to differentiate one part of the city from the other or
identify from which part the interviews come. Is the backstreet party taking
place in West Berlin’s Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg in the East? Is the Frederick
the Great fan from East or West? The audience is
compelled to watch attentively and is continually kept guessing. In certain
areas, the difference between the sides of the wall are less pronounced than prejudice
would often have one believe. Only when the actual circumstances are described
in more detail is it possible to identify the location accurately. “If people are confused,
then it is intentional,” says literary manager Christa Vogel, because only in this
manner is it possible to break down clichés, “which have crystallized in many people’s
minds since the Cold War.” Only in this way is it possible “to soften the
hardening attitudes, the prejudices and ignorance that have built up over the years
amongst those in the West” and combat the “undesired ignorance amongst those in
the East.” Shots of East and
West Berlin are shown between the individual interviews, presenting unusual views
of the city. It is like taking a stroll through an unknown town - Berlin “at
second or third glance.” These pictures record just as much of the city’s
relationship to history as do the comments made by its inhabitants. Such as
when people were asked about the military presence of the occupying soldiers in
West and East: their answers all expressed an air of indifference, demonstrating
a rather individual relationship to the past. Yet those things which at first
sight appear to be everyday in character, suddenly disintegrate and take on new
form, unrelated to the past. “To this day I have
always had a very strange, deep attachment to Berlin, yet have always sensed an
overwhelming inner conflict. If I’d made a feature film, I would have tried
to present this inner conflict. However, as I want to make documentaries at
the moment - because I can learn most for myself the closer I am to reality - I
have tried to express something of what I have observed and experienced myself in
Berlin over the last 25 years through different characters.”
(Helga Reidemeister) Damiel (the visually elegant Ganz) is an angel assigned to the divided city (and Berlin is but one of countless dualities in Wender’s work). In partnership with angel Cassiel (Otto Sander), he observes, sympathizes with and consoles the human race. Though he is invisible to most, there are some intuitive beings who detect his presence, including Peter Falk, who, with trademark aplomb, plays himself as a visiting actor appearing in a German war movie. Damiel, Cassiel
and a host of other angels, all dressed in long overcoats, the scarf tucked under
the lapels, with their hair tied in ponytails, are all over town, following would-be
suicides, bitter parents, accident victims, mothers in labor, Turkish immigrants
on a drive. They know about the man who intends to kill himself today, sticking
his rarest stamps on all his farewell letters, and the taxi driver who mistakenly
calls the Zoo stop “Tierra del Fuego.” A collective spirit of benevolence,
the angels listen in without judgment and with pity. But they lack, Damiel
realizes, the tactile. In evocative language (crafted by Wenders and co-writer Peter Handke), Damiel expresses a desire to unite his eternal spirituality with the mortal, the sensual; “to come home like Philip Marlowe and feed the cat,” and “ to be excited by a meal, the curve of a neck . . .” Which is where Marion (the graceful Solveig Dommartin) comes in. A trapeze artist at a French circus (named the Alekan, no doubt after the cinematographer) who wears pantomime wings and swings in the “heavens” above the circus crowds, she seeks romantic solace for her deep-thinking spirit. Will Damiel forsake the eternal? "Wings of Desire,
like most Heaven-and-Earth movies, ties up its resolution with romantic ribbons
but, in Wenders’ eyes, such a conclusion is the crowning union of life’s dual opposites,
the sensual and the spiritual, German’s East and West -- as well as its Nazi past
and occupied and uncertain present . . . It’s also one of the best endings you can
hope for in a movie. And it is one of the best movies you can see."
Desson Howe, Washington Post, July 1, 1988. Showered with awards, such as Wenders as Best Director at Cannes 1987, Best Direction to Wenders and Best Actor to Bois at the 1988 European Film Awards, Film Strip in Gold for Outstanding Feature at the German Film Awards in 1988, and Alekan for Best Cinematography in 1988 at: the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards; the National Society of Film Critics Awards (USA); and New York Film Critics Awards.
Related reading: Peucker,
Brigitte. "Wim Wenders' Berlin: Images and the Real."
Berlin in Focus. Cultural Transformations in Germany.
Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ed.. Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 1996.
125-38. |
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For questions related to the website please contact Jessica Hale |
Before,
during, and after the fall of the Wall - Berlin's other half often represented a
haunting presence in the films of Germanys' "Poetic Reunification Imaginary." These
films often take a documentarist look at Berlin, whose architecture becomes a metaphor
for both its caesura and its cultural unity. The All-round Reduced Personality
is a brilliant yet subtle meditation on representation with feminist implications;
the visual and aural depictions both of Berlin in its dialectical process of "being"
a city, and of women in their personal and professional lives within the city's
Wall. Painter and filmmaker Jürgen Böttcher conveys in his unconventional documentary
The Wall the historical and symbolic significance of Berlin's Wall.
Divided Heaven, based on Christa Wolf's novel of the same name, explores
the dangerous quest for female identity against the backdrop of the momentous historical
event of the building of the Berlin Wall. Filmed as the Wall fell and the GDR became
obsolete, The Architects laments lost opportunity and youth, represented
by a young architect whose dreams were strangled by communist dogma. Documentaries
by Helga Reidemeister depicted Berlin as a cultural unity without the wall, years
before reunification in Berlin – Shooting Place (DrehOrt Berlin),
while Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire lends the city a more mystical wholeness.