Bork-Goldfield and Beate Brunow (Wofford College) have also developed teaching materials for the movie and the book. The link and some other materials can be found on her personal website at http://ibork.faculty.wesleyan.edu/
Dr. Bork-Goldfield would be very happy to present the movie/book in person at chapter events or conferences. ibork@wesleyan.edu
BERLIN — With its clunky rotary phones, vinyl-coated swivel chairs and wooden desks, the Stasi Museum, located in the former headquarters of the dreaded East German secret police, provided the perfect retro look for “Deutschland 83,” a new eight-part German television series set in the last throes of the Cold War. The show, which was filmed partly at the museum, makes its United States debut Wednesday on SundanceTV.
But the aesthetics mask something darker. “It was quite weird to go to this place if you know what terrible things happened there,” said Sylvester Groth, who plays a Stasi official in the series and may be best known for playing the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels in “Inglourious Basterds.” As an East German citizen in the 1980s, Mr. Groth, now 57, himself was followed and intimidated by Stasi agents after defecting to the West during a run of theater performances in Salzburg, Austria.
“Deutschland 83,” which will run with subtitles on SundanceTV, may be the first German-language series to be picked up on American television. (SundanceTV said it was not aware of any others.) The show sheds light on a transformative time, when it felt as if the Cold War would never end yet in fact momentum was building for the collapse of the Berlin Wall six years later.
Two episodes of “Deutschland 83” were screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February to generally positive reviews. In the show, Martin Rauch (Jonas Nay), a young East German officer, is recruited by his aunt Lenora (Maria Schrader, a prominent director as well as the star of the 1999 film “Aimée & Jaguar”) to masquerade as an aide-de-camp to a West German general privy to NATO secrets.
Although the subject matter recalls the much-praised 2007 German film “The Lives of Others,” about a Stasi agent, “Deutschland 83” has a different feel. With humor, romance, and soap-opera-style plot devices, it captures a time when tensions between the Soviet Union and NATO soared over the arrival of Pershing II missiles in Europe, East Germany was heading toward financial collapse, and the Soviet military shot down a Korean Air Lines flight that it believed to be on a spy mission. A peace movement was in full swing in Europe, with the antiwar song “99 Luftballons” topping the West German pop charts (and soon becoming a smash hit, “99 Red Balloons,” in the United States.)
“I picked ’83 in part because of the music,” said Anna Winger, an American novelist who created the series with her German husband, Jörg Winger, the producer of a popular German television crime drama “Soko Leipzig” (“Homicide Leipzig”).
Photo
In “Deutschland 83” Jonas Nay plays an East German who is enlisted by his aunt (Maria Schrader), right, for a Stasi spy mission in the West.CreditConny Klein
On a recent afternoon, the Wingers strolled through the Stasi Museum, passing by a uniformed tour group from the German Air Force that was peering into displays of hidden recording devices.
Ms. Winger, 45, said the show was also inspired by her and her husband’s conversations about how they might tell their two daughters about the layers of history of Berlin, which has been transformed since German unification and where the couple have lived for more than a decade.
The series has other resonances for Mr. Winger, also 45, who is from Cologne in western Germany. While performing his military service, he studied Russian and was trained to listen to intercepted Russian radio broadcasts. In 1998, he recounted, a Russian broadcast relayed a Merry Christmas greeting to Mr. Winger and all of his colleagues by name. “That’s when we knew we had a mole,” he said. He said that memory had lingered for years.
Both he and Ms. Winger, who is Jewish and grew up partly in Kenya and Mexico, said they had become weary of didactic German television programming that tends to dwell heavily on the Nazi past.
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Sylvester Groth as a Stasi official.CreditLaura Deschner
“There’s so much focus in Germany on World War II that sometimes it feels like history ended in 1945,” Ms. Winger said. Not much in German popular culture, she added, “addresses how we got from 1945 to the period that we’re living in now, which is sort of an amazing time.”
Still, they wanted to tell a story with a twist, from the perspective of the East German spy. This drew in Christian Vesper, senior vice president for scripted programming at SundanceTV: “He believed in his mission and his country and yet wasn’t an evil guy,” he said. “He was just a young man doing what he thought was right — that is what made it interesting to us.” SundanceTV is a co-producer of “Deutschland 83” with Germany’s RTL channel, which will present the show this fall.
Mr. Nay, who plays Martin, the young spy, was born in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell. “I only remember Germany as one country,” he said. “Everything that’s concerning the divided Germany is historic — it’s so far away.”
In researching his role, he said, he learned spy techniques like picking locks and doing the so-called brush pass, in which two people seem to be simply brushing past each other but are handing off spy material. A NATO expert was on the set during the filming to offer advice.
Mr. Nay plays Martin as nervous and charming, committed to his cause but distressed that he has to break ties with his mother and girlfriend. But if Martin comes across as likable, producers say the series is not suffused with “ostalgie,” which translates as a sentimental longing for the old East Germany.
“That’s the wrong word,” said Nico Hofmann, chairman of UFA Fiction, which produced the show at the renowned century-old Babelsberg studio outside Berlin. Over the course of its eight episodes, he said, the show rather evolves into an existential critique of the Cold War system.
The distribution rights for “Deutschland 83” have been sold widely in Europe but so far not in Russia. Before deciding whether to acquire the rights, Mr. Winger said, “they want to see Episode 8” — when fears of a nuclear strike are at their peak — “to see how the Communists look.”
Does anyone get the Sundance network?
I'm hoping that the show is a success, so that Netflix, Amazon, or HULU will pick it up.
This is the Daily News broadcast in WEST Germany from Channel 1, ARD, from 25 years ago.
These peace demonstrations took place every Monday afternoon after a service which included a kind of free exchange of complaints in Leipzig'sNikolai-Church.
During the scuffle, the protesters chanted:
"Stasi raus!" (Away with the Staatssicherheit = secret police; reportedly 1 in every 6 citizens!)
"Mauer weg!" (Down with the wall!)
Diese DDR Bürger wollten einfach Freiheit.(These East German citizens simply wanted freedom.)
Die Volkspolizei (in Uniform) und Stasi sind auch dabei...
After
the gathering in the church, these 2 homemade banners were unfurled --
and held aloft for a mere 6-7 seconds; long enough for cameras to
capture the sentiment, and then sent the broadcast around the world.
"Für ein offenes Land mit freien Menschen" [For an open country of free citizens]
"Reise Freiheit statt Massenflucht" [No limits to travel instead of mass exodus]
Were the Volkspolizei or those serving in the Staatsicherheit less
committed to the socialist government in Leipzig than elsewhere? Why
didn't they clamp down on these protests before they grew to be
unmanageable?
Western sources confirm that during the last 4 Mondays leading up to the 9th of November, the Montagsdemonstrationen,
or Monday Demonstrations at the Nikolaikirche drew between 300,000 and
500,000 people. With so many protesters willing to fight against travel
limitations and other governmental limitations, such as study and
career opportunities, control was lost.
The follow-up story on the newsreel also focuses on the unrest in the DDR (East Germany).
Hundreds of DDR citizens responded to an offer in Hungary to open its borders for a day. Officials in Budapest were discussing arrangements, thus many of the refugees had been waiting for over 2 weeks. Meanwhile, ever more DDR citizens walked away from their lives and joined the campers in hopes of emigrating to West Germany.
This from CAFÉ BABEL from September 14, 2009 By Ádám Terjék
Translated by Judit Révész
The picture of the opening of the Hungarian-Austrian border in 1989 is
living vividly in my memory: in the television news of 10 September 1989
a group of East German tourists exult and rejoice at the announcement
of Gyula Horn, Hungarian foreign minister saying all DDR citizens staying in Hungary could leave
to the “west” with their passport. Surpassing all expectations this
act of Hungary played a crucial role in the soon destruction of the
Berlin Wall, the reunion of Germany and of Europe.
As Helmut Kohl,
former chancellor of West Germany summarised in a short sentence: It
was the Hungarians drawing the first brick out of the wall.
24828.jpg, _Sep 2009
Image: Gyula Horn cutting the barbed wire at the Austrian-Hungarian border in 1989; Soucre: MTI, www.mult-kor.hu
There
is no doubt that it was a historic event for both the Germans and the
Hungarians. It is also interesting to see that following the sudden
weakening of the Soviet Union it was Poland and Hungary that tried to
seek their way to independence at first. These two nations proved so
many times in their history how much they love freedom and how many
things they are ready to do for it.
...
In the second half of the 80s a small group of people recognized that
the days of communism are numbered, but for average Hungarian and for
the outside world it didn’t seem obvious at all. Unfortunately today
there are some, who attempt to make those daring acts unimportant,
saying that the collapse of the communist regime had always been a
matter of time; so taking the decision of the opening the frontier and
making steps towards bringing the communist autocracy to an end didn’t
need much courage.
They are not right at all! It did need much courage.
The fact that Hungarian government of that time managed to make itself
independent from the omnipotent communist party and were brave and
resolute enough to take the decision about opening borders the proves
about much of courage. We shouldn’t forget that the soviet troops were
still stationed in Hungary at that time, and it was a real possibility that
the Soviet Union intervenes again even by force, like it did in 1956 "our first revolution, which at the time, the Soviets tried to label as a counter-revolution. We now know that was only desperate propaganda." Finally we may put the question to ourselves: who deserves the glory? As
Miklós Németh, former prime minister said: letting the East German to
cross the frontier was a joint, collective achievement of the people of
Hungary.
