“Once upon a time there was a country, and I lived there. When people ask me how it was I say it was the best time of my life, because I was young and in love.” [1] Thus the narrator concludes his story of growing up in the German Democratic Republic in the closing stages of the film Sun Alley (Sonnenallee, Germany 1999). To be young and in love is the premise of all teen flicks, but the idea of making such a movie about growing up under communist dictatorship was both new and controversial. In the face of political histories that portray the GDR as an ethically and financially bankrupt state of dire grimness, Sun Alley gives a much brighter view of day-to-day life in the GDR. Yet the film’s strategy is not simply to provide a counter-argument to a dominant view of history, but also to consider the role of the individual and the individual’s memory when accounting for the past. The slide between the personal and the political, between historical events and their reconstruction in memory is reflected in, indeed demonstrated through, the musical soundtrack. Whilst the music fittingly evokes the era in a general way, it is not always of the time. It thus serves as a figure of the process of recollection and its inaccuracies.
Directed by Leander Haussmann and produced by Klaus Boje and Detlev Buck, Sun Alley gives the viewer a comical glimpse of a rather inefficient yet lively East Germany in the late 1970s as experienced by the gawky adolescent Micha Ehrenreich (Alexander Scheer) and recounted through voice-over by an older version of the same person. True to the genre, this film concentrates on two themes: teen sex and teen culture, the latter represented particularly in the form of pop music. Through snappy editing and rapid shifting from one plot-line to another, the viewer is introduced to a host of somewhat eccentric but well-meaning characters negotiating a viable civilian existence in close proximity to a border checkpoint on the Berlin Wall. After many trials and tribulations, our hero eventually gets Miriam (Teresa Weissbach), the babe of his dreams, and the film concludes with a fantasy sequence in which Micha and his friend Wuschel (Robert Stadlober) become local pop idols. The whole neighbourhood kicks up its heels and dances westwards.
This light-hearted treatment of life in the east provoked the ire of Help e.V., a leading organisation dedicated to the recognition and compensation of victims of the GDR. Within a couple of months of the film’s release, Help e.V. initiated a lawsuit against Haussmann, accusing him of “Offending victims of the wall”[2] . The organisation demanded neither the director’s conviction nor a banning of the film [3] , leading one to conclude that the legal action was primarily designed to allow for grievances and counter arguments to be aired in public. In the eyes of the press, however, the organisation’s actions showed a lack of understanding of filmmaking and artistic creation, and also a lack of humour [4] . As I shall show in this discussion of film’s use of popular music, accusations of revisionist tendencies in the film derive from a cursory reading of the film’s comic surface. Whilst the film’s mode of narration is indeed comic, the events that are narrated are in themselves of a more serious nature.
Ostalgie – nostalgia for all that is East German – is a matter that has been hotly debated since the elation of reunification wore off in the early nineties. The notion that one might look back on a repressive, undemocratic regime with affection seems abhorrent to many cultural observers, particularly from West Germany, and is often compared with revisionist attempts to downplay the criminal aspects of the National Socialist period of German history. On the other side of the debate, a wholesale discrediting of the GDR is hardly fair to those who in good faith tried to create – as the slogan went – “the first workers’ and farmers’ state on German soil”, only to see it collapse and become incorporated into the capitalist west within an astoundingly short period of time. The term Ostalgie is often used in the media, especially the press, as a derogatory term, and is figured as the desire for a return to the old days of the GDR, a desire to rebuild the wall and restore a paternalistic socialist order. Yet such an extreme form of Ostalgie does not occupy any position in rational debates about the state of the German nation. The PDS, successor to the old Socialist Unity Party that ran the GDR regime, now only appeals to its minority of voters through its insistence on socialisation through democratic processes, and the most extreme voices of the alienated and disaffected – those of the Neo-Nazis – are calling for an order far removed from either democratic or authoritarian socialism. Nostalgic reminiscing over the GDR era certainly finds its expression in the public realm, but this expression is hardly uncritical. As Norbert Kapferer points out:
From a psychological point of view, GDR nostalgia is a ‘normal’ act of self-defence against the widespread opinion in the West that unification should mean total absorption because there is nothing worth keeping from the former GDR. This reaction means that nobody can accept the argument that everything in the past is meaningless, and worthless. In this case, GDR nostalgia is also a survival method in a new social world, which preserves some small packets of personal identity [5] .
Kapferer’s point has been borne out in television and film productions over the last five years or so. The German television broadcaster RTL recently screened a light, magazine style program called Die DDR-Show (The GDR Show). Wolfgang Becker’s bittersweet reunification comedy Good Bye Lenin was the largest-grossing German film of 2004. And Markus Imboden is currently shooting a biography of the East German writer Brigitte Reimann with Martina Gedeck in the main role, titled Hunger auf Leben. Ostalgie, it would seem, is more prevalent than ever. What is particularly noticeable about my first two examples is their combination of comic treatment with an eye for cultural icons and fads.
Both celebrate the peculiarities of the GDR predominantly through those phenomena that made the GDR visually and aurally quaint and different. In this respect, the direct precursor of the TV program and Becker’s film are two films from 1999: Sebastian Peterson’s Heroes Like Us (Helden wie wir) and Leander Haussmann’s Sun Alley. These were the first films to deal with the GDR in a way that was both comic and iconic. This is not to discount numerous other films made in the 1990s about issues to do with East Germany, but most of these are set at the time of unification or directly afterwards. Rather than attempting to recreate the lost world of the GDR, they tend to either look optimistically into the future or present the conflicts and tensions between East and West in the reunited Germany. Leonie Naughton has examined these two directions in 90s films about the East [6] , taking as her paradigm the two Trabi films (i.e. films revolving around the fate of a Trabant, the most commonly produced East German car), namely Go Trabi Go (dir. Peter Timm, 1990) and Go Trabi Go 2: That Was the Wild East (dir. Wolfgang Büld, 1992).
The particular mix of the comic and the iconic that I have described is no doubt largely due to the fact that the screenplays of both Heroes Like Us and Sun Alley were written by Thomas Brussig, citizen of the GDR until its demise [7] . On a superficial level, it might seem that Brussig is inviting us to view this film as an expression of Ostalgie. Early in the film, Micha gives many of the classic arguments provided by those who look to the benefits of the old order: “At least we don’t have any homeless, and no-one has to go hungry, either. Food is cheap and prices are stable.” Here we find many of the arguments that are repeatedly presented by members of the PDS [8] , and by others who look to the benefits of the old system. Whilst the German Democratic Republic may have been economically weak, politically corrupt and restrictive on freedom, it is argued that there had been a security of employment, a sense of working for a common goal and an intimacy of personal relations that has since been lost in the individualistic, dog-eat-dog world of free-market capitalism that developed in West Germany and was propagated in the reunited Germany.
Yet despite such moments of defensiveness in the face of criticism from outside, the attitude expressed in Sun Alley by Micha, his friends and his family to the culture of the GDR is generally more ambivalent. The chain-smoking father is constantly cursing everything to do with the Communist regime, though he falls silent when in the presence of government officials. Conversely, Frau Ehrenreich tries to maximise the opportunities of her family and herself by spouting the correct blandishments to those in authority, despite the fact that she would rather be in the West. Micha’s sister is happy to court a communist party member one week and a Catholic seminarian the next, and is so uninterested in politics that she does not know the difference between socialism and fascism. What is noticeable about Micha’s family and friends is a general willingness to conform to the system in all external respects whilst maintaining a degree of opposition or distain on a personal level. As a means of atoning for misdemeanours committed at school, both Micha and his beloved Miriam give speeches in praise of the socialist ideal in front of the FDJ (Free German Youth), the communist youth movement of which all teenagers were expected to be members. Yet neither shows any strong conviction in what they are saying. Miriam crosses her fingers behind her back whilst making a vow of commitment, then quickly changes out of her FDJ uniform once she has finished delivering her speech. Micha talks rapturously about Marx’s love for the working classes, though with his gaze directed at Miriam alone, it is clearly another love that he is referring to. This combination of outward conformity and private distanciation was highly characteristic of life in the GDR, as Arnd Bauerkämper points out:
[T]he deformation of official institutions was the price of one-party rule in the GDR. Dictatorial directives and everyday lives intertwined. The dictatorship conditioned individuals to conform without completely dispossessing them of their own will [9] .
The film’s use of popular music underscores precisely these tensions between conformity and resistance, between defence of the East and longing for the West. This is a film in which all the male teenagers are shown to be obsessed with pop music, particularly western rock music, though a poster of the Hungarian band Omega in the opening scene shows that youth culture is not exclusively an import from the West. It is their prime topic of conversation, though as pointed out before, the opposite sex also figures quite prominently in the film’s representation of teen culture. On the most obvious level, the link between these two themes is identical to that in most teen films: the music provides the young males with common values and a shared identity, and the pop stars are models of male performativity and prowess. In short, pop music stands for masculine views of sex, though given the boys’ general difficulty in socialising with the opposite sex, it more often than not functions as a substitute. “Men need music!” states the barely pubescent Wuschel defiantly. It is thus not surprising that all of the songs bar the last (to which I shall return) feature male vocalists. In the very first sequence, the camera scans Micha’s bedroom to reveal icons of pop culture, and particularly pop music culture. Only after a few moments of taking in these visual clues does the voiceover make clear that this teenager’s pad is in fact situated in East Germany and that Micha is engaging in the illegal activity of recording a banned Western song. As he sits on his bed leaning against the bedroom wall, the audience is informed of the fact that this is also part of the Wall and that behind it lies West Berlin. Micha’s world, both literally in terms of locality and figuratively in terms of cultural self-identification, is located on the borderline between east and west.
The act of recording a banned song is somewhat ambiguous within this argumentative landscape. It is true that the banning of popular music was peculiar to the Communist regimes under Soviet control, but the act of producing a home-made dub of copyright material is a violation of international law, and undercuts capitalist modes of commercial exchange. Willingness to engage in activities of a mildly criminal nature is a familiar part of teenage culture (or at least its mythology as an alternative to adult or mainstream culture), and pop music has aroused the mistrust and censure of those in authority, be it the police, be it the family, for decades. We have here a tension between two argumentative topoi, one presented primarily in visual terms, the other presented through dialogue: the former indicates that teenage life is much the same in all industrialised countries; on the other hand, Micha points to specific issues that make living in the GDR unique.
Whilst the scene gives a clear insight into the value and significance of pop music in Eastern Bloc society, its content is by no means authentic, as the song that the audience hears is in fact the signature-tune “Sonnenallee”, composed by New Zealand singer Graeme Jefferies specifically for the film [10] . Although the steel-guitar instrumental and relaxed vocal style give an appropriate seventies feel, the number in no way provides historical accuracy to the film. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the two dozen songs that comprise the film’s musical soundtrack is the general disregard for this type of authenticity. Only five of the film’s twenty-four tracks are taken from original seventies recordings. Many of the most recognisable songs are re-recordings by contemporary artists: the cover versions of Marc Bolan’s “Get it on” and the Box Tops’ “The letter”, for instance, were both recorded by the film’s musical team under the name Dynamo 5. Even the fleeting snippets of music by the Rolling Stones – the band that the youths accord semi-divine status – is presented in cover versions. Other featured songs are rock numbers current in the late 1990s, whilst yet others have been specifically written for the film.
From a budgetary viewpoint, it is hardly surprising that the film’s producers should choose cover versions over original recordings; securing the rights for the latter would simply have been prohibitively expensive. Nevertheless, the variety of music presented, and the fact that the cover versions range from the faithfully imitative to the shamelessly parodic, indicates that considerations other than the purely economic are at play. The music presents the ambience of the seventies rather than concentrating on historical recreation, thus underscoring one of the film’s main themes, namely vagaries of memory and reminiscence. Rather than being an example of pure Ostalgie, Sun Alley actually enacts and presents the processes involved in nostalgic reminiscence, highlighting the discrepancy between historical fact and people’s memory of it. Micha’s first words show this slide between youthful obsession and a more sober perspective that has come with age: “I always wanted to be a pop-star and get things moving, although Brian Jones died at twenty-seven, Elvis at forty-two, and John Lennon didn’t grow old.” Given that the story is narrated from a point in time after the Fall of the Wall in 1989, i.e. that the narrator must be at least a decade older than the Micha we see in the film, the youthful voice that the audience hears is a further example of semantic sliding in the aural representations of the film. Brussig envisaged such a narrative voice to convey the idea of an older man who becomes young through the act of recounting his youth – [11] an approach that has a fine poetic logic, but one that simultaneously entertains a chronological impossibility. Thus both in terms of narrative voice and music, the act of recollection shows a contamination of historical events by the accretions of later times.
As pointed out before, the film derives humour from the tension between the familiar and the different. One of the pre-release trailers, for instance, promised the holy trinity of teenage desire – sex, drugs, rock’n’roll – but with a homely GDR touch: “Love – intoxicating substances – rock and pop” [12] . The balancing of similarities and differences between East and West is shown in many of the scenes that are the stock in trade of the teen movie. At the school disco, girls and boys sit opposite each other, eyeing each other apprehensively. After an abortive attempt by Micha at chatting up Miriam, the males reassert their potency by pelvic-thrusting to (the cover version of) “Get it on”. In a cinematic moment that is a quote from Quadrophenia (dir. Roddam, England, 1979) [13] , a tall handsome teenager enters the room and all eyes turn to him: a rocker from the West, and Miriam’s boyfriend. But Miriam’s moment of glory comes to an abrupt end when the headmistress accuses her of fraternising with the “class enemy”, and orders her to give a self-critical account of herself at the next meeting of the Free German Youth. Disastrous school dances are nothing new to teen movies, but the politicisation of activities that in most teen movies have no overt ideological import is something that gives this movie its bitter edge.
Yet another set piece familiar to viewers of teen movies and transformed by its relocation to the GDR is the party. Mario (Alexander Beyer), the most rebellious of Micha’s friends, invites the gang over to his place while the parents are away for the weekend. The evening starts with the consumption of “drugs” prepared from a mixture of cola and a non-prescription herbal asthma remedy purchased at a local pharmacy. Friends, friends of friends and complete strangers arrive. The youths gradually succumb to the strange effects of the concoction as a song by the contemporary German band Einstürzende Neubauten slowly but insistently wells up. The deep, pulsating beats convey the awakening carnal drives of the participants as they dance, mate and trip out; nevertheless, the music shows the indelible influence of 80s industrial and 90s tribal music just as much as 70s psychedelia. Given that Micha and his friends are ingÈnues in sexual matters, the music’s intensity betrays retrospective knowledge, giving the chaotic scene an erotic charge over and above the actions portrayed on screen.
Needless to say, the night of abandon has disastrous consequences. The flat gets trashed, which is particularly unfortunate given that Mario’s father is a collector of rare musical instruments. Youth culture’s frenetic obsession with its own music, it is implied, excludes and even destroys other musical traditions. A western newspaper journalist photographs Mario and Micha urinating on the Berlin wall from the balcony of Marco’s flat, which leads to Micha being chastised by the headmistress at school and Mario being expelled. Thus the film gradually escalates the tensions between the political and the personal, showing with ever greater clarity that youthful pranks done in the name of fun can have serious consequences in this political and historical context. Later on in the film, Mario finds himself in difficulty because he is unable to find work, and eventually signs up to become a member of the Stasi (the East German state security service), which is tantamount to becoming a government spy. The more rebellious the individual, the more the authorities force submission.
We can follow this increasingly complex and serious interference of the political by tracing the youths’ pursuit of what they consider to be the ultimate in rock music. Let us return to the opening scene, where Micha is making a dub of banned music. Although we hear the film’s title track, Micha is in fact recording the song “Moscow” by the (western/capitalist) group Wonderland, a song which by virtue of its title and melancholy lyrics is exactly the kind of music that was banned by the communist authorities. Micha plays the song to his friends in the local playground, only to arouse the attention of Horkefeld (Detlev Buck), one of the border-guards. Taking possession of the cassette, the guard announces with mock seriousness that it is confiscated, then reveals that he himself enjoys playing the latest music for the colleagues, and that he will make a copy of the song. Here it seems as if music is able to bring out the human face of authority, becoming a kind of currency of mild and perhaps beneficial corruption. This tendency, however, has its limits, for when Horkefeld eventually does play the music back in the mess-hall, one of his superiors takes offence and demotes him forthwith.
For the remainder of the film, the search for the hottest, most forbidden pop music is pursued most assiduously by Micha’s friend Wuschel, who is on the hunt for a mint pressing of the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main Street. Records, posters and magazines about western bands are only available through the black market. Wuschel is informed by a dealer that it is worth 250 East German Marks, which Wuschel calculates to be the equivalent of three months’ income. The significance of the Rolling Stones as a rallying-point for anti-authoritarian youth culture is not without its historical basis. As Thomas Lindenberger points out, in the run-up to the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the GDR, a rumour went around that the Rolling Stones were going to give a concert for their East German fans from the Springer Tower in West Berlin, which stands directly opposite East German border. On 7 October 1969, a few thousand young visitors to the capital congregated near the border to Kreuzberg, resulting in scuffles with the East German police that had been stationed there as a precaution [14] . As things transpired, the rumour proved to be groundless.
The Rolling Stones prove to be equally illusive in the film, and persist as the absent object of desire, the symbol of phallic power that derives its force from its very absence. Farcical and dramatic elements combine in a scene that starts off innocently as a comparison of radios produced in the East and the West. A senior border guard (Horst Lebinsky) plugs in a confiscated Western radio, only to cause a power failure along that section of the wall. Panic ensues, a state of alert is declared, and the guards arm themselves. Wuschel, with his newly purchased “Exile on Main Street” under his jacket, fears that he will be apprehended and makes a run for it. The recently demoted border guard Horkefeld, eager to rehabilitate himself, tries to apprehend the youth, but in the excitement shoots at him. Wuschel falls to the ground, and the whole neighbourhood flocks around. Miraculously, he opens his eyes, but rather than showing gratitude for being alive, he bursts into tears with the discovery that the bullet has shattered his Stones LP.
Within the context of the whole film, the scene is basically comical, with a moment of high drama thrown in. Yet the shots of soldiers grabbing weapons, of a sky illuminated by flares, and the sound of sirens all show the cruelty and danger of the Wall. And whilst Wuschel’s salvation from death fits into the comical-poetic justice set up by the film, it is at the same time quite improbable that a vinyl record could provide adequate protection from bullets. The comic genre of the film does not allow Wuschel to die, even though we know, and are reminded by the pacing of the scene, that a person in this situation should. Thus the film takes us to the point where all its illusions are about to fall down, only to turn away from this point and restore its fictional order. But there is a price to pay for this comic indulgence of youth ‘saved’ by rock’n’roll: in the film’s final scenes, we see that Horkefeld has been dismissed and now works as a street-sweeper.
In another near-death experience, towards the end of the film, Wuschel is knocked off his bicycle by a car-driver from the West, who placates the youth with 50 West German Marks. This is the exact amount of money that Wuschel needs to fulfil his dream, and thus the film’s final sequence opens with a ceremonious first playing of the Stones album. Triumph soon turns to disappointment, as Wuschel discovers that he has been fobbed off with a double album of second-rate “yugotrash”. Making the best out of a bad situation, Micha pretends that the two youths are in fact listening to the Rolling Stones. This is more than simply confronting a given situation with a positive attitude; this is a creative act of fantasy that transforms an unfortunate situation – indeed a disastrous one for Wuschel, who as we have seen literally values Stones records more than life itself – into one of unmitigated joy. This small scale fantasy develops into a full-scale realisation of the typical teenage male fantasy of being rock and roll superstars. The whole neighbourhood gets swept up in the euphoria of this rock concert, a rock concert that slowly, inexorably moves westward. The guards are unnerved by the unorthodox conduct of the people, yet are unable to identify anything criminal within it. One asks, “Are they allowed to do that?” to which another replies, “Well, you know, there’s nothing we can do about it.” Neither directly supporting the regime nor directly opposing it, the people find a third way of behaving that makes the regime’s efforts redundant and irrelevant. It is a vision of subversion through delight.
Once again, the featured music contributes to the general atmosphere of the scene, though its historical authenticity is questionable. The Memphis-based band the Box Tops recorded “The letter” in 1967, which makes it a little too old for the period in question. Nevertheless, its lyric about taking an aeroplane to get to the singer’s loved one couples freedom of emotion with freedom of movement – a logistical impossibility in the GDR with its strict border controls, dilapidated roads and inefficient transport infrastructure. It must not be forgotten that one of the main issues at stake in the last days of the GDR was that of freedom of movement, whether for the purposes of emigration, of visiting relatives or simply of seeing the world. The vast majority of East Germans of all political persuasions saw freedom of movement as a necessary part of political change. Evidence of this groundswell of opinion can be found in the hundreds of East Germans who applied during 1988-89 for permits to holiday in Hungary so that they could cross that country’s recently opened border to the west.
But just as important as the lyrics is the way in which this song, rather negligible in the broad sweep of music history, is superimposed over a piece of bad rock’n’roll, which itself is a poor substitute for a truly renowned album. Through this process of making do on the part of Micha and Wuschel, a new paradigm of and a new context for cultural participation are created. Thus in its portrayal of W and M’s engagement in pop music–any pop music the film moves away from discussions of the intrinsic quality of the music to its cultural value. The music is good because the youths want it to be and because they perceive its relevance to their own situation. The Box Tops’ song never sounded or looked as good as this; through imagination, the film argues, the boys have made the song, and themselves, into legends.
The final march westward is indeed an egregious fantasy. Yet the underlying principal of pursuing pleasure regardless of political import may not be so far from the historical truth. The Wende – that series of events that led to the fall of the GDR – was above all a revolution that sought change outside existing categories. The peaceful mass demonstrations of 1989 were not primarily the expression of opposition to the Communist government, but rather a call for reforms to an old and atrophied system. People who considered themselves to be loyal citizens and committed socialists sought change. The government itself saw the validity of many of these demands and initiated reforms. Yet ultimately, the reforms proved too central to the people’s desires, overtaking the core beliefs of the regime. Thus the ideological underpinnings of the system finally became an irrelevancy that was obvious to all, to the extent that the government voluntarily dissolved itself. Sun Alley‘s final rock-concert fantasy, its joyous insistence that neither attacks nor supports those in authority, shows precisely this pursuit of happiness outside predetermined political categories.
Yet there are many years between Micha’s teenage days and the Fall of the Wall: what of the time when he was no longer young and in love? The Wende may well have been peaceful, but it was hardly effortless. The limits of this fantasy vision are given visual expression in the last moments of the film. In a strange compaction of time, the boys run off screen, through the deserted border check point that Sun Alley must have become with the Fall of the Wall. Yet at the same time, tape and other litter are blown onto the street, the refuse that is left after a film has been screened. A couple of tumble weeds roll by, a wry nod to the conventions of the studio western, as well as an allusion to the jocular term “the wild east”, which was in currency in Germany during the nineties. As the colour fades to black and white, all we are left with is not the real Sun Alley but a deserted film set, a constructed backdrop upon which all of these creative acts of narration have taken place. Nina Hagen’s hit from 1973, “Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen” (“You forgot the colour film”), provides the musical conclusion:
You have forgotten the colour film, Michael my dear
Now no-one will believe how nice it was
You have forgotten the colour film, by God
Everything’s white and blue and green and soon no longer true [15] .
The explosive, testosterone-charged euphoria of a neighbourhood rock concert gives way to the lurching, tottering beat of a brass band. Hagen’s shrill voice mockingly sings of an ignominious conclusion to a holiday gone wrong, though what is most important to the singer is not the holiday itself, but the images that are constituted by the photographs. Colourful pictures produce happy memories, no matter how bad the events really were. This song is a purely East German production that was distributed and broadcast with the blessing of the authorities, showing that critical, ironical voices were certainly tolerated, so long as they were not overtly political. With its ironical tone and enigmatic final line, the song draws the audience away from the heroic, away from what might have been another wall film with its melodramatic trope of escaping to freedom, and back to the domestic, the familiar and the typical. Just as the filmmakers have been able to bring colour to what seemed to many to be a bleak history of the GDR, so they are able to take that colour away from all these fantasies. Somewhere between the coldness of exterior views of history so critical of the regime’s repressions and interior memories of youth and love lies the reality of daily life in the GDR.
In summary, Sun Alley presents a superficially harmonious world, only to reveal that this world is riddled with problems. We have seen that beneath the comical surface, more serious aspects of life in the GDR are presented. In the discrepancy between the mode of presentation and the matter being presented lies a critique of the dialectic relationship of experience and memory. This dialectic is put even more explicitly in the Brussig’s book Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, which was written in tandem with the film, though not conforming in all respects to it: “Happy people have a bad memory and many reminiscences” [16] . In musical terms, this discrepancy is revealed in the use of music and lyrics that conveys the ambience, emotions and ideals of the time without attempting to provide an accurate historical reconstruction. But at the same time the film also shows that music had a significant cultural role in opening up imaginative possibilities that made life more tolerable.
As Helen Cafferty states, “the film works against a simplistic Ostalgie that wants the GDR back again” [17] . Whilst I agree with her, it should be pointed out that there is very little Ostalgie that proposes such a reinstatement. Such “simplistic Ostalgie” may perhaps exist in well-lubricated bar-room debates and may surface in moments of road-rage, but in the media it is largely a fictitious construct; a paper tiger representing an extreme position that few people hold. Rather than seeing Ostalgie as a simplistically idealised view of the GDR, recent films and broadcasts have shown that it is time to develop a more complex definition of the term itself, reflecting the many aspects involved in remembering the GDR era.
Endnotes
[1] All translations of the screenplay and of other German-language sources are mine.
[2] Jens Bisky, “Beleidigend,” Berliner Zeitung, 30 January 2000.
[3] Stefan Wolle, “Schatten in der Sonnenallee,” Die Welt, 11 February 2000.
[4] Also Thomas Brussig, “‘Opfer politischer Gewalt haben ein Recht auf Wiedergutmachung’: Im Streit um die angebliche Beleidigung von Maueropfern meldet sich der Autor des Films Sonnenallee zu Wort: eine Entgegnung von Thomas Brussig,” Der Tagesspiegel, 29 January 2000; Kerstin Decker, “Hart an der Grenze,” Der Tagesspiegel, 1 April 2000; Gunnar Decker, “Opfer als Verfolger,” Neues Deutschland, 3 April 2000.
[5] Norbert Kapferer, “‘Nostalgia’ in Germany’s new federal states as a political and cultural phenomenon of the transformation process.” Political Thought and German Reunification: The New German Ideology?, eds. Howard Williams, Colin Wight and Norbert Kapferer (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 38.
[6] Leonie Naughton, That was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002), 165-205.
[7] Anke Westphal, “Die DDR als Hippie-Republik”, taz, 28-29 August 1999,http://www.thomasbrussig.de/sonnenallee/taz.htm.
[8] J.K.A. Thomanek and Bill Niven, Dividing and Uniting Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 77.
[9] Arndt Bauerkämper, “Historical roots of values in individuals’ choice after 1989,” Ten Years of German Unification, eds Jörn Leonhard and Lothar Funk (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press), 85.
[1] Graeme Jefferies and the Cakekitchen official website,http://www.thecakekitschen.net.
[11] Thomas Brussig, Eine essayistische Beschäftigung mit den Etappen des “Sonnenallee”-Stoffes: Idee, Drehbuch, Film, diploma thesis, Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf”, Babelsberg, 2000.
[12] “Liebe – berauschende Mittel – Rock und Pop”.
[13] Paul Cooke, “Performing ‘Ostalgie’: Leander Haussmann’s Sonnenallee,”German Life and Letters 56, no.2 (April 2003), 162.
[14] Thomas Lindenberger, “Sonnenallee – ein Farbfilm über die Diktatur der Grenze(n),” WerkstattGeschichte 26 (2000), 93.
[15] Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen, mein Michael,
Nun glaubt uns kein Mensch wie schön’s hier war.
Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen, bei meiner Seel’,
Alles blau und weiß und grün und später nicht mehr wahr.
[16] Thomas Brussig, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1999), 57.
[17] Helen Cafferty, “Sonnenallee. Taking comedy seriously in unified Germany,” Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film, eds. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson and Kristie A. Foell (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter 2001), 268.
Created on: Monday, 11 July 2005 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 27 July 2005