EAST GERMANY ON THE SCREEN | February 29th 2008

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The former East Germany has graced the big screen lately, but often in misleading blockbusters. After the glimmer and glitz of the Berlinale, Cornelia Rudat considers two new documentaries that capture the real lives of others ...

Alas, Berlin's annual international film festival is over. Some 400 movies and documentaries from all over the world lured around 200,000 visitors to screenings from February 7th until the 17th. And the 58th annual Berlinale enjoyed more glamour and international attention than ever before, with stars including the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Willem Dafoe and Ryan Reynolds in attendance. All of the awards have been handed out, including the Golden Bear (the top prize for the best film, which went to "Tropa de Elite", a Brazilian thriller directed by José Padilha). But as usual, my personal favourites were not among those competing for the coveted grizzlies. Instead, they were documentaries about people who grew up behind the iron curtain in East Germany, as I did.

Award-winning blockbusters, such as "Good-bye, Lenin!" and "The Lives of Others", spread an image of the collapsed German Democratic Republic as a country of perpetrators and victims, supporters and opponents. Excellent movies, but fiction. The real lives of others--that is, the overwhelming majority of East Germans who were neither victims nor perpetrators, but ordinary people who tried to lead decent lives under obscure circumstances--are wonderfully captured in two new documentaries that first screened at the festival.

One is "... dann leben sie noch heute" ("...they are living happily after"), the final episode of "The Children of Golzow" ("Die Kinder von Golzow"), a long-running chronicle that I have been following for years. Winfried Junge, a directors from East Germany, began the extraordinary project in 1961, documenting the lives of 18 former fellow-students from a school class in Golzow (a Brandenburg village 80km east of Berlin) for almost half a century. (Junge's wife Barbara joined the project years later.)

Karl Gass, a successful East German documentary filmmaker, proposed the idea of capturing the first generation of six- or seven-year olds at a new type of "socialist" school. The opening instalment in the series--"When I am starting school"--was released a few weeks after the rise of the Berlin Wall. Back then, the Junges had little clue of how long they would be working on the project. By 2007, they had completed 20 films of between 14 minutes and five-hours' length.

Having grown up in a small East German village myself, I was especially curious to follow these stories. I was only too anxious to see what Progessfilm, its distributor, announced was "definitely" the final segment of the longest-running documentary in the history of cinema. (Michael Apted's wonderful "7Up" series in England has a similar premise, and is the longest-running documentary on television.)

The film festival included Parts Three and Four of "...they are living happily ever after". (Parts One and Two enjoyed successful screenings in 2006.) In rejoining Elke, Karin, Bernhard, Eckhard and Gudrun--as well as Gudrun's father Arthur Klitzke--it is fascinating to observe the ways these lives have been shaken up by reunification (some for the better, others for the worse). Karin, a former poultry farmer, has found a job and a new love in West Germany, while her classmate Gudrun, a former mayor and single woman, has been struggling. Some jobs in Golzow's farming and stock breeding have been saved, but many in the village suffer from unemployment.

But what can be said for everyone, regardless of their experiences, is that they have grown more confident before the camera. Time and new freedoms have eroded much of their timid reserve from the years before 1989. In the film's epilogue, we see them all sitting in the same kindergarten sandpit where this story began 47 years ago. The effect is bracing.

The second film, "Sag mir, wo die Schönen sind..." ("The Beauties from Leipzig"), is a very amusing 90-minute documentary made by Gunther Scholz. Nine women from the East German city of Leipzig (Saxony), now in their late-30s and early-40s, speak about participating in the city's first and last beauty contest in May 1989. Gerhard Gäbler, a photographer in Leipzig at the time, had taken photos of the contestants at home and at work. Luckily he also recorded interviews with the young women, in which they expressed their hopes and dreams for becoming "Miss Leipzig".

I had no idea that beauty contests even took place in my country, where stoicism and hard work had been prized over winning the genetic lottery. What a treasure trove for Scholz to discover. When the director confronted each of the former contestants with their old pictures and statements, they all shook their heads, laughing in disbelief.

There are some wonderfully fun moments in this film, such as when one of the women--Diana Kaube, a midwife trainee (who is seen standing between two dummies of pregnant women)--recalls being perhaps the only beauty competitor ever to pose with unshaved legs. As she described feeling mortified by her hairy legs during her first trip to America, after the fall of the iron curtain, I was reminded of my own awkward mistakes upon entering the brave new (Western) world.

The women's stories are captivating. Regina Buchter, forbidden as a Catholic from pursuing medicine in the GDR, is now working as an interior architect in Zurich. Simone Würges, once a tram driver in Leipzig, is living and working in Koblenz. When her West German partner praises the modesty of East German women ("They are not demanding and grateful for small things"), the audience erupted in both protest and approval.

There's Grit Pannier, who runs a successful PR agency in Berlin and Dubai, and Simone Zinguire, a former pretzel-factory worker and now a chambermaid in a five-star hotel in Leipzig. None of these women complain or regret anything. They are all pragmatic, optimistic and full of good humour, earning the admiration of anyone who learns their stories. Gunther Scholz has crafted a kind homage to these singular beauties, and a larger gift for anyone who is still figuring out what it means to leave the East Germany of our childhood behind.

"Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute - Die Kinder von Golzow" (Parts Three and Four) runs in Germany from April 3^rd 2008.

"Sag mir, wo die Schönen sind..." runs in Leipzig's Passage cinema on March 5^th.

(Cornelia Rudat works in The Economist office in Berlin.)