PRODUCED BY Ö-FILM, a company run by DEFA-trained producers Katrin Schlösser and Frank Löprich, Sammelsurium represents a reflective journey across the portion of unified Germany that was so recently the GDR. Unlike some of the other GDR-themed documentaries of the Wende era, Sammelsurium, which premiered at a festival in the western city of Duisburg, received very little attention from journalists at the time. Hans-Jörg Rother’s 1993 review for the eastern Neue Zeit is an exception. Dietmar Hochmuth was himself a DEFA feature-filmmaker of the last generation, and his interview with Koepp later in the same year emphasizes the shifts in the perception of Eastern documentary directors and documentary films within the former East after the Wende. Both writers articulate a disparity between DEFA’s high art of documentary filmmaking and Western media, though Koepp is one of those rare established DEFA filmmakers whose careers continued, uninterrupted, after unification. While Rother mourns those documentarians who abandoned their craft, Hochmuth betrays a far more biting critique of East-West relations and Eastern submissiveness in the age of film-funding boards and contracts with Western television stations. From both pieces, it becomes clear that by 1993 the euphoria of unification had given way to more disturbing trends: unemployment, right-wing extremism, and professional disorientation.

Hans-Jörg Rother

Journey into a Lost Era

First published as “Reise in eine verlorene Zeit” in the Neue Zeit

(March 26, 1993).

Translated by Joe O’Donnell.

New in Cinemas: Volker Koepp’s Sammelsurium—ein ostelbischer Kulturfilm (Hotch Potch—An East Elbian Cultural Film)

With every passing day, new layers of experience are obscuring the GDR past. Recollections are becoming indistinct and, depending on one’s mood, taking on either a dark or a rosy tint. Perplexed helplessness is on the rise, since it’s not easy to reduce forty years to one common denominator, and it’s hard enough to deal with the present. On the other hand, taking a position on today’s issues presupposes having recognized and understood what happened yesterday. A task, perhaps, to occupy the rest of our lives?

Volker Koepp, known for many documentaries set in the area between Brandenburg and the Baltic Sea, calls his new film an “archeological search.” Without commentary, he presents a series of impressions from a journey from the former inner-German border on the Elbe River to what is now Germany’s eastern border on the Oder River.