JÜRGEN BÖTTCHER’S DIE MAUER was one of several documentaries that gave voice and vision to the GDR’s demise and the rapid political, social, and architectural transitions that followed the opening of the German-German border, particularly in Berlin. Taking the Wall in this state of transformation, touristic reverence, and reflection as his subject, Böttcher grants the structure some of the historical complexity that would no longer be perceptible in its dismantling. Sibylle Wirsing, then a cultural correspondent of the West’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, examines the film alongside several feature documentaries from the immediate Wende period. While critiquing what she sees as DEFA filmmakers’ general tendency to ignore pacing and appropriate running times, she does suggest that Böttcher’s film could actually be longer. West German film critic Kraft Wetzel, writing for the East-West weekly Der Freitag, a paper founded in 1990, similarly rescues Die Mauer from the media’s oversaturation with images of the Wall. Both journalists demonstrate an attitude of goodwill toward Böttcher’s work and, in Wirsing’s case, toward DEFA documentaries, that seems to portend the kind of positive historical attention in the West that many of the Wende films never, in practice, received.

Sibylle Wirsing

“Loose Living Arrangements, Temporary Abodes, Stylized Hideouts”

First published as “Lose Quartiere, vorläufige Bleiben, stilisierte

Winkel” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (October 17, 1990). Translated by Adam Blauhut.

“New DEFA Documentary Films, Presented at the Academy of the Arts (East Berlin)”

Speeches, loudspeakers, the suppression of free speech, chants, demonstrations, new beginnings: DEFA responded quickly. Its documentary filmmakers captured the autumn of 1989 while impressions were still fresh. Whenever necessary, feature-film elements are used to bridge the gap between present and past. The young actors who play themselves in Kurt Tetzlaff’s Im Durchgang (In Transit, FRG 1990) are graduates of the Helmholtz Gymnasium in Potsdam. In front of the camera, they relive the events that took place the previous year between their graduation and the collapse of the dictatorship. This was an interim period for these young people, who were privileged in the sense that they were tolerated by a state, a Party, and an army that were no longer attempting to break their will. Members of this individualistic elite were left to themselves. They lived in an unorthodox self-constructed GDR on the fringes of society.

Their social environments are offshoots of their parents’ middle-class homes: loose living arrangements, temporary abodes, stylized hideouts.