IN DECEMBER 2008 former employees of the German Democratic Republic’s state-run DEFA (Deutsche Filmaktiengesellschaft) Studios as well as cinemagoers from the former East were up in arms. Volker Schlöndorff, a prominent cineaste of the West’s New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s and, after the Wende, the managing director of Studio Babelsberg from 1992 to 1997 (located on the grounds of the old DEFA Studio for Feature Films), had made an unfortunate remark in an interview with the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung. “Babelsberg!” he proclaimed, “I’m often called a liquidator, but in fact I laid the foundations for today’s successes. I got rid of the DEFA name—DEFA films were terrible.” Within days the DEFA Foundation and the distributor Progress Film-Verleih, jointly responsible for the legacy of the films produced in the GDR, issued an open letter condemning what many saw as a wholesale dismissal of East German film. Signed by hundreds of film professionals who got their start at DEFA and the East’s film academy, the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf” (HFF), the letter and several media responses made clear that Schlöndorff’s offhand comments conflated state propaganda with a lack of aesthetic merit and, by extension, with an illegitimate East German entertainment culture. On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, such specters of the Cold War still punctured Germany’s performance of unity.

Around this time I was seeking a way to commemorate the tumultuous political events of 1989/90 at Indiana University, a large research institution in a small college town in the American Midwest, and I was struck by two phenomena: the fact that German Cold War fault lines had also divided North American German studies and, more specifically, the study of German cinema; and the unbiased appreciation of the work of filmmakers from the former GDR in the United States and elsewhere abroad in comparison to the reception of DEFA films in the unified Federal Republic of Germany, a dichotomy that was revealed in conversations with those filmmakers. The first of these seemed to call for a disciplinary reassessment of the East German filmography in the larger canon of North American German studies as well as the collaboration of scholars from both traditions; the second suggested the productive possibilities of an unlikely geographical location for a discussion of the Wende.