RECOGNIZED WITH THE HESSIAN FILM AWARD as well as the German Critics’ Award, Stilles Land, the first feature of Andreas Dresen, opened in Berlin and eastern Germany on October 8, 1992. Both Reinhard Wosniak of the Rostock regional paper Ostsee-Zeitung and filmmaker Hannes Schönemann, writing for the highbrow (East) German film journal Film und Fernsehen were quick to emphasize the film’s setting in the provinces, where the distant rumblings of East Berlin’s Wende confronted a more authentic, perhaps more coherent experience of life in the East. While Wosniak celebrates the film’s adherence to DEFA’s realist aesthetic (which would continue to be one of Dresen’s trademarks) and its nuanced portrayal of the East German experience of the Wende period, Schönemann places the film alongside the work of a slightly older generation of DEFA “offspring,” the embittered one to which he and his slightly younger wife, Sibylle Schönemann, as well as Helke Misselwitz, Herwig Kipping, and Ulrich Weiß belonged. Unlike DEFA’s pre-Wende Nachwuchs, particularly the Schönemanns, who were imprisoned and then expatriated from the GDR in 1984 and 1985, the film-school graduation of Dresen and some of his contemporaries such as Andreas Kleinert occurred in a smooth transition to the new opportunities of the Federal Republic’s unified film-funding structures. Schönemann’s review betrays a wistfulness of its own, despite its measured praise for, even defense of, Stilles Land. One is reminded that one’s age in the fall of 1989 determined experiences of the GDR and its cultural production that were hardly uniform between generations.

Reinhard Wosniak

A Wonderful Film Thanks to the Peculiar Character of the East

First published as “Ein großartiger Film dank der Eigenart Ost” in the Ostsee-Zeitung (October 10, 1992).

Translated by Joe O’Donnell.

The GDR in autumn 1989. Some people are voting with their feet, while others are still preparing the fortieth anniversary of the state’s founding. A country between eras. In its most northeastern part, a young director arrives at a provincial theater with high hopes and big plans. Thus begins Andreas Dresen’s Stilles Land, shot in 1991.

A Fascinating Chronicle of the Wende

After its initial film awards and nominations, it is now opening in the East. That another six weeks will pass before it debuts in the West seems somehow symptomatic.