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What remains of the DDR


Lucia Orlacchio

images of the fall of the Berlin Wall are in the memory of all of us: November 9, 1989 the citizens of East Berlin in mass climbed over the fence cement for 28 years separated the two Germanies, to reach the West. We will begin the process of disintegration of the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republick, DDR), the socialist state was born in 1949 under the direct influence of the Soviet Union who settled here with his troops on the pretext of DDR defend the capitalist from the threat of USA during the Cold War.

While DDR has now fallen for many years, there's still a matrix in German culture and particularly in contemporary cinema : there are many filmmakers today are inspired by the German socialist regime and that this complaint system, horrors and crimes or remember it gloomily lifestyle and habits with particular feeling nostalgic for the East Gemany, defined Ostalgie . "Good Bye, Lenin!" (Becker, 2003) is one of the films where you can find many of the clichés of 'Ostalgie: East Germany is seen with regret so blind and naive as to be forgotten are the traits of dictatorial socialist regime and enhanced the illusion of calm and order to a life controlled by the government.

On the other hand the control of the life of citizens is contextualized in a climate of terror in the film "The Lives of Others" in 2006: director von Donnersmarck is well documented in the tension felt in the 80s by artists and intellectuals in the performance of all their activities closely monitored by the Stasi, the secret police of the GDR that dealt with security and intelligence. In this case, the language of film documents and reconstructs the "age of suspicion" paying considerable attention to the psychology of all individuals included in the system and therefore also of the same members of the Stasi.

E 'therefore clear that the GDR no longer exists, but only politically: the German Democratic Republic in fact continues to live in German cultural memory that still needs to dig into the past to re-establish the foundations of their identity.