What is left of the GDR? : Wishes that almost never come true

Ever since the GDR disappeared, I’ve been busy as a journalist trying to find out what the GDR was. To this day, I still make films about this vanished country, mainly on behalf of RBB and MDR, where East Germans are mostly among themselves. But why? And why still?

Why is it worth telling about a country that has no respectable value in the history of Germany and in the history books of the Federal Republic? And what am I actually talking about in the films when I talk about the GDR, East Germany? And who do I tell? My current film “Bettina” is not doing so well in the West.

The drama of the GDR is that the elderly didn’t trust their youth, couldn’t bear to contradict them.

Lutz Pehnert

I was always of the opinion that it is wrong to look at the GDR from the end. A basic idea in my film work has always been that you can only understand the GDR if you look at it from the beginning. And by that I don’t mean the Ulbricht group, which was deposed in Berlin in 1945 in order to open a satellite state of Moscow here. I mean those for whom the end of a horrible story was a chance for something new. During this time Bettina Wegner was born. Her parents were among those who wanted something new. Communists, but unhappy because their six-year-old daughter was an ardent Stalin admirer.

I think the mistake in looking at the GDR is that one often and all too easily spells it out from its inability, its mistakes, its absurdities, its brutalities.

But the GDR was – and this is the only way to understand its existence – not only a place from which one wanted to get away, but also a land of opportunities, a promised land. Unfortunately, those in power in the GDR were not theatergoers. They quoted Lenin instead of Shakespeare. Instead of reading Shakespeare, they lived Shakespeare’s plays: the plays of the powerful who do not want to pass on their power.

Lutz Pehnert accepts the Clio Film Award from Marion Brasch.
© Photo: Andreas Klaer/PNN

The drama of the GDR is that the elderly didn’t trust their youth, didn’t understand their difference, couldn’t endure their contradiction. “The sons die before the fathers” – Thomas Brasch. The fact that in the end, in 1989, this musty salad did not become another GDR, but only a connection to a practiced system, also has something to do with this.

Older people didn’t understand 21-year-old Bettina Wegner, who wrote notes against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact countries in Prague. They disciplined them and sent them into production. But she became a singer in this country, sang until she was no longer allowed to sing and stayed until she was expelled from the country. Bettina Wegner thus lost her homeland. But the GDR – and that’s just as bad – also lost Bettina Wegner.

We East Germans are stubborn about the vocabulary of the West from the vocabulary of the Cold War.

Lutz Pehnert

The GDR was never the better Germany, never the better society. But it also existed for its few decades through the illusion of many that it could become a better society. She rightly disappeared. Or as Mad Max says in Fury Road, “Hope is a mistake. If you try to fix something that’s broken, really broken, you go insane.” We East Germans have become smart about it, but also stubborn about the West’s enduring vocabulary of Cold War vocabulary. I have no problem if someone doesn’t know anything about my life and doesn’t want to know anything about it. As long as he doesn’t explain to me what my life has been like.

I’ve just made an article for the culture magazine of the RBB about the soul music of the GDR in the 1970s. Sometimes I have the impression that GDR pop history is known in the West no more than Ulbricht’s statement about the West’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah”, which shouldn’t be copied, please. And that was what young musicians in the GDR were passionate about. They imitated their role models – Jethro Tull, James Brown, Deep Purple – by playing and performing their songs. Then the culture officials said, stop with that Western stuff, invent yourselves. They didn’t say it so casually. Nor was it a recommendation, but an authoritarian presumption, the tool of which was the state “gaming permit”, the so-called “cardboard”.

The singer Bettina Wagner believed in her country and was disciplined by the party cadres.
The singer Bettina Wagner believed in her country and was disciplined by the party cadres.
© Photo: Jörg Möller

Not everyone who wanted to was allowed on the stages of the GDR; but only those who knew their craft. This is an absolute restriction of freedom. The other side is that young people were trained at music colleges and at the legendary technical school in Friedrichshain, which revolutionized pop music on German soil during and afterward. Yes, it was a revolution, it was avant-garde, and it was grandiose. The way to the blues riff and to the wind section of funk and soul led through the Bach fugue.

At some point the Federal Republic had Udo Lindenberg, the lone fighter. But the GDR already had Phanta Rhei, the modern soul band, the Joco Dev sextet, Bayon, Uschi Brüning, Christiane Ufholz, Renft: concentrated musical power and virtuosity. No, we do not count. It’s just about acknowledgment, maybe also about recognition.

Bettina Wegner came into being in the muddle of state funding and paternalism: a singer, a songwriter. Actually, she just wanted to sing love songs. What makes her inimitable for me is the stringency of her attitude. Not to submit to any political system, to any doctrine, to any presumption, but to remain true to oneself and one’s own conscience. She grew out of a courage that was stronger than her fear. She was scared, but she didn’t betray herself. This is a great art, perhaps the best.

The first, most beautiful and also most challenging part of the work on this film was listening to Bettina Wegner’s songs. all night long Again and again. I fell in love with these songs while beaming, fighting and crying. I also broke down in them because they did something: measure my life against them. Or to simply ask me: What about you, what did you want, what have you lost? That was my start in the film.

My favorite song is her “Love Song”. And my favorite line: “Don’t touch me / oh, touch me”. It’s not political. But she talks about our wishes, which almost never come true. And that we have to deal with it.

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Source: Tagesspiegel

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