Nostalgia Isn't What It Used To Be

All but a few stretches of the Berlin Wall were torn down in the first heady months after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). Yet some east Germans still cling to memories of the 40 years they lived under communist rule — memories that have grown more affectionate with time. Speciality shops and some websites offer east German board games, 15-packs of the infamously rough Cabinet cigarettes, Be Ready condoms, even cans of Trabi Duft — fumes from the iconic Trabant car — and the very brand of hair gel preferred by former east German leader Erich Honecker. Young Berliners still gather at "authentic" G.D.R. parties, where guests don the uniforms of state organizations, swill Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine and dance to ballads like In the East, which sold 300,000 copies a few years ago. This phenomenon of nostalgia for the lost east, dubbed Ostalgie, was neatly encapsulated in the 2003 hit film Goodbye Lenin!, a sweet-tempered comedy about a son who protects the feelings of his ailing mother by pretending the Wall is still standing and the G.D.R. is intact.

That may be an amusing concept for most cinemagoers. For many east Germans, struggling to find their feet in the new realities of a reunited Germany, and missing the rigid certainties of life in a totalitarian state, it struck a deeper chord. In retrospect the G.D.R. really didn't seem all that malign, just a bit comical with its puttering cars, camp displays of military might and empty shelves. But now, it seems, east Germans may finally be ready to take a colder, harder look at their communist past.

Just as films like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon captured the dark memories in the U.S. about the Vietnam War more than a decade after the conflict had ended, several German movies indicate a toughening of opinions about the G.D.R. A handful of new releases, including one by the makers of Goodbye Lenin! called The Red Cockatoo, explore the G.D.R. and its 100,000-strong secret-police force, the Stasi, not as the subject of comedy but of cruelty and farce. The Lives of Others, which swept the prestigious Lola German Film Awards this month in Berlin, is going strong at the German box office with its story of a successful stage actress whose life is destroyed by a lecherous Culture Minister and the Stasi.

The director of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 33, says he did not set out to make a political point but wanted to personalize the period. "Cinema is a good barometer to show what is going on in a country," Von Donnersmarck told Time. His film is being heralded as the first major feature to examine the personal cost of entanglement with the Stasi. "There has been a tendency to see the former G.D.R. as a state in which no one really suffered and the Stasi was just a laughing matter," says Peter Schneider, a German author and Lola awards jury member. "Now we have the first real attempt to show how the secret service poisoned the lives of millions of citizens."

The Lives of Others is part of a wider and growing debate in Germany about the G.D.R. And it is far from one-sided. Some former members of the old regime and retired Stasi officials, buoyed by the electoral gains of the Left Party, the successor to the G.D.R.'s Communist Party, have become increasingly vocal in defending their former lives. In one incident, 80 ex-Stasi officers sought to block a series of memorial plaques to 40,000 local people arrested by the state security forces from being erected outside Germany's Stasi memorial, an old interrogation center and prison that now serves as a museum. "They are telling lies!" shouted the group's organizer, Wolfgang Schmidt, a former agent, who also used his website to accuse the museum's director, Hubertus Knabe, of being a "professional agitator." Earlier this month, Schmidt was ordered to stop communicating with or about Knabe, or face a fine. Two new books by ex-Stasi agents also portray the secret police as professional men upholding the law of the land. "In our intelligence work we never used methods that led to serious crimes, terror or murder," said one of the authors, Gotthold Schramm, at a press conference. Stasi victims in the audience greeted that statement with loud jeers.

Germany was one of the first countries to provide public access to its communist-era secret police files — an estimated 6 million were made available in 1992. But last week, a commission established by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to consider new ways to examine the legacy of the G.D.R. recommended that the Stasi archive containing millions of personal files on ordinary citizens be closed to public view. The proposal drew accusations that Germany was trying to bury its past, although commission members insisted they merely wanted to place the study of the period with qualified experts.

Though it opened up the files early, in other respects, Germany has been slower than its neighbors in Eastern Europe to examine its communist past. That may be about to change. "A struggle is going on over how Germans will think about the G.D.R. in the future," says Knabe. "Either it was a strange country with complete social security and no unemployment and kindergarten for everyone; or it was a dictatorship that killed 1,000 people at the border, forced more than 4 million to flee, and jailed tens of thousands."