Mexico? no, DDR…

Tonight at the Goethe Institute we saw “Spur der Steine”, a 1966 DEFA film. It was censored immediately after its first screening and it became available in theaters in the DDR only from november 1989…not surprisingly!

As per IMDB: “Hannes Balla is the foreman of a group of building construction workers at the large construction site “Schkona” in the GDR. They spend most of their time working hard and drinking harder – to some they are fun, to some they are a public nuisance. Things get more complicated when the good-looking Kati Klee is employed as a young technician, and the ambitious new Party Secretary, Werner Horrath, aims to boost work efficiency and downsize Balla’s ego. A contemporary movie about work, love, and everything in between”.

Interesting film about “carreerism”, with an almost critical view on the SED party, with Walter Ulbricht portraits and  the like. A bit of a Peyton Place film too. And the foreman…he’s got a great presence. In between 1960’s Alberto Sordi’s “spaccone” characters and today’s Ben Affleck equally “spaccone” characters. Manfred Krug is groβartig in this role. The film is weird too…where women engineers remove their tights in the middle of a building site in order to avoid the dust, widows are mad for Eilikör, carpenters wear an earring with a pearl and swim naked in the middle of ducks.

hungry as a wolf

Two posts ago, we were the 1980s, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain were there and I was in love with both John Taylor and Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran. Geez…I could not make up my mind! In Cold War attire, Le Bon had a bon enfant sovietique spy attitude.

So it seems quite appropriate, after last week’s full immersion on STASI’s Eric Mielke, to get to know more about Markus Wolf.

Listen to the whole story on Radio2’s “The STASI over Berlin”

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Thank you Mik for  the heads up!

And well done to Radio 2 for the “View to a kill” cameo. After all, “a fatal kiss – is all we need”.

Anna in Stasiland

Stasiland, an incredible book by Anna Funder. The italian translation is very good, pity only for the title “C’era una volta la DDR”, which sounds a bit silly, actually.

Funder starts in a casual way to ask people how things were during the DDR years, and she ends up conducting a very intriguing reportage.

Beyond stereotypes and beyond Ostalgie, “between Kafka and Monty Python” Funder contacts victims of the regime and former Stasi officers, Mitarbeiters and talking heads. She visits the places were citizens were detained and subject to police interrogations. She smells the stale air of these rooms, where the odour of terrified people, dossiers, senile power and outright paranoia still lingers.

For 10 years the letters that my DDR penpals and I were writing each other were intercepted, opened with special W-shaped steam devices, read, copied and filed.

My friend Michael went up to the Archive and got the letters, just after the fall of the Wall. Just like those people you see in the film “The lives of others”. Just like the protagonists of Anna Funder’s reportage.

We were teenagers and loved Duran Duran. We were discovering Madonna. I worshipped Radio Caroline, we met over Radio Free Europe.

My friends in Brandenburg and Saxony were longing for freedom. They travelled a lot across the Socialist countries. We had freedom in Triest, but I had never travelled. Freedom meant different things for us.

I wonder if I can go there, and feel the blow, of seeing my letters in a file, imagine them through the eyes of a Stasi zealous Mitarbeiter, filed and numbered, in a box. I have the sinister impression that somewhere, someone knew a lot about me.

mediaset, or der schwarze kanal (italian style)

I’m reading Anna Funder’s Stasiland and it’s very enlightening. My DDR penpals never bothered to describe this TV program, der schwarze Kanal, probably because like millions of other DDR citizens, they switched off the TV-set on Mondays and wrote letters instead.

Well, now that I discovered the content of this program I must say it’s a familiar feeling. I realize that I have at least 3 schwarze Kanal on my non-flat, beer-bellied TV set: Canale 5, Rete4 and Italia1.

The real McCoy schwarze Kanal is the illegal Rete4 network, in particular the Telegiornale of Emilio Fede, the novel Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. Here Fede in a schwarze Kanal top performance, producing his brand of murky innuendo on Roberto Saviano.

Of course Fede is kein Stasi bureaucrat, quite to the contrary he embodies the quintessential italian style. Nice suits, hyperrealistic tan, slimy rictus, oily and obsequious. The PM’s running dog.

Rete4, but also Canale5 and Italia1 offer on top their schwarze Kanal their share of  female buttocks nervously-shaken in silly sexed-up dances, very different from the DDR’s chastened and sanitized Lipsi dance.

We also have U-boot schwarze Kanal inside RAI1 and RAI2: the telegiornale. And the newspapers! But the rationale of the schwarze Kanal Made in Italy is the same of the DDR. Trying to keep the information outside, and when they can’t, shout at it.

Basically RAI 3 plays the ARD role. Everything said by RAI3’s Milena Gabbanelli, RAI2’s Michele Santoro, Sergio Ruotolo and Marco Travaglio, is attacked by the schwarze Kanal. Or even the strips of Vauro, who was censored last week.

The Stasi created the first pioneering derivatives of the news programs with the schwarze Kanal. Italy created a real subprime flourishing derivative market of information sewers.

A friend told me yesterday he only watches the news on Al Jazeera. Sign of the times.

The funny thing is, The Guardian online edition now has italian politics articles in italian…will Il Giornale o Il Foglio start to write in french against Le Monde, in english against The Economist?

Goodnight from the Divided City…(yes, on top of everything we’ve got also Popetown, something that the DDR tried to copy, but couldn’t match!)

more about Berlin

A few updates…on the italian Radio 3 the “Jumping over the Wall” (Saltare il Muro) series of interviews has been on air for a week now. You can find the MP3 files below the Berlin Wall section.

I kept on reading books on Berlin, the Weimar Republic, 1945, 1989…a few updates in the bookshelf in Berlin and Rome sections, depending on where I actually read the book. In Berlin we do not have TV, Mac, PC. It’s fabulous for reading books, no distraction…no blogs, no news apart from a tiny alarm clock radio permanently set on JazzRadio.

Other books are being read now, so more to come. I have a few thousands pages to travel across, so I’ll refrain from buying other books, but in the meantime in the Berlin Wall section I jotted down the titles of a few ones which may be worth browsing (but not buying yet!) when in a bookstore…

saltare il muro, jumping across the wall

20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Radio3 is collecting individual memories and your own story. If you were there in November ‘89, tell your story to Radio3…this is the page. From April 6th live on Radio3.

In the meantime, a new section has been opened on this blog, “Berlin Wall”…have a look and leave your comments!

against the wall

The first time MeinMann and I learned more about the Berlin Wall, we were at Bernauer Strasse with a Dutch journalist explaining us the unfolding of the events in 1989. It was the first time we heard about the story of Peter Fechter, who was shot and left to bleed at the wall. Today, on Der Spiegel Online:

Berlin paid tribute Thursday to the last person shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Chris Gueffroy died in a hail of bullets as he tried to flee East Germany on the night of Feb. 5-6, 1989. He was the last person to fall victim to the East German policy of shooting people trying to flee across the Berlin Wall — although more were to die trying to escape from East Germany before the borders were opened on Nov. 9, 1989.

East Germany’s ex-leaders always denied they had ordered soldiers to shoot people trying to flee across the Berlin Wall. However, documents which surfaced in 2007 proved without doubt that such an order did exist. “Don’t hesitate to use your weapon even when border breaches happen with women and children, which traitors have often exploited in the past,” reads an order dated Oct. 1, 1973.

9.11.1989, the fall of the Berlin wall…2

It’s almost 8pm, so let’s have a look at the news on TV…

Keine Gewalt – Wir sind das Volk (no violence – we are the people) – The countdown to the Berlin wall fall: the October events across the DDR, gatherings in front of the Getsemani Kirche in Prenzlauer Berg.

ZDF – SED Guenther Schabowski’s press conference – from fredthefly

ZDF freedom to travel

TELEGIORNALE RAI 1 RAI 2 RAI 3  – from DrGeppe80

TAGESSCHAU ARD – from Xy01

BBC NEWS – from BBC archives

BBC NEWS (with Thatcher bonus track) – from United Britannia

Ann Diamond – from TFAssociates

Dan Rather - from PWagoner 77

NBC News Martin Fletcher – from AOL

What happened after November 9th…

ZDF – Branderburger Gate reopens – from fredthefly

Today’s news

Tagesschau.de in Bernauerstrasse and slideshow “Jetzt wächst zusammen, was zusammengehört”.

9.11.89, the fall of the Berlin Wall…1

Well, do you remember it? Are you old enough to have lived this joy in real time? I proudly am old enough! ;D And it is one of my most beautiful memories. Even if I was not in Berlin

video by CA1965 retrieved on youtube

At that time I was at University.. Blogs, e-mails did not exist, but just like now I would spend my evenings writing to my penpals in the DDR, in Czechoslowakia, in Poland, in West Germany, in Norway… I lived the Fall of the Berlin Wall in the words of my friends from Neu Brandenburg, Leipzig, Neuruppin, Karl-Marx-Stadt, Chemnitz…

video by Hellpastell retrieved on youtube

It is a pity I could see the images just on TV and not stay there in the cold Berlin nights in the middle of all that energy, but since my DDR friends had shared their thoughts and problems with me for the past 10 years, I was so happy, as though as I had lived there. From my window I could see the Yugoslavian border, so I knew a thing or two about curtains, be them made of iron or slightly more permeable geopolitical material.

We were aware that all our letters used to be inspected, fotocopied and filed by STASI. Boy, the apparatchiks were quick…it took 3 days for a letter to go from Brandenburg to Triest. With all the snooping in between. The polish apparatchiks were less efficient but definitely more transparent, under Mr Jaruzelskij’s term they would open, staple and stamp the envelope with a framboise OCENZUROWANO logo, but that would bring to one month the delivery time from Czestochowa to Triest.

When I saw the final scenes of The Lives of Others (the steam scenes) I almost cried. So that’s the way they used to do it…they had special steam machines, er…obviously they weren’t steaming the letters in the kitchen.

After the Velvet Revolution, the Berlin Wall fell down…a few days later my mother asked me, Why don’t you enrol in a russian course at ITALIA-CCCP? And so, apparently anti-clockwise on the dial of history, I started studying russian. I clearly had the feeling that the world behind our back, behind squeezed Triest and Gorizia, suddenly expanded!

Two years later black clouds of madness and war crowded our horizon. But 9.11.1989 was a wonderful day and it did change our lives.