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Screening the East : Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989

Screening the East. Heimat. Memory and Nostalgia in Germany since 1989 (Berghahn, 2011; pb 2013) offers a close study of a wide range of films made since 1989, which offer an insight into life in eastern Germany since unification. The principal focus is on the emergence of an east German identity that continues to stimulate academic interest but which has only sporadically been explored in terms of contemporary film. East German identity is considered in its historical and cultural contexts, and with reference to three related issues - Heimat, memory and nostalgia.

Drawing on social and political studies, cultural theory and archival material, the monograph considers, inter alia, the representation of provincial communities in the popular sentimental Heimat narratives of the early nineties, the period’s sober social-critical films, which offer a corrective to the nostalgic impulses of the former, then addresses the effects of unification on the urban population (principally that of Berlin), and turns to the east Germans’ controversial celebration of the GDR past in the final chapter.

The analysis of the films concludes that a new east German identity has emerged, one that involves an awkwardly articulated movement, whereby the east Germans face the future whilst simultaneously looking backwards. In some films, this leads to the resurgence of a localised community that celebrates the values of an imagined past, whether of a romanticised, ahistorical vision of Germany, or of an idealised GDR. In others, a yearning for the past hinders individuals’ arrival in the present. The films, it concludes, ultimately demonstrate the continuation of an east German particularism that resists and problematises true integration between east and west.