IN 1990 AND 1991, while the members of the hard-won Nachwuchs “DaDaeR” production group were making the films at the core of the Wende Flicks series, the highest profile project having to do with GDR cinema was archeological. In the months after the fall of the Wall, East German filmmakers such as Roland Gräf and film scholars such as Rolf Richter set about unearthing and restoring the feature films buried in the signature act of East German film censorship, the Kahlschlag of 1965 and 1966 that put a dozen completed films—the full year’s production of adult feature films—on ice. Once restored, banned films such as Jahrgang 45 (Born in ’45, GDR 1966/1990), Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones, GDR 1966/1990) and Das Kaninchen bin ich (The Rabbit Is Me, GDR 1965/1990) (re)premiered at the Babylon Cinema in East Berlin, starting in November 1989.

In addition to fulfilling the deferred dreams of star DEFA directors, for East German intellectuals the banned-film series fulfilled a double function in the nascent codification of perspectives on the East German past, even as it extended the lack of attention that younger directors had long suffered at the DEFA Studios. On one hand, the series illustrated and overcame the repressions of the Communist system; on the other, it recognized and dignified the cultural achievements of East Germans. At the same time, it also conformed to the decades-long tendency for West German reception to prize “dissidence” above all other qualities in GDR and Eastern European literature. As a result of this symbolic confluence, the banned-film series was the ideal vehicle for representing the complexities of German unification to the outside world. Accordingly, it was subtitled for international viewers and circulated by the Goethe Institute’s network of (unified) German cultural centers throughout 1992 and 1993.

Ironically, although dissidence was the premiere criterion for according value to East Bloc literature in the West, some of the films being made by young East German filmmakers during the Wende period were too avant-garde for Western consumption. The black-and-white classics were easier to digest—clear representations of the perceived gray world beyond the Wall—in contrast to the colorful and challenging avant-garde work of the last generation. Their very historicity made the older films orderly, while the newer works exposed a biting, unsettling underside to the peaceful revolution.