Becoming Finished: When and Where Is the End?

IN THE LAST FILMS produced and coproduced by East Germany’s DEFA Studio for Feature Films between 1989 and 1992, one notices the curious phenomenon that there is no place left for no place. I don’t mean to imply that everything that had been out of whack in the GDR settled into its proper order right after the state’s sudden collapse; nor that these films in any way hail belonging in a triumphant new Federal German order. Rather, what is so odd is that the anarchy that bursts out on the screen is so unsure of its place. Its targets aren’t portrayed as resisting its blasphemies, and its clowns—and they are literally clowns in the film on which I focus, Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Latest from the Da-Da-R, GDR/FRG 1990)—lack an insolent edge of manic glee. And what is true of place goes for time as well: their hour of revolution come at last, the clowns find they are of two minds … or of neither of two minds. Long accustomed to living between worlds, to reading and acting between the lines, the clowns of really existing socialism find that their cherished nowhere is no longer where it used to be. The threat and promise of disorder, of pregnant, creative disorder, has, in the very midst of its outbreak, lost its position as a progressive irritant within the tightly controlled production system of East German cinema.

I survey in the following discussion a range of films from the Wende (East Germany’s hectic period of collapse and unification with the West) to characterize what I argue is their identifying quality: namely, a visual and narrative effort to find the right aesthetic terms for representing the sort of event that the Wende really is, against the backdrop of daily routines that figure as always dated and remote. Surely, something momentous is afoot, but its “elsewhere,” its hidden presence, never seems to amount to anything other than the outdating of just those suddenly strange and fragile routines.