When I started researching this book in 2001, I was inspired by the discovery that a handful of films by a very diverse group of directors had been made during the period that began with the final months of the GDR, included the early years of unified germany, and ended with the final sale of the DEFA studio in 1992. Most of these films had received little attention in East and West Germany, let alone abroad. I set out researching the films and their production histories in hopes of gaining insight into the transitional period in Germany from 1989 to 1992 from the unique perspective of East German filmmakers who for the first time in their careers worked under relatively free circumstances as the studio and the country they had worked in unraveled.

The films I saw were not at all what I had expected. To begin with, most of them, while containing many references to the Wende, did not directly thematize the collapse of the GDR or German unification. rather, I thought, they worked through GDR-specific experiences such as the loss of utopianism, runs-ins with censorship and stasi, generational struggles among filmmakers in the DEFA studio, and of course the grassroots protest and peace movement of 1989. However, after delving deeply into the works of directors such as Foth, Weiß, Günther, Kipping, Voigt, Misselwitz, Kahane, and Welz, I realized that their Wendefilme represented only a few of the remarkable achievements in complicated careers that reached back long before the events of 1989 and continued into unified Germany.