For the past two days, the streets of Berlin have been lined with giant foam dominoes. On November 9th, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dominoes will tumble down, mimicking the historic event that ended the division between East and West Germany.
Communication 2008 alumna Cate Smierciak, currently residing in Berlin, calls the city “confused about its identity” as it cannot be entirely considered a historically East German or a West German city. However, this urban confusion has led to a freethinking and artistic culture that is responsible for a creative atmosphere featuring projects such as the wall of dominoes, painted by various international artists and Berlin schoolchildren, lining the old East-West German border.
The alumna in Berlin
The night before the anniversary of the Wende, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Smierciak stood among crowds of people looking at the dominoes during the last few hours they were to remain standing. Smierciak attends film school at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf (HFF) Potsdam Babelsberg. Smierciak finds Berlin fascinating because of the history of the Wall: “It just feels like bizarro world. It’s so different than any other European or American city.”
Though not a German native, Smierciak considers the history of the Berlin wall an important part of her life. After spending several months learning German in Cologne and Berlin, Smierciak got a job with Fat Tire Bike Tours giving bicycle tours of Berlin, specializing in tours about the history of the Cold War and German reunification. As a tour guide and a student in Berlin, Smierciak gained insight into both foreign and German perceptions of reunification.
Smierciak hopes the 20th anniversary of the Wende has inspired non-Germans to learn more about the event. Most of her tourists came from English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia. In guiding tourists around Berlin, she received questions demonstrating a certain amount of ignorance about the history of the Berlin Wall, such as “Why did Hitler build the wall?”
The professor in Evanston
Smierciak is not alone — other members of the Northwestern community are actively educating Americans about the history of the Berlin Wall. In October, Northwestern’s German and History departments hosted a conference dedicated to the exploration of the Berlin Wall’s history, “The Fall of the Wall Reconsidered.” German Professor Franziska Lys, one of the organizers of the conference, showed a film she created featuring East German natives.
Professor Lys’ film, Drehort Neubrandenburg, depicted a set of video portraits of citizens in the East German city of Neubrandenburg. Shot in 1991, the first segment of the film illustrates Neubrandenburg’s reaction soon after the Wall came down. One portrait depicted an elderly couple, the owners of the oldest grocery store in Neubrandenburg — when asked whether they were optimistic about the new competition with West Germany markets, they said yes. According to the couple, if they survived communism, they could survive capitalism.
When the film screened in Neubrandenburg for the first time in 1991, the audience reacted with silence. Lys remembers the audience’s general attitude of bitterness and being told, “I guess you made the film that you wanted.” Today, Lys believes she screened the film too soon — the people of Neubrandenburg were not ready to reflect.
Above all, the intention of the film was to teach the German language. Professor Lys believes that it is impossible to really understand a language without understanding the culture behind it, and that it is impossible to understand a culture simply by looking at words on a page. The voices and faces of native speakers can help students understand a language in its organic environment.
Lys got the idea for the second segment of the film when students began to wonder what had happened to all the people of Neubrandenburg, and the second segment was shot in 2002. At this point, the Neubrandenburg grocery store featured in the first part of the film was no longer in business.
After the second segment was completed, Drehort Neubrandenburg screened in Neubrandenburg again. This time, remembers Lys, the reaction was completely different: Many cried and some people left the audience, unable to handle their emotions. After the screening, Lys and other members of the film team were asked to sit together and discuss the film with the people of the town. Now that the citizens of Neubrandenburg had time to reflect on the fall of the Wall, they better understood how life had changed after unification with the West and were more willing to have an open discussion about their history.
As Lys became more deeply involved with the history of the separation of East and West Germany, she was surprised to learn of the extent to which people’s awareness of the world is filtered through other individuals’ biased presentations. Lys met a group of East German students following the fall of the Wall that believed the Wall did not exist to prevent them from learning about West Germany, but rather to protect them from it.
The Ossies and Wessies in Germany
In modern Berlin, Smierciak still notices remnants of the tensions between East and West Germany in the attitudes of German young adults in the form of lighthearted stereotypes about the difference between “Ossies” (East Germans) and “Wessies” (West Germans.) Though among young people, these stereotypes are merely jokes and do not carry malicious connotations. Still, they are very much a part of Berlin culture.
For example, for one of her first projects in Berlin film school, Cate and a group of German first-year students were asked to make a quick short film. The students decided to make a story about a “Wessie” who secretly preferred products exclusively sold in East Berlin, such as pickles, but was too embarrassed to buy them in front of his fellow West German friends.
However, Germans from older generations take the differences between East and West Germany more seriously. Smierciak knows West German families who refuse to go to their children’s soccer games held in the former East Germany.
Though Berlin is not often considered a global film-making hub, Smierciak chose to live in Berlin because she wanted a different experience. “I decided that [New York and LA] would always be there and that I wanted to have a bit of an adventure.” Now Smierciak has the opportunity to be at the heart of celebration of a pivotal point in both German and global history.