Posts Tagged ‘East Germany’
Behind the Wall in ‘Stasiland’
Bookslut's Jessa Crispin talks to Australian author Anna Funder about her 2003 book Stasiland... Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a document of a city in flux. After the fall of the wall, the East and West found itself intermingling, sometimes unwillingly, in a city that had to transform itself structurally and demographically very quickly. Australian journalist Anna Funder found herself drawn to these places of tension. In Stasiland we meet a former propagandist for [...]
The Müggelturm
Richard Carter explores Berlin's mysterious Müggelturm... Out in the furthest reaches of Treptow-Köpenick, hiding behind a high barbed wire-topped fence, is a strange radome-topped tower on a hill. If you're thinking it looks like a cold war listening station, you'd actually be completely right, but it's one with a rather interesting background. Back in 1954, with plans well underway to establish a brave new world of communism in East Germany, work began here on building a tower [...]
Majakowskiring
Richard Carter takes a trip to Pankow to explore the former houses of the SED politicians... "Entschuldigen Sie, ist das der Sonderzug nach Pankow?" (excuse me, is that the special train to Pankow) sang West German rocker Udo Lindenberg in his 1983 hit Sonderzug nach Pankow. In it, he suggested he'd sit down with East German leader Erich Honecker to ask, over a bottle of Cognac, to be allowed to perform in East Germany. He suggested that Honecker was really a closet rocker who'd don a [...]
When Grandparents Fall in Love
Susan Bernofsky spends some time on Cloud 9... The East Berlin setting of German director Andreas Dresen’s 2008 film Cloud 9 doesn't particularly jump out at you. What we mostly see of it is the view from the window of the apartment that the film’s protagonist, 60-something-year-old Inge, shares with her partner of 30 years, showing the S-bahn tracks that come to stand for the ever-sameness of a marriage that has been stuck on the same track for years. Inge’s partner Werner [...]
