Katja Hoyer: belief

Transcript context

…That’s a great book, yes. The movie Good Bye, Lenin!—it’s very famous in the United States as a portrayal of East Germany. How accurate is it? I think it toys with the idea of nostalgia quite well. This idea that people struggled with the transition from one system to the other. Just briefly, for those who haven’t seen it, the premise is that you have a mother falling into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then she’s not to be disturbed afterwards. The doctors are worried. Her son basically tries to recreate this illusion that the Berlin Wall hadn’t actually fallen. That is done in a tragic, comical way that I think encapsulated the experience quite well. Most people were happy. They were euphoric. They wanted reunification, but they were also worried about losing their entire way of life, the world around them, and especially that insecurity of not knowing what was coming next. I think that really describes the zeitgeist of the era quite well. I think it’s done a decent job in encapsulating that. Is it an accident that the painters Richter and Polke came from the East, or were there undercurrents of creativity there, where it’s, in retrospect, not at all surprising that they came from East Germany?…

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