Deutschemarks Uber Alles!: The Failure Of East Germany's Silent Revolution

The home video revolution has, among other things, given us journalism on the fly, and Deutschemarks Uber Alles! is a good representative from this new school of documentary filmmaking. Filmmaker Jesse Drew's subject matter is Germany after the Fall (of the Berlin Wall). One of the last holdouts in the wake of Gorbachev's so-called Sinatra Policy ("do it your way"), the barrier between and East and West Germany came down at the end of 1989, and Drew's documentary takes an interesting reading on the new freedom from a handful of German interviewees. The interviewees are separated into two camps, primarily: 1) freedom fighters from WWII days, such as Dr. Lilli Segal and Jan Kaplowitz (whose mother was killed at Auschwitz, and who-to his shock-discovered that the house he lived in was formerly the residence of a Nazi officer) and 2) the new generation of young activists, many students at Karl Marx University, who may not wholeheartedly support communism, but are definitely less than impressed with capitalism. What is interesting here is the fact that these two diametrically opposed generations share a discomfort with the new conservative government of the unified Germany. With pictures of the Marlboro Man and giant Pepsi bottles having replaced those of Marx and Lenin in the former East Germany, one can see why filmmaker Drew suggests that the "deutschemark" is the real winner over all in the revolution. Inexpensive and intriguing, Deutschemarks Uber Alles is recommended. (Available from: Mission Creek Video, P.O. Box 411271, San Francisco, CA 941411271.)