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Director's Statement
“East German identity” I’m very careful with terms like “East German identity.” And I hate the word “Ostalgie” (nostalgia for all things GDR). I don’t want to go back to the GDR, which doesn’t mean that I just quietly gave up on its ideals. Gundermann said it very well in one of his excavator journals: “I belong to the losers. I bet on the right horse, but it didn’t win.” Gundermann took the GDR at its word ... It’s a huge tragedy and it broke many people in the GDR. The ones who believed in it became outsiders or were even persecuted. It’s a paradox of history that the communists were suddenly spied upon. Gundermann saw for himself how it feels to be labelled the enemy. That quote says a lot. For example, that the utopian idea of a fair world is justified – but it’s a question of implementation. The GDR didn’t keep its promise, but that certainly doesn’t mean that the utopia idea is no good. Personally, I’m pretty fed up with all the clichés that continue to exist even so many years after the fall of the Wall, as well as with the tainted ways we see each other. 18 songs in the film for the audience to discover or re-discover Of course, we wanted the audience to become acquainted with Gundermann’s great songs. Their unique melancholic poetry makes them essential and they can be deeply touching. I wanted to share that feeling of being profoundly touched, that’s why there is so much space given to the songs within the film. But it was important to us that they were revised and that we didn’t just play them back verbatim. They are a kind of cautious adaptation. Jens Quandt supervised the music recording, and I chose Gisbert zu Knyphausen’s old band. They’re all “West musicians” who didn’t know Gundermann, and were excited to explore and adapt the songs.