In assessing what post-German Democratic Republic (GDR) documentary brings to independent documentary film culture in Germany, one is struck in general by the relatively privileged status the ‘independent’ documentary has long had. Despite being ‘marginal’ to the major media industries based on entertainment, documentary films in Germany enjoy considerable status, exhibition outlets and funding, even where topics are politically controversial and methods are either avant-garde or critical of the mainstream. Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the position of secure employment, steading funding and guaranteed screening outlets even made GDR documentary filmmakers the envy of their Western counterparts. Granted, there were constraints and restrictions, but the principal difference in working conditions that German unification brought to former GDR filmmakers was a less secure, projectbased funding system and a shift in screening venues toward television – the West German media system, in other words.

But this chapter will not dwell on the process of integration of the former GDR documentary filmmakers into the new funding and production context, which has been achieved with remarkable success in many instances. Instead it will concentrate on three major themes that have helped make this integration successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It will first illustrate the phenomenon of collaboration between filmmakers from both East and West Germany, which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and provides the basis for unique accomplishments in documentary. Then, partly based on these East-West collaborations, it will discuss examples of German documentary's frequent explorations of non-European topics, which challenge the clear separation of European and non-European in both politics and film art. Here, the film collaborations between Helga Reidemeister and Lars Barthel will serve as a case study. And finally, also as a result of decades of experimentation with the nature of the film medium's presentation of ‘reality’, ‘history’ and the individual human subject, Thomas Heise's German ‘portrait film’ Barluschke (1997) will be explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.

Regarding the filmmakers of the former GDR, since most of them now work with a well-subsidised medium in one of the world's wealthiest countries, it may seem disingenuous to categorise them as ‘independent’, let alone at the vanguard of outsider activism.