WHEN WATCHING THE EASTERN CINEMA of the Wende, one quickly notices the prominence, in several films, of actors who are primarily known for their roles in the West German oeuvre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. These casting choices, which could hardly be neutral at that moment in history, form a productive starting point from which to explore questions of archive and intertextuality in the films of the DEFA Film Library’s retrospective, Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany. In approaching the films as complexly intertextual, I intend neither to reinscribe the idea of a national cinema at the expense of film production and reception’s more transnational trajectories, nor to suggest that Eastern Wende cinema only won its contours in belatedly drawing on the alternative traditions of the West’s New German Cinema. Rather, the story I would like to tell is one of cultural dialogue never entirely suppressed by the border between East and West and of DEFA directors’ engagement with tropes of New German Cinema in the broader context of European and transatlantic traditions once they were free of state censorship. But importantly, I argue that there is no single story to tell in the first place. As this contribution suggests, the appearance of Fassbinder actors in different Wende Flicks points to at least two divergent routes taken by the last generation of DEFA directors in their attempts to make sense of the Wende. The first might be termed an expansive movement toward “critical archival unification” of East and West German film history. The second was an (equally critical) reexamination of the DEFA tradition.

Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Latest from the Da-Da-R, GDR/FRG 1990) begins with the camera’s slow pan across and simultaneous zoom out of its initial close-up on a heap of prototypical GDR brown coal in the courtyard of the former prison Berlin-Köpenick. The first cast name displayed in the opening credits is that of Irm Hermann, whose role in the film is significant but secondary. Next, a cut takes us into the prison cell where the film’s two actual leads, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, playing the clowns Meh and Weh, quietly sit in two different corners.