DEBATES ON POSTWALL GERMAN FILM have highlighted in one corner an absence of serious political engagement with the new realities of a postcommunist, unified Germany (Rentschler), and in another, the forgotten or ignored legacy of East(ern) German filmmakers, whose work in the early 1990s peered into the posttotalitarian quotidian (Pinkert 204; Ivanova 261; Hake 329). Lacking in these analyses of film's ability to reflect politically on recent German history has been an extended look at German documentaries in the twenty-first century. Particularly when questioning film's potential to initiate or sustain historical inquiry or to mold public memory and influence identity politics, the documentary lends its own contribution to mediating and forming social images. While the documentary's role in disseminating the representation of subjects, narrative techniques, general ethical values, and the documentarian's personal ethical position in connecting life with art is acquiring increasing significance in scholarly studies (e.g., Nash, “Documentary-for-the-Other”; Nash, “Telling Stories”; Sanders), the specific application of these academic pursuits to contemporary German documentary films remains in its infancy.

This chapter brings the question of the “ethical turn” in German documentaries to the present with a focus on the award-winning filmmakers Marc Bauder and Dörte Franke. Born in 1974 in Stuttgart and Leipzig, respectively, Bauder and Franke diverge from cohorts whose feature comedies in the 1990s and early 2000s nurtured a humorous portrayal of life in socialism, allowing “the construction of an imagined GDR” (Ivanova 262; see also Hake 327). With over ten films collectively spanning a decade-long cooperation, Bauder and Franke have made the legacy of Germany's pasts and the ethical conflicts inherent in national identity politics the ongoing focus of their filmic work. Whereas other medial presentations of contemporary German history reflect the diverging memory cultures of the former West and former East, Franke and Bauder's filmic work on unification melds both perspectives. Franke's life story as the child of political prisoners in the GDR, emigrating to the Federal Republic in 1981 almost one year after her parents were bought free by the West German government, adds a personal note to the directors’ oeuvre. In contrast to postwall documentaries that look back reflectively at the GDR (Pinkert 208), Bauder and Franke situate their narrative perspective in the present, seeking not to reconstruct a vanished era historically, but rather to represent its living legacy visually.