Twenty Years After the Fall of Communism, forty years after the student revolution, and sixty years after the founding of the Federal Republic, Germany has been afloat in anniversaries that beckon contemplation of the nation’s development since the end of the Second World War. Cinema has contributed to these commemorations with films that scrutinize postwar German history and the yearning for a just civil society. By telling stories about a shared past, cinema functions as a public forum for debates on national history: where the divided nation has been, what struggles it has won and lost, and what dreams the country has for itself. Not only does cinema satisfy the pressing need to understand how the nation became what it is now, but by focusing on a common past it helps to create a shared identity and sense of purpose, a collectivity that seems elusive in the present.

In a 2008 interview for Deutschland Radio, director Christian Pet-zold maintained that despite all the new technological advances that provide people with an insular mediated experience, the collective aspect of cinema would win out in the end: “Cinema is in essence the story of a community. Cinema belongs to the city. In essence, cinema belongs to the public realm.” Petzold acknowledged that in the near future cinema would most likely have a difficult time competing with computers and the Internet, but he argued that it would survive: “I believe that people will not endure individuality. I believe that they like to dream collectively once in a while.” Cinema’s affinity to collective dreaming and its ability to examine social issues through the lens of fantasy make it a viable and vital institution to mediate conflicts in the process of imagining the nation.

The collective experience of watching a film together in a public space gives viewers the opportunity to participate in a vision of reality that transcends the individual. Cinema holds utopian potential as a vehicle to overcome a myriad of boundaries and connect disparate individuals into something larger than the self. In the post-cold-war era, in which common political beliefs seem beyond reach, old ideals have lost their familiar contours, technological advances in communication make physical proximity unnecessary, and human encounters are increasingly mediated, there is a feeling that the collective has changed beyond recognition. How does the nation stay connected both politically and interpersonally?