The First Decade: The Emergence of a Standardized Narrative

Depictions Of Relationships between partners who lived on opposite sides of the German-German border before the events of 1989 have maintained an enduring appeal for producers of film and television feature films commemorating the Wende and German unification. This is not surprising given that narratives involving cross-border romance have the potential to engage wide audiences from both the former East and West Germany. They therefore provide the scope to explore barriers to unification such as distinctive identities, values, and attitudes. At the same time they can act as metaphors for the dominant popular perception that unification was somehow natural and inevitable. Cross-border romance, furthermore, provides a pretext for the reconstruction of 9 November 1989 — the evening when the main physical barrier to such relationships was overcome — as a potentially cathartic resolution to the issue of division.

This chapter focuses on the representation of the couples in cross-border romance films. It explores the set of situational, character, and plot conventions employed in the restaging of the past by way of such transnational encounters and asks: How are the memories of cross-border relationships shaped and mythologized in such film fictions? From whose perspective is the story remembered and what or who is remembered? What kind of messages do the films propose about East and West German identity formation at the time of division? This essay charts the changing constructions of the couple in films in which such relationships form the primary narrative thread. The first part examines the construction of cross-border romances in three films produced during the first decade after unification that have many features in common: Verfehlung (Heiner Carow, 1991), Das Versprechen (Margarethe von Trotta, 1995), and Wie Feuer und Flamme (Connie Walther, 2001). An analysis of the most recent construction of cross-border romance, in Heimweh nach drüben, a television drama from 2007, will then show how some stereotyped images of East and West German identity from the first decade have endured while negative images of the GDR have largely been abandoned in favor of idealized and nostalgic ones.