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2: A PHYSICAL METAPHOR
As time has changed and as the physicality of the Berlin Wall and the Iron
Curtain have disappeared the attitudes towards it has changed, also in how
it is portrayed in books and films. In the 1999 Leander Haußmann comedy
Sonnenallee (‘Sun Alley’) we meet 17 year old Micha and his friends living
on Sonnenallee, a street that was crossed by the Berlin Wall. Their biggest
interest is western pop music which is difficult to get hold of, especially
under the scrutinising eyes of the border guards patrolling just outside their
apartments. The film portrays an almost comical side of the wall and of life
in East Germany in the 1970s when the film is set. This would have been
impossible or at least highly inappropriate for a film produced during the
wall’s existence and this was criticised by, for example, the news magazine
Der Spiegel, which was critical of the nostalgia for former East Germany
presented in the film and also thought it was uncritical of the former GDR
government (Wellershoff 1999). Despite this criticism the film became
hugely popular. This is connected to what has become known to ostalgi
which is often explained as nostalgia about the former East Germany, which
developed during the 1990s. In her study of how former East Germans
define East and West, Ethnologist Sofi Gerber (2011) suggests that ostalgi is
not necessarily about nostalgia as it does not automatically refer to a
longing to a ‘better past’. In her interviews with former East Germans she
has instead seen a sense of loss that the country they once lived in and
nearly all physical objects related to this disappeared as many East German
products and objects quickly became exchanged for West German ones
after the unification. Many of the people interviewed found that they had
lost a lot of the material objects that could have reminded them about their
childhood, and in a way also reinforced their identity. This was not the
same as a longing for East Germany as such (Gerber 2011:153). The film
Sonnennallee was also mentioned by several of the people interviewed as a
nice reminder of what life was like in the GDR. One of these interviewees
claimed that the film reminded her of her childhood and that it made it
possible to talk about it to others (Gerber 2011:152). Another example of
such a film is ‘Goodbye Lenin’ produced in 2003. It is not my intention here
to go into a discussion about the subject of ostalgi as such but rather to
show how later views and perspectives, some highly personal, can have a
major effect on how people look at their history and how they form and
transmit this history, be it in meetings with others or through films or
books. In Sonnennallee the Berlin Wall became the backdrop as well a
reminder of the constant omnipresent ‘all seeing eye’, the East German
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