In February 1986 they received the call of a fatherland that no longer exists: four young GDR citizens on the verge of adulthood see themselves forced, like so many others in East and West Germany, to do their one and a half years of military service. What is special: Their service area is the border system, an anti-imperialist protective wall according to their superiors, death strips and prison bars for a population incapacitated in naked reality. Now, seventeen years later, there is a reunion with the comrades and the old post. This feature film, which was the first in reunified Germany to deal with the inner workings of the GDR border troops, tells of life on the fence, the associated contradictions and some hot phases in the Cold War.
A Finnish taxi driver in Berlin gets in over his head when he accepts a fare from two men with briefcases full of money stolen from ruthless gangsters.
A lighthearted look at the opening of the border crossing of Bornholmer Straße in Berlin from the point of view of the confused border guards.
The last day in the tanzclub "Dschungel" at Winterfeldplatz, Berlin-Schöneberg. Located at the bar Slumberland, GoltzStraße. 24. It documents with single frame automatic one night from evening to dawn. Sounds from The Doors and Iggy Pop. "Dschungel" moved in 1978 to Nürnberger Straße 35 and became more glamorous and hip.
By the end of the seventies Tanzclub Dschungel moved from Winterfeldplatz, Berlin-Schöneberg to Nürnberger Straße, Berlin Schöneberg/Charlottenburg. A more glamorous venue.Tanzclub Dschungel at Nürnberger Straße, Berlin Schöneberg/ Charlottenburg was the place in Berlin. A relative of Studio 54 in NYC. But much more. Ask Nick Cave, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Zazie de Paris, Mick Jagger, Prince, Grace Jones, Blixa Bargeld, Depeche Mode, Liza Minnelli, Iggy Pop, Bette Midler, Boy George, Sylvester Stallone, Hildegard Knef, David Hemmings, Michel Foucault, Claude Brasseur, Robert Mapplethorpe or Barbra Streisand.
Dragan Wende has lived in Berlin since the '70s and has seen the city change through the years. His nephew comes to live with him as Dragan remembers the better days he lived as a Yugoslavian immigrant in a divided city.
In August 1961, a few railway cars and barbed wire divided East Germany from West. It was a barrier that would be extended and become increasingly more sophisticated, a technological counter to each escape attempt. Computer imagery reconstructs how the Berlin Wall grew from a meager obstacle to a 97 mile barrier of concrete slabs, watchtowers and guards.
The wild West Berlin of the 1980s became the creative melting pot of pop subcultures: music, art and chaos. Before the Iron Curtain fell, anything and everything seemed possible.
The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, bringing the reunification of Germany and an end to the Cold War. This documentary revisits the events surrounding the wall's historic collapse. Interviews with George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl offer insight into political maneuvering while firsthand accounts from Germans provide personal perspectives of this historic event that changed the world forever.
A beautiful East German Olympic hopeful pole-vaults over the Berlin Wall to freedom.
The 5th anniversary of the inner-German wall to West Germany and West Berlin is on the agenda. The necessity of erecting the border is illustrated by comparing the situation in 1939 and the situation in the summer of 1961 with regard to the "threat of intervention" by the Western powers. Berlin people and GDR border guards are interviewed.
A global television broadcast of the event in which former Pink Floyd leader singer and composer Roger Waters led an all-star cast in a mammoth benefit performance of his acclaimed concept album, The Wall. Set in Berlin, Germany less than a year after the destruction of the hated Berlin Wall, Waters was accompanied by disparate talents such as Cyndi Lauper, James Galway, Joni Mitchell and Albert Finney in the classic dark musical tale of a rock star's descent into madness and back.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.
“Liberty Train – Bürger’s Long Journey” sheds light on the events of the PEACEFUL REVOLUTION of 1989 from different perspectives. It centres on the eyewitnesses who, together with thousands of other people who had fled East Germany, were in the garden of the West German Embassy in Prague on the evening of the 30 September 1989.
David Hasselhoff, better known for his roles in “Knight Rider” and “Baywatch” released a song titled, “Looking for Freedom” the year before the Berlin Wall came down. He performed it on top of the Berlin Wall to a million people during the biggest New Year's Eve party Germany had ever seen. Twenty five years later, David revisits the now-reunited capital, investigating what is left of the Wall, and explores what it meant in the context of the Cold War dividing Communism in the East from democracy in the West. Along his journey he meets extraordinary people who dreamt of freedom and risked their lives trying to overcome the dreaded Berlin Wall.
In the early 60s, Bernward Vesper and fellow university student Gudrun Ensslin begin a passionate love in the stifling atmosphere of provincial West Germany. Dedicated to the power of the written word, Bernward and Gudrun found a publishing house whose first publication is, paradoxically to many, a controversial past work of Bernward's ostracized father, an infamous Nazi author. Bernward defends his father's writing ability, even if he is haunted by his father's suspicious past.
1978. In a desperate act of love, a plane is hijacked in East Germany and forced to land in the American Sector of West Berlin, triggering a Cold War crisis and forcing 60 hapless passengers to decide in minutes whether to give up everything and stay in the West...
Nachruf auf Jürgen Trahnke
Documentation on the Berlin S-Bahn, which threatened to fall into oblivion as a result of the division of the city.
Using diary excerpts, photographs and memories from companions, the film paints the portrait of the artist Jürgen Baldiga who sensitively and authentically captured the West Berlin queer scene of the 1980s and early 1990s with his camera.