Films by Jörg Hauschild

Germany 2017, 90 min
by Martin Farkas

“After all, these are not good memories, fun memories. And really, that time is buried.” Between 30 April and 4 May 1945, several hundred civilians commited mass suicide in the Pomeranian town of Demmin. There was desperation between the ideological void and the fear of the Red Army. Whole families drowned, hanged or poisoned themselves. The nervousness of the old citizens of Demmin whom Martin Farkas visits is still noticeable: not a hand that stays motionless during the interview – they are rubbed against skirts or twitch all over the place. One inhabitant describes the perfection of the city before the war and the “tinkering” that began after it was over and is still going on today. “Tinkering” is not a bad term for what is going on in Demmin and what Farkas is looking to illustrate in his film. There are the right wing extremists who abuse the consequences of that mass hysteria as an occasion for an annual funeral march on 8 May, the anniversary of the German surrender. There are the citizens of Demmin who turn away, part disgusted, part indifferent. There are counter-rallies and a few mostly contemporary witnesses, who open up about their memories for the first time after 70 years. (Carolin Weidner, DOK Leipzig)

Germany 2014, 90 min
by Annekatrin Hendel

He was the charismatic pop star of East Berlin’s oppositional literary scene in Prenzlauer Berg in the eighties, a close acquaintance of Christa Wolf, Franz Fühmann and Heiner Müller. He was also a zealous informer working for the GDR’s secret police: Sascha Anderson, born 1953. Twenty years on, the pain he inflicted on friends and colleagues is as deep-seated as ever and the finely woven web of lies, half-truths and legends he unfurled around him still raises tempers. Annekatrin Hendel sits Sascha Anderson down before a camera to ask him what prompted him to act as he did and discover what he thinks about it today. What convinced him to denounce others? What caused him to gamble with his own life? Does he feel remorse or the need to atone? The film questions Anderson’s one-time companions such as ceramicist Wilfriede Maaß, who separated from her husband on his account, former university classmates Lars Barthel and Thomas Plenert, poet and anarchist Bert Papenfuß as well as Roland Jahn, now Federal Commissioner of the Stasi Archive. Making use of these fragments of memories the film creates a document of an era bound by trust and betrayal which persists to the present day.

Germany 2012, 90 min
by Andreas Dresen

Henryk Wichmann, 33, member of the CDU party has been working as an opposition representative in the Brandenburg state parliament since 2009. The film follows him over the course of one year, observing his work in parliament and his constituency Uckermark/Upper Havel. There he visits schools, senior fairs, the Federal Armed Forces and local business enterprises. He has to deal with labour deficit, faces troubles with the Deutsche Bahn and illegal dumpsites as well as with the Lesser Spotted Eagle and the Bearded Tit. Actually, he prefers to be where it hurts the most – at the base. Almost 10 years after VOTE FOR HENRYK! Andreas Dresen gets us up to speed. A new tragicomical documentary about what political work and democracy in harsh practice really mean – in the plenum and hallways of parliament and in the daily routine in the constituency.

Germany 2011, 97 min
by Annekatrin Hendel

Once with the Stasi, always with the Stasi? Once you were in the agent controller's grasp you could never escape - that's what they say, anyway. Writer Paul Gratzik was an unofficial informer for the GDR State Security Service for twenty years, broke with them in the 80's and exposed his identity. "Vaterlandsverräter" ("Traitors to the Fatherland") is a portrait of an exceptional man. On one hand it is a psychological profile of one of an extraordinarily paradoxical figure, a "man of extremes": satyr, seducer, radical and hermit. On the other hand it tells a story about the GDR, its critics and the Stasi of the kind that has never been told before in all the 20 years since the end of East Germany.