Summer's End

The last few weeks of a very hot season have offered a few entertaining media diversions before the country gets back to business

The heat wave that took hold in Europe this summer was nowhere near as deadly in Germany as it was in France. But it wasn't much fun, either. Quibbles over whether or not it was the hottest summer on record were, at the time, simply too exhausting to follow - it was too hot to care - and it's only now, with temperatures bearable again, that Europeans can once again begin to seriously consider the possibility that humans have done something rather drastic and nasty, maybe even irreparable to the planet's climate.

But back when the wave was cresting, papers had a tough time rousing interest in the knotty details of health care reform or in the debate over whether two consecutive quarters of ever-so-slightly negative economic growth meant Germany had stumbled into a recession or was merely stagnated for the moment. For a while, the press was having better luck with the squabbles between Germany and Italy (see Summer Theater), but that whole affair was too silly to last. And so, a nation primarily interested in finding the most effortless way to get wet and cool found distraction by bumping along from one non-issue to the next, each trumpeted in the press far beyond its real import but not entirely uninteresting, either. Herewith, three that all happen to have something to do with exhibitions in some way. Not sure what to make of that:

DDR Reloaded is the rather clever title Der Spiegel gave to Matthias Lohre's article on the recent upsurge in Ostalgie, a term coined years ago for "nostalgia for the east (Ost)" back when the euphoria following the fall of the Berlin Wall faded and many East Germans (a good many of them unemployed) were beginning to wonder if things weren't better before. For years now, Ostalgie nights have been staged in clubs, GDR products, food, clothing, etc., have fetched decent prices and so on. But now it's really taking off.

Three TV networks, and probably a fourth have already or will soon launch programs with names like Die DDR Show and, while there have been films like Sonnenallee and Heroes Like Us in the past few years, none have been as successful as Good Bye, Lenin! (see What Happened When the Wall Fell?). Six million Germans, nearly one out of 13, have seen this film. Julian Kramer has one possible explanation:

[I]n the final analysis, [the film] has achieved what political reunification, often experienced as a top-down remodelling of East Germany into a capitalist mould, has failed to do: creatively facilitated a mental reunification of Germans led from the East, where Westerners are able to acknowledge the human values of the sunken East German republic without feeling complicit with its bankrupt political system.

The "controversy" here is that some worry that a "Verharmlosung," essentially a prettying-up of the GDR from the safe distance of memory, could be going on. Not likely. Over time, Ostalgie has evolved from a sort of mournful pining to a simple interest in a rapidly receding past, which is probably why the exhibition "Kunst in der DDR" (Art in the GDR) has been so well-attended.

Another exhibition sparked up such an immediate brouhaha merely when word of its planning got out that it's already been postponed a year. "Mythos RAF," exploring the artistic treatment of the Red Army Faction, or the Baader-Meinhof Gang, won't open at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin until the fall of 2004. Evidently, the original concept, since dumped, allowed for the possibility that there might be lessons to be learned "about the relationship between the individual and the state, about ways of exerting influence and about power structures" by taking another look at those years. Families of the RAF's victims protested, a cut-off in funding was threatened and, well, the Goethe Institute runs a translation of Joachim Güntner's Neue Zürcher Zeitung article on what all's happened since. I'm just ticked off about having to wait another year to see Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 again.