Remembering 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall
A Round Table discussion with University of Illinois faculty
November 9, 2009
5:00 - 6:45 pm
Location: Illini Union, Room 314.
Refreshments served at 4:30pm
Panelists:
- Anke Pinkert
Germanic Languages and Literatures - Diane Koenker
History - Zsuzsa Gille
Sociology - Ed Kolodziej
Political Science, Center for Global Studies - Moderator: Robert Pahre
Political Science; EU Center
Co-sponsored by the European Union Center and the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Global Viewpoint Interview: Professor Anke Pinkert Discusses the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Changes Since Unification in the 1989
Related Event:
After the Roundtable join us for the
EU Center Movie Night:
"No Place to Go" 2000, Germany
With an introduction by Anke Pinkert
7:00pm
Location: 1080 Foreign Languages Bldg.
(Lucy Ellis Lounge)
New York Times Review
April 5, 2001
"Both a Nation and a Novelist Getting Too Little Sunshine"
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: April 5, 2001
Shot in deep, sad black-and-white, Oskar Roehler's ''No Place to Go'' is a study in minutely contrasting shades of gray -- visual, moral and psychological. The film covers the euphoric revolutionary days of November 1989 like a damp blanket, showing us the unraveling of East Germany through the eyes of one of its West German sympathizers, a novelist named Hanna Flanders (Hannelore Elsner), whose own collapse is at the film's dramatic center. Though its context and some of its interest is political, the movie is motivated by something deeper and murkier than ideology. Hanna Flanders is explicitly based on Mr. Roehler's own mother, the West German writer Gisela Elsner.
''No Place to Go,'' which will be shown tonight at 6 and Sunday at 3 p.m. in the New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art, is a fascinating document of filial ambivalence -- raw, merciless and yet ultimately tender, clearly driven by the need to make sense of an enigmatic and overpowering figure. The film, a chronicle of Hanna's tormented last days -- her suicide seems, from the opening scenes, to be a foregone conclusion -- is also a tour of her life. Her restless despair sends her from her chic modern apartment in Munich to Berlin, West and East, and then to her bourgeois parents' opulent house in Nuremberg. In each place she reconnects -- or fails to connect -- with an aspect of her former existence. Along the way, she is revealed as a creature of desperate contradictions, pathetic and heroic, vulnerable and vain, and, almost like a Fassbinder heroine, dignified even as she is humiliated again and again.
On the face of it a thoroughly unsympathetic character, Hanna is spared our contempt because, though Mr. Roehler depicts her humiliation with remorseless rigor, he does not participate in it. Her worst traits -- egoism and hypocrisy -- are established early and clearly enough to make overstatement unnecessary. Her despair at the demise of East German Communism is briefly assuaged by a trip to Munich's Christian Dior boutique, where she buys a fabulous and expensive coat that soon becomes a symbol of her displacement. She wears it first in the lush emptiness of West Berlin's Excelsior Hotel, then to a boisterous East Berlin workingman's bar, looking at once glamorous, terrifying and absurd. (Later, desperate for money, she tries to return it, and is coldly rebuffed by the Dior clerks, who had fawned over her before.)
Hannelore Elsner (who is not related to her character's real-life model), holds the screen with the intensity of a silent-film goddess. Her face, heavily mascaraed and framed by a helmetlike black wig, is a mask of gloom. But even at her most imperious, Hanna inspires others to kindness, especially ordinary East Germans, who have the most reason to resent her and who are confounded that she is unable to share their joy.
Hanna's downward slide is briefly interrupted when she runs into her ex-husband, Bruno (Vadim Glowna), in the Nuremberg train station and goes home with him for an evening of drunken reconciliation. The scenes between them lift the movie out of its depression, even as they deepen its ultimate sorrow. The sight of two aging, disappointed people, marooned in history and clinging to each other to the sound of an old American pop record, is an indelible image of love and forgiveness, all the more so for being a son's compassionate imagining of his failed, suffering parents.
