Erich Honecker ruled the GDR for 18 years. His fall in 1989 heralded the downfall of the state that had called itself "the better Germany" for 40 years. Nazi victim and autocrat, bourgeois and power-conscious: Honecker was an ideological hardliner who coordinated the construction of the Wall in 1961 and whose regime was known as an unjust state for Wall deaths, firing orders, the Stasi and forced adoptions. In the wake of the fall of communism, the former model socialist fell into homelessness and found himself on the run in his own country. Suffering from cancer, he managed to evade responsibility before a court by emigrating to Chile, where he died in 1994. This gripping documentary portrays the rise and fall of this contradictory German politician with an impressive array of top-class international and national contemporary witnesses. Erich Honecker would have been 100 years old on August 25, 2012.
The life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived the Nazi reign as a trans woman and helped s...
Former "Titanic" satire magazine editor Martin Sonneborn takes an undercover trip around Berlin and ...
A documentary on the late American entertainer Dean Reed, who became a huge star in East Germany aft...
Journalist Daniela Dahn interviews the East-German author Christa Wolf during the German reunificati...
Documentary (in colour) about the first youth meeting (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend) in East Berlin...
In the 1960s, a white couple living in East Germany tells their dark-skinned child that her skin col...
In the documentary Last To Know political prisoners, sent to jail for openly opposing the East Germa...
When people think of DEFA, the film heritage of the GDR, they probably don't just think of film imag...
Short biographical documentary about the life of Alfred Florstedt and his life as a progressive comm...
The viewpoints of women from a country that no longer exists preserved on low-band U-matic tape. GDR...
From an official perspective, marginal youth culture did not exist in East Germany. The topic of sub...
This color documentary tells the story of the "Mamais." In 1960, a group of workers at the Bitterfel...
Hard, harder, hardest! This film orders you from the start to turn up the volume and pay attention. ...
Documentary about the life in the then newly completed city Halle Neustadt in the former DDR in East...
In 1989, thirteen GDR scientists and technicians set off from East Berlin to the Georg Forster resea...
Daniel lives in Bernau, a small town north of Berlin.This film tells this 21-year-old’s story and de...
A locomotive journey traversing the North to the South of the German Democratic Republic on the eve ...
Documentary reports on the annual icing of the Oder in the 160-kilometer border area between the GDR...