DOCUMENTARY WORK: – berlin | ostalgie at 20

Twenty years after mass celebrations at the Berlin Wall signaled the end of the cold war to spectators glued to tv sets the world over, the "wall in people's heads" remains an uncomfortable complication we're collectively trying to gloss over.  

A country simply vanished, gobbled up by its capitalist sibling... This Berlin travelogue explored the commercialization of memory by everpresent "Ostalgie" marketing efforts – the exploitation of nostalgia for all things east – leading up to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

As Germans found themselves torn between wanting to forget, not being able to air legitimate grievances, and dutifully memorializing, official handling of GDR history would at times prove to be quite tone deaf: the razing of the Palace of the Republic.  

Monuments teeter-totter between high-minded civic institutions and commercialized kitsch. Entrepreneurial genius yields Trabi Tours, a GDR-themed hotel, mass produced replicas of Soviet era tchotchkes. A Stasi themed bar... 

A city and a country as a work in progress....