After almost 40 years of partition Germany was re-united in 1990, and to mark the occasion, the German Department at NUI, Galway will screen two German films set during those momentous events.
The films, Stilles Land (1992 ) and Die Architekten (1990 ) will be screened on Monday in the Arts Millennium Building, AM 200. The event runs from 6pm to 10.30pm and will start with an address by Peter Drexler, former professor at the University of Potsdam and an expert on German film of this period.
He will give a talk entitled The Divided Screen: Encounters between East and West in German Cinema after 1945, which will be followed by a cheese and wine reception and the films, which will be screened with English subtitles.
Stilles Land is set in northern East Germany. A theatre company is attempting to stage Waiting For Godot, but is pulled into the events surrounding the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Will Kay succeed in staging the play anyway? And is it worth waiting for Godot after all?
In Die Architekten, the last film to be produced in East Germany, an idealistic young architect is commissioned to design an enormous suburb in Berlin but the bureaucrats reject his ideas wanting cheap and sterile housing facilities instead. As East Germany comes to its end, however, the building project itself becomes a memento of meaninglessness.
