Since Reunification

After 1990 there was one Germany, one film industry and a new set of subjects: the end of the East, a country of immigrants, and a generation with no memory of the war. In the late 1990s and 2000s German films began to win audiences and prizes abroad again, and since the middle of the 2010s German-language series have found a global audience on streaming services. This chapter follows that stretch of time, with a selection of the best-known films and series. It is a selection, not a ranking, and the titles and dates are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked. The chapter ends with a cut-off date of 2026.

A Slow Start, Then a Revival

The 1990s began uncertainly. The East German studio had gone (Chapter 5), the New German Cinema generation was ageing (Chapter 6), and audiences preferred American films. Two things helped the revival: a funding system that supported new work, and a group of younger directors who made films aimed at wide audiences. Comedy proved a reliable success. A parody of the Karl May westerns of Chapter 4, Der Schuh des Manitu (2001), was one of the most successful German films at the box office (check).

Films That Travelled

The East on Screen

Many of the most successful films of the period looked back at the East. Good Bye, Lenin! is the best known, a comedy with a serious edge about nostalgia and about how much of the old life people missed (compare the Ostalgie box in Chapter 5). The Lives of Others takes a darker view. It is set in 1984 and follows a Stasi officer assigned to monitor a writer, and it was praised for its portrayal of the surveillance state, though historians have pointed out that the central change of heart is more a drama than a documented type of event (check). Between them the two films show the range of ways in which East German life was remembered after the Wall fell.

A Country of Immigrants

Millions of people with Turkish family backgrounds live in Germany, and from the 2000s their stories reached the main stream of German cinema. Fatih Akin, born in Hamburg to Turkish parents, is the best-known director, and his films such as Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) deal with life between two cultures. This strand was largely absent from the earlier chapters, and its arrival is one of the real changes of the period.

The Berlin School

Alongside the popular hits, a group of directors working in a quiet, observational style, often called the Berlin School, attracted critical attention. Christian Petzold is probably the best known, with films such as Barbara (2012) and Transit (2018) (check). Their films are usually slow, restrained and set in the present or recent past, and are admired by critics more than by wide audiences. They are a reminder that the German tradition of serious art cinema has continued.

The Streaming Era

From the middle of the 2010s, German-language series became a global export through streaming services and a new kind of co-production between broadcasters and platforms.

• Babylon Berlin (from 2017). A crime drama set in Berlin in 1929 and the following years, based on a series of novels, made by a team that included Tom Tykwer. It was a co-production of a pay-television company and the public broadcaster ARD, and it was reported as the most expensive German-language series made at that time (check).
• Dark (2017 to 2020). A science-fiction mystery about time travel and families in a small German town, made for Netflix, which was an early German-language original for the service and found a worldwide audience (check).
• Das Boot (from 2018). The sequel series mentioned in Chapter 8.

The public broadcasters, meanwhile, have put much of their archive and new work online in their own libraries, and Chapter 7's picture of a few national channels has given way to a crowded market. Babylon Berlin in particular shows the new mix of public and private money.

Where Things Stand

German film and television in the 2020s is a mixed picture: a steady stream of comedies for home audiences, a few films that reach international audiences, a lively but small art-cinema scene, and a television and streaming sector that exports its drama. The long conversation about the Nazi and East German pasts continues in many of these works, which is the subject of Chapter 10.

Exercises

Next chapter: Capstone: Confronting the Past on Screen, which draws the course together.