I m sure ClericJay is familiar with this German TV film. Yesterday I have watched the entire 94 minutes( the 10 parts ) from YouTube, and the scenario was very realistic. In this alternate history fiction, during the East German uprising, the Soviets make a desperate attempt to crack down on the revolution by using force, and a series of miscalculations end up causing total war. This was very plausible, and only by miracle it did not happen. Normally collapsing empires do not give up without causing trouble. But the war scenes and the scenario were very realistic.
Incidentally, since the walls of Libria are in fact from an East German military base, this movie should be interesting for EQ fans.
Thus Father and Dupont will probably come to power in the not so distant future.
I've seen the whole film in a row last week, but I did not find any time to comment until now.
No, I didn't know this film/documentary until you mentioned it. It was relaesed in 1998, when I was 9 years old. And back then I wasn't really interested in the topic and I doubt that my parents would have let me watch such a kind of movie.
But it was indeed very realistic and intriguing. The whole scenario is believable and was not only possible, but most presumable back then.
This whole miracle happened so "silently" that my parents recognized it the next day (well, my mum was in the hospital with me beeing just born).
I've seen a very good documantary about the 9th November 1989, where everything was shown in the very very detail, what happened, who was where and best of all: interviews with all important acting persons from this day, for example:
Günter Schabowski, who declared the opening of the border by accident without reading the backside of his paper, where was standing that the opening should have been restricted and happen a few days later.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_SchabowskiAnd the East German Border Officer at Bornholmer Straße, who was the first to decide to open the border, after he was getting no clear orders from his headquarter about the further procedure with the masses of people coming to the checkpoint.
By the way, he's living in a town not 20km away from mine, but I need to research, where exactly. I've been thinking about visiting and talk to him.
But first I have to look the documantary again to recall his name... But no time for that these days...
The whole fall of the wall was a miracle and sometime I feel like it was for me somehow.
Living in the GDR with all these restrictions would have been... difficult for me I suppose, though many people arranged themselfs with the system, so they did not really felt "imprisoned" or something like that. (The GDR still had the highest living standard in the East-Block...)
Back to the documentary:
What impressed me most about the way it is done, is that it was so hard, sometime impossible, to destinguish between the "faked" scenes with actors and the real historic material. They combined it perfectly.
To me, understanding all three languages (more or less), the quality of monologues and language as well as acting was fascinating, especially the Russian General was very well done.
Though I must say that the few comments of the German persons/actors were quite "sketchy" translated into English subtitles, while the Russian wasn't that far away from what the subtitle was declaring...
I'm wondering where they got all these war-fighting scenes from. Unbelievably impressing, some even much more then "artifiacial" scenes from war movies.
The documantary was done by the team of Guido Knopp, who is a very famous and controversial historian. The whole film is clearly wearing his "handwriting".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_KnoppSome say that he'd show the whole Hitler-regime too human/too positive, but I think that he's hardly trying to look at both sides as neutral as possible.
(And even Nazis were just humans and I think it's very interesting to try to find out how they became persons, who were able to do such things.)
He and his team did so many legendary documantaries for German TV and I hope they'll do much more in the future.
