by Elizabeth Ward
In the year that the governing mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, memorably termed the capital of post-reunification Germany ‘poor, but sexy’, a designation designed to epitomise the city’s concomitant economic difficulties but international appeal, Hans-Christian Schmid’s 2003 film Lichter captured the realities of another (in)famous political soundbite directed towards the peripheries of the newly reunified country: the promise that former East German towns and cities would be transformed into ‘blooming landscapes’ of change. As the film lays bare, however, in border cities such as Frankfurt an der Oder, the recent political-economic reorientation appears far less like an opportunity for organic regrowth so much as a building site for capitalist expansion, socio-economic stagnation and illegal border crossings.
The impacts of reunification are evident throughout the film but not, primarily, socio-politically or on account of the fall of the inner-German border. Rather, they are experienced first and foremost socio-economically and as the result of the relocation of the Federal Republic’s and the EU’s external border. Lichter is a key film in relation to how it explores the border at a juncture in German geopolitical and film history when questions about not only Germany’s reconfigured national and international identities were in the spotlight, but increasingly its transnational future. Entering the second decade of post-reunification Germany, it was increasingly evident that the difficulties facing the former East not only were the result of long borne financial and structural scars, but also were causing multi-generational wounds for the future. To explore these points, this chapter focuses on the three thematic iterations of the impact of the Frankfurt Oder–Słubice border in the film: the relationship between movement and bodily autonomy; the role of language as a form of transnational transactionalism; and the economic impact of the circulation of international capital finance.
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Elizabeth Ward 