late fall 2009 series

The year 2009 marks the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Cornell Cinema notes what was a monumental historical moment with a four film series, kicking off with Billy Wilder's 1961 James Cagney-starrer One, Two, Three, the production of which was interrupted when the Berlin Wall was erected. That didn't stop the film, though, a fast-paced satire which targeted everything in sight: "capitalism, consumerism, Communism...'ex'-Nazis, middle-class American families, rock 'n' roll (East German torture methods include multiple spins of "Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini"), The Coca-Cola Company and the Cold War itself....  Based on a frenetic one-act play by Hungarian great Ferenc Molnar (Lilliom, basis of Carousel), Wilder's adaptation set cynicism records even for him that bugged many contemporary critics and Cagney himself.... But in our taste-free, post-Communist age, One, Two, Three can now be seen as prophetic of the eventual Fall [of the Wall] itself, as well as a latter-day classic of screwball comedy." (Film Forum)

Nine years later, in 1970, in the still fragile German democracy, the journalist Ulrike Meinhof helped secure the freedom of left-wing revolutionary Andreas Baader from prison, and the media dubbed the new coalition the The Baader-Meinhof Gang. This radicalized group used violent terrorist tactics to fight what they believed was the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment, many of whom had a Nazi past. The history of the group is explored in the Oscar-nominated The Baader-Meinhof Complex, an "explosive but scrupulously journalistic drama." (Chicago Reader)

Another gripping political thriller, this time set on the other side of The Wall in 1984's East Berlin, The Lives of Others (winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 2006) traces the lives of a playwright and the Stasi agent who spies on him, as each confronts the moral ambiguities of totalitarian terrorism in the waning days of Soviet rule.

The series concludes with the comedy Good Bye, Lenin! Set during the early fall of 1989, the tale unfolds after a woman has a heart attack and falls into a coma, thus missing the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she awakes in the summer of 1990, her son must shield her from any excitement as it could be fatal. His elaborate efforts to conceal the end of the socialist regime work for a while, but he can only do so much to hide the arrival of capitalism and Coca-Cola.

To further explore the watershed events of 1989 and their aftermath, Cornell is hosting the interdisciplinary conference, "1989 in Europe and the World" to be held on November 19 and 20 at the A.D. White House. Sponsored by the Cornell Institute for European Studies, the Luigi Einaudi Chair Program, the East Europeanist Circle and the Institute for German Studies, more information about the conference can be found here.