Silent Country

They belong to the generation that grew up in East Germany after the reunification - and they’ve ‘made it‘: Daniel, Esther, Laura and Soska went to school together, now they fly around the world, live in gentrified districts or have fled to the countryside from precisely that gentrification. They’ve all received a good education, they’re liberal, socially engaged, successful in their jobs - and yet, when they meet again after quite a while, there is a slight sense of unease. Resentment and prejudices surface - traces of a past that has by no means passed. Their parents, citizens of the GDR, may have called themselves ‘antifascist’, but just like the West, certain things carried on after 1945. Former Kapos, prisoner functionaries in Nazi concentration camps, became officers in the GDR’s Volkspolizei, the ‘German People’s Police’; Algerian contract workers were hounded through the streets; there were Neo-Nazis parades. The persistent myth of the better, the innocent German state turns out to be the result of collective repression, of burying and silencing of facts, of a romanticised version of history, which Thomas Freyer calls to the fore using original voices and statements. He keeps asking how and where, from a historical perspective, hatred and violence became anchored in our society; he examines the fertile ground for the current political shift to the right and refuses to accept simple interpretations.