Deutschlandreise

A journey through time and East Germany, 30 years after reunification as well as the first trip that the director and cameraman undertook through the then newly collapsed GDR. A curious road trip has turned into a road movie as well as a document of time.

A few months after the fall of the Wall in November 1989, the West German director Wolfgang Ettlich and his cameraman Hans-Albrecht Lusznat embarked on a journey into the unknown, camera in hand. They repeated the undertaking several times since then, but are now doing it for the last time: what started as an inquisitive road trip through the East German provinces has become as much of a road movie as it is a document of the times. Ettlich and Lusznat revisit people that they also interviewed and captured on film back then, asking about their former hopes and fears: Have they been fulfilled? Were they justified? What was the road to capitalism like? But they also approach people on the side of the road or in supermarket parking lots and record, then as now, the changes that have been inscribed in people's biographies and faces, in the places and landscapes, and also – rather unintentionally – in cinematic aesthetics, due to technical progress.

Image © Hans Albrecht Lusznat