For German Unity Day, ARD is finally not showing a GDR comedy. Instead, a feature film highlights the hardships of the post-reunification period in the Deep West. A good decision.
It’s an unusual program decision – but a good one. On the eve of German Unity Day, Das Erste will not be broadcasting any of the usual GDR comedies on Wednesday at 8:15 p.m. Instead, a television film looks deep into the west of the newly reunified Federal Republic: to Kaiserslautern.
On the surface, politics plays no role in this Social drama “A man of his class”. The focus is on ten-year-old Christian, the child of a violent father and a terminally ill mother. It’s about the difficult separation from the toxic father, but above all about poverty – material and educational.
The film looks at the summer of 1994 and shows a milieu in dissolution, the remnants of a once self-confident working class. The father is proud of being able to support the family on his own as a mover, but fails because of the demands he has set for himself. He takes refuge in alcohol and violence. Christian’s promise of salvation is the recommendation to go to high school, which ultimately means breaking out of the working class. However, this can only succeed in the crucial summer of his young life if his aunts stand up for him.
This sounds like heavy material, but it is haunting, emotional and even easy to tell at times. This is rare in Germany – Hamburg director Marc Brummund’s role models are British working class dramas. The film gains authenticity through the original. The journalist Christian Baron had expanded an essay about his mother into a novel and was in close contact with Brummund and his co-screenwriter.
His unsparing openness about his own origins opens up a view of a milieu that is rarely explored in German films. In West Germany it once represented the typical SPD clientele. The film shows the moments of disintegration of this social class. Like the main character, some of them succeeded in the educational advancement pushed by the Social Democrats. The other part fell into the social systems – and later became a core target group of the SED heirs from the Left Party, which expanded westward, and their campaign against the Hartz IV reforms.
With the story from the Palatinate, the leading SWR counters the legend of the “new federal states” that were suppressed after reunification. In structurally weak areas of West Germany, the high unemployment affected society differently than in the total upheaval in the East. But the – albeit more gradual – dismantling of mines, steelworks and the textile industry also shocked entire families and half of the city.
The film is therefore an antidote to the 1990s nostalgia that is currently taking hold not only in fashion but also in political discussion. The challenges of the decade strained society no less than today. Economic weaknesses are not abstract, they affect people.
Geopolitical and economic upheavals are currently affecting society again. The climate-neutral restructuring of the economy is not a sure-fire success; global tensions threaten the German export model. Again, it’s not about statistics, but about actual people. Just like in the movie.
