Wires and Waves

Oh my god. This is not like those other videos. “Oh yeah I haven’t seen it but I think I hate it.” That’s me! I won’t watch the show but I will watch this 100 times. That show may become my new Harry Potter.

To ease the Drag Race withdrawal.

Earlier today I saw a film called “The System.” It’s a German movie from 2011 and was screened in Dublin as part of the Irish Film Institute’s German Film week. The backdrop of the story is a deal between a Russian pipe manufacturer and German businessmen in the formerly grand East German resort town of Rostock. The real story, though, is about a 21 year old boy named Mike who gets roped into the whole ordeal, almost by force, and is thrust into the discovery of his parents’ involvement in the German Democratic Republic (aka GDR, which, despite its name, was the Communist East German government). I thought the movie was just okay until I got home, sat down and started thinking about it.

It reminded me of going to the DDR (German for GDR) Museum in Berlin two months ago. The museum is basically a bunch of artifacts and reconstructed scenes from life in East Germany from 1945 until the Republic’s famous fall in 1989. It was unendingly fascinating to see how people once lived so differently in the houses that surrounded me, but the most amazing part was that it all happened within the last generation, some of it even while I was alive. For an American (or even West German) visitor, it was kind of a peephole into a world I knew existed but was never really afforded a clear view on to. But imagine what it would be like for someone around my age born in East Germany to see.

As Americans, we’re conditioned to confer onto our elders some basic level of respect. While we may disagree with them about political issues or cultural progression, it’s kind of ingrained in us that our parents and especially our grandparents were generally very good people who tried to make our lives better than their own. But what about East German young adults? They live in essentially the same world we do, cherishing Capitalist ideas about freedom and justice, accumulating possessions to express their personalities, choosing those personalities at will, etc, which is fine. But their parents most certainly didn’t grow up that way and their grandparents were the ones who made it so. In fact, their grandparents and perhaps even the parents of East German (and Polish and Bosnian and Ukrainian and so on) young adults fought brutal wars and shed much blood for the sole purpose of maintaining a world in which they’re no longer living.

How does that play out in their minds? How can you respect elders that society and culture tell you every day were fatally wrong? The movie dove into this in a great way. Without spoiling it (and sorry the trailer doesn’t have subtitles, but you can get the gist), Mike comes of age struggling with it. It’s a battle I’m glad I’ll never have to wage in my mind. Not necessarily because my Baby Boomer parents or Silent Generation grandparents were indeed flawless, but because society allows me to go on every day believing they were. It’s quite a luxury.