Post-Unification Cinema 1990-2007

The collapse of the Wall on 9 November 1989 and the signing of the Unification Treaty on 3 October 1990 marked the end of the postwar period and the Cold War. The difficult process of unification, a process also known as the Wende (change, transition), fundamentally altered the social and political landscape in the old Federal Republic and the so-called new states. Whether thought of as reunification, unification, or the coming together of two unequal partners, the making of the Berlin Republic has taken place in the context of European unification, globalisation, and mass migration, on the one hand, and increased ethnic and religious resentments and new provincialisms, on the other. German unification has once again resulted in confrontation with the legacies of the past (i.e., the Third Reich and the GDR) and given rise to a complex and contradictory culture of remembrance, retrospection, and nostalgia. It has provoked heated debates on the meaning of Germanness, whether defined in legal, ethnic, linguistic or cultural terms, and put into question the role of the nation state in a post-communist Europe defined less by ideological differences than by social and economic inequalities. At the same time, the 1990s and early 2000s have seen a greater tolerance toward ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and a growing acceptance of pluralism, multiculturalism, and hybridity in social attitudes and cultural practices. The equally dramatic changes in the world economy, from the ascendancy of multinational corporations to the creation of new information technologies, have only intensified the sense of unprecedented mobility and dislocation and resulted in repeated confrontations over issues of immigration, citizenship, and asylum laws and over the costs and benefits of the neo-liberal world order.