“On the brink” within the cinema: Structural change in Lusatia

In a GDR promoting movie from the Nineteen Seventies, gigantic excavator shovels dig into the earth, as if socialism was but to be found a superb 20 years after its founding. Aerial photographs present newly constructed blocks of homes, the digicam panning as if it itself had been caught up within the movie’s enthusiasm. Within the current, Torsten Pötzsch, mayor of the northern Saxon district city of Weißwasser, patiently leads a gaggle of South Korean guests by the final remaining buildings of the disused native glass manufacturing unit.

Beforehand within the workplace, Pötzsch outlined the historical past of the place: upswing from the Nineteen Seventies, change, migration, and now structural change as a result of phase-out of fossil vitality. “On this technique of the second structural break, we even have to return to phrases with what occurred right here within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, that individuals had no prospects, no future and that the state didn’t react.”

What Pötzsch says additionally outlines this system of Britt Beyer’s documentary “Auf der Kippe”. The current can solely be understood with information of the occasions that overwhelmed the area after the autumn of the Wall. “Auf der Kippe” reveals the arduous work for profitable structural change in Lusatia and the wrestle over the query of what this might appear to be.

Companies are slicing their method into the panorama

Rebekka Schwarzbach from the Cottbus environmental group runs backwards and forwards between bushes, looking out, lastly finds what she was searching for and reveals images of a white deer on her laptop computer. The forest is to be expropriated and lower down in order that the vitality provider LEAG can carve its method even additional into the panorama shortly earlier than it’s compensated with one and a half billion in federal funds. The initiative to protect German mining areas, by which workers of mining firms have come collectively, is anxious in regards to the finish of brown coal mining.

The residents of the area who’re afraid of the lack of mining and people who consider the tip of brown coal mining is overdue and now need to save what can nonetheless be saved from nature kind two ranges of Beyer’s movie. The third is regional politics, which wrestles with the distribution of funding from the structural funds and with tasks which might be supposed to safe and even restore the way forward for a area.

A movie amongst East Germans

“Auf der Kippe” is a sober movie, simply as appropriate for cinema as it’s for tv, though the lengthy photographs of the flat panorama seem extra spectacular on the display. The pictures are accompanied by eight items by the brothers Rolf and Joachim Kühn, whose sound is characterised by the clarinet of Rolf Kühn, who died final summer time. It at all times hovers over the settings as if questioning. However the middle is the conversations and actions of the residents.

“Auf der Kippe” is a movie made by East Germans. Everybody within the movie is aware of in regards to the “transitional trauma,” as Schwarzbach aptly calls it, and the upheavals that adopted. Mayor Pötzsch sums it up soberly when he visits the previous glass manufacturing unit: his former kindergarten is not there, neither is the varsity neither is the manufacturing unit the place he as soon as labored. Later he leads Marco Wanderlitz, the Federal Authorities’s Jap Consultant, by a corridor of the previous manufacturing unit that has been transformed into an occasion corridor.

If all the things goes effectively, it would develop into the core of a brand new district that can carry younger folks, schooling and jobs to town. There are planning conferences with a doable investor who laughs when Pötzsch needs cocoa as an alternative of espresso. Structural change is tough work. Britt Beyer’s “Auf der Kippe” reveals the fears, hopes and uncertainties on the way in which to a Lusatia with out brown coal mining.