Introduction

In April 1986 I flew to West Berlin to work on a documentary about the 25th Anniversary of the Berlin Wall with a journalist and academic who moved to Berlin in 1980. I landed on the morning after the terrorist bombing of the La Belle Disco and entered a city on high alert. American soldiers in tanks patrolled the city. The radio urged people to be on the lookout for other terrorist incidents. It was my first time in a militarized zone. On my first solo trip across the border, I was invited to Passover services in a small room at the still damaged Rykestrasse Synagogue. In contrast to West Berlin, the city on the far side of the Wall felt calm and safe.

Although I returned to New York after a month, my fascination with the divided city grew, and I returned three times between the initial trip and the Fall of 1989 by means of special visas to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) arranged through a contact in the small Jewish community in East Berlin. In the more than thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, I remain drawn to the memory of my time there.

The film will capture what I observed and experienced as a foreigner in a strange land and what I have learned in the intervening decades through reconnecting with people I met and interviewed. It is an exploration of life and identity in a socialist society that existed for forty years then disappeared.