East-West: The myth of hazelnut and cinderella – WORLD

Stand: 08h07 | Reading time: 4 minutes

eA question under neighbors: "When are you still watching, Cinderella, Advent, Christmas Eve or Christmas?" The neighbor comes from Low Saxon, where they claim to speak no dialect, because every sentence has look like an important request from the German Bundestag. When I talk to him, I do not speak a dialect, because East Berlin is a language that, I think, excludes somebody else. We, the neighbor and I live south of East Berlin.

With "Cinderella" we hear the great German Christmas film. "Three hazelnuts for Cinderella", a joint work of Potsdam-Babelsberg Defa and Barrandov studios in Prague in 1973. Everyone knows the fairy tale Grimm: Under the regime of a totalitarian mother-in-law, a beautiful young woman lives in bad conditions until she has young man is released from the outside. Shooting adds something to the story – especially those hazelnuts that happily fall from the bush, removing the appropriate clothing to flirt, dance and get married. Cinderella looks like a woman on the best side. You know how it goes. Peace, joy, freedom.

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when we always "Cinderella", we can not answer as easily as expected to the nice neighbor. we not only as a family, but as neighbors in general, as natives, as East Germans who maintain their traditions and at the same time. always see the same movie is. That's how the neighbor imagines it. A film like a collective campfire around which a whole nation rallies, to remember that there was nothing else in the past, and to make sure even. A good idea I have never been we, and all the others I know were probably not. We have seen this and that, from time to time, sometimes "Cinderella". Even in the West, the fairy tale film was once often loved.

Thirty years after the fall of the wall, East looks like a fairy tale. You become a figure. I know the West Germans, who envy us for our deep oriental music, for the driver of the singer-excavator Gerhard Gundermann, whom they had just met at the cinema. They envy us for our modest football in the East because of the rustic and outstanding supporters of the region. And they even envy us for our more interesting Ostjugend, as gipsies and victims of the Stasi, or as determined communists who paraded in blue shirts for a German state they considered the best. These are projections. I only know of a few western Germans who were interested in eastern Germany before 1989, and many of them after 1989.

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"Three nuts for Cinderella" has become, as we say in capitalism, a cult. The film came in the 90s in the Kiezkinos. Dresses, accessories and landscapes began their great winter journey. This year, they are exhibited in Dresden, where Cinderella met his prince in Moritzburg. There are representative story books, inspired by the cult movie, personalized and featuring the owner's name, and musicals. At the death of Dresden actor Rolf Hoppe in Advent, no obituaries forgot to mention his supporting role (Hoppe is the king), as there had been nothing in international films. In the obituaries, Rolf Hoppe was again "the Eastern actor".

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Communication experts call this over-identification. In the calm exchange, if not already more and more disturbed, between East and West, one feels it quite often. The actress from Dortmund, who portrayed her ideal image of an unscrupulous officer of the Berlin Stasi in a television series about the eighties in East Berlin. Visitors to the Emsland stadium who, in Köpenick, sing like "We of the East!" And "Who can not buy from the West?"

It would be a side. On the other hand, exploratory but well – intentioned projections still and again return East, his clichés and oriental algae that others expect. In retrospect, one becomes obligatorily collectivized and one behaves as one has attributed to him. if: we look "Cinderella" tonight, when others are in church, as always,