Östliche Landschaft

A doomsday mood wafts over a garbage dump near East Berlin. Crows and seagulls circle above it while below, a heavy machine trundles over a photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev. Not far from the flag of East Germany, a brochure offers information “about the beginnings of our state” and another on “the economy and national defence”. Mixed among the physical remnants of a defunct state are private artefacts of its citizens – letters, photos, questionnaires rustling gently in the wind next to a broken doll, a damaged accordion, a discarded prosthetic. A young man takes off his clothes. Naked, he sets out. Ah, but whither?
The documentarian, writer and translator Eduard Schreiber was considered the only essay filmmaker in East Germany when it still existed. In the highly symbolic images of this 1991 short film, he made manifest the dissolution of Soviet dominance. His Östliche Landschaft (Eastern Landscape) is a filmic elegy on the end of a state, of which what remains, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, is “what passed through it, the wind!”.