Deutschland 83
Dec. 21st, 2015 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakWhich is a US/German co production in German that got broadcast in the US first and was just shown over here. Apparantly it was a great success overseas despite being in German, subtitled, and cast with German actors, not US actors playing Germans. Here, it got barely noticed in terms of viewing quotes. The premise sounded very similar to The Americans, and I thought, might as well support the home team, and bought the dvd that got released as soon as the last episode (in a miniseries of 8) was broadcast.
Overall conclusion: entertaining but not a must. Mostly good actors. Also a sometimes unintentionally hilarious mixture of German and US tv habits.
What it's about: After Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, the East German secret service decides the US wants to blow everyone up to kingdom come and decides that (more) action is called for. Our hero, Martin Rauch, hitherto employed as a regular soldier working at the border (which implies he's very loyal), just happens to be a perfect doppelganger of a young West German soldier, Moritz Stamm, who is about to be deployed as the sidekick of a West German Nato general, so Martin is substituted for real Moritz, who gets killed and isn't heard of again. (He was an orphan, and while the show early on has a short suspense subplot when someone shows up who knew real Moritz, in doesn't otherwise use anyone from real Moritz's life.) He also has to do a crash course in spying and in West German vocabulary, and off he goes to work for General Edel.
A first remark here: I think the main reason why Martin starts out as a regular soldier instead of a trained spy is to make him more sympathetic to the audience. Otoh it requires some suspension of disbelief that he doesn't get tripped up more while trying to play a West German in West Germany. (He has a few mishaps, but not that many.) When hearing the premise, I was very curious how they'd handle the accent, because that's one of the most obvious giveaways. That part actually works for me, because Moritz supposedly hails from Braunschweig, and Jonas Nary, who plays Martin/Moritz, sounds vaguely North-East enough that it would work for both someone from Braunschweig and someone from the various East German provinces speaking Hochdeutsch. (However, I have to point out that none of the other East German characters, of which there are a lot, sounds as if they're from the East. Not a single Saxonian or Thuringian accent among them. Given that former Minister of Foreign Affairs Genscher left Leipzig as a young man but still sounds distinctly Saxonian after spending most of his life in the West, and for that matter Angela Merkel, who was born in Hamburg but moved East as a young girl, still immediately is identifiable as an Ossi when she speaks, I find that... unlikely. It's especially noticable when you get newsclips featuring Erich Honecker speaking, and then we cut to various secret service folks who all sound like Wessis...
Anyway: the show uses the various spy tropes, sometimes successfully (Martin/Moritz has to romance a secretary, and naturally this does not end well for the secretary, making him feel like dirt, as well it should), sometimes less so. (In episode 2 or 3, there's a Chinese spy showing up just when Martin has retrieved a supersecret McGuffin, and not before or after do we have any indication that the Chinese are involved. She's simply there so there is a naked Chinese assassin trying to kill Martin via Kung Fu. Did someone watch Marco Polo and decided that is a must when pitching a show to the US market?) It's at its best in the little moments - Martin experiencing a walkman for the first time, for example -, or when making fun of bureaucracy (the East German secret service priding himself not not needing any stinkin' US IBM computer in order to read the supersecret stolen flobby disc, no matter that their own computers don't have the proper equipment to read it), or turning clichés upside down (the prostitute accidentally taken hostage with a US general expresses the hope the hostage situation is over by 4 pm which is when she has to pick up her son from school).
As far as the 1983 setting is concerned, I'm partially impressed (the computers, the West and East newsclips interwoven with the tv action) but have to complain about a pretty big change from history, which is: public awareness of AIDS. At one point, you see the Spiegel article which was the first German article to report about AIDS in a major media outlet... in 1985, not 1983. Yet in this show, a mother warning her daughter to use condoms is aware of AIDS enough to use it as an argument. This isn't a minor issue, because there are three male gay characters on the show, and guess what becomes hugely plot relevant?
Not a nitpick, just an observation: something really odd to me for the first few episodes was the thing with the uniforms. If you'd asked me what the colour of the German military uniform is, I'd have to think really hard and probably would have to google anyway. This is because you very rarely see Germans soldiers in uniform, and even less so in the 1980s when I grew up. The biggest chance to see one is on Friday afternoon when they go home for the weekend, but even so, soldiers usually change to civilian clothing first thing. As this witty tv tropes entry notes: The Bundeswehr is not especially popular with the German public. While other Forces around the globe might be the pride of their countries, the armed forces of Germany are rather seen as a necessary evil by most and as an unnecessary evil by quite a few. There is no "our boys" or "we must support our troops" feeling over here; call it the inevitable result of detoxing from a century of overglorification of the military.
So when Martin, undercover as Moritz, wears West German uniform nearly all the time in the first three or so episodes and is surrounded by lots of other uniform wearers because, after all, he works for a general, it really felt WEIRD to me. (I think I saw more West German uniforms there than I saw in my entire 46 years old life.) However, the show was careful to show that the general's son, Alex, gets out of uniform as soon as he's not on duty, and after the early episodes, Martin himself is wearing civilian outfits when not with the general as well.
Also not a nitpick but an observation: one of Martin's handlers who later also gets involved with Alex is a character who already has been in the West since 1962, a university professor whose cover is being a big deal in the peace movement. His name is Tobias Tischbier. The alliteration and the last name makes him sound like he ought to be a character from a German children's book, preferably by Michael Ende or Paul Maar. Every time someone addressed him as "Tischbier" I was expecting either the Sams (from Maar's novels) or Bastian from the Neverending Story to show up.
Definitely a nitpick more than an observation: laudably, one of the show's subplots deals with one of the most unpleasant aspects of life in the East: the way citizens were encouraged to spy on each other all the time. However, the MacGuffin for this subplot is an illegal book circle (since a great number of books, not so subtly George Orwell's 1984 in the show's instance, were not allowed to be read in East Germany. Which, fine, but: why doesn't a single civilian East German character watch West German tv? Because this is what was done far more often than trying to get your hands on illegal books. It was far easier (and no less forbidden). (There was only one region in the GDR, nicknamed "the valley of the clueless", where you couldn't get West German tv.) I assuming because watching tv doesn't look subversive to a tv audience today?
Gender: the series has no lack of female characters, sometimes going neatly against expectations with them, as in the case of Martin's mother Ingrid (set up as the passive victim via which emotional leverage on Martin is had) and her sister Lenora (stationed in Bonn as the coordinator of East German spy activities and set up as the icy spy mistress) - turns out Ingrid is one of the strongest and most sovereign women of the show, and Lenora is both not cold and far less secure about her job than she'd like to be.
The main West German family, otoh, feels like an US tv export: Dad is an emotionally remote hardass general who can't connect to his sensitive gay son but does connect to Martin/Moritz, son Alex is the sensitive gay son politically opposed to his father and looking for meaning in his life, rebellious daughter Yvonne is sexually liberated and not the brightest but means well. (Yes, scriptwriters, I, too, watched Dynasty in the 80s.) I guess the one thing going against cliché is that Yvonne's living with a commune doesn't turn out to be a disaster (they don't brainwash her, take her money or anything like that), and her musical talent actually secures her success: she gets a job as a backup singer for Udo Lindenberg (which, believe me, means she's doing really well in 1983 German pop scene), which is also the show's excuse for using the song I was waiting for all the time: Lindenberg's Sonderzug nach Pankow (link leads to a 1983 performance. I should add here that the soundtrack in general is good because the 1980s songs are used with meaning re: the overall context. (Glaring case in point: Nena's 99 Luftballons. The film version of Watchmen bizarrely used this for Laurie's reunion lunch with Dan, never mind that the lyrics. Deutschland 83 uses it in the pilot as a bookend, and given the overall theme of the Cold War and East and West coming ever closer to blowing each other up, the lyrics are spot on.)
Speaking of families, there is a very soap opera twist near the end, which, well, it's the early 80s, which means Unexpected Relations are definitely in the narrative cards. It also gets foreshadowed. But the way it is used is unexpected (and welcome).
Ideologically speaking, the show thinks both East and West governments are full of self important bureaucrats, which, fair enough, and Martin's goal through the show becomes not concluding the Western way is better but to save both from starting World War III. Which is another sympathetic trait of the show.
Most unlikely thing to happen not related to AIDS or Martin not tripping up nearly enough for someone who isn't a trained spy: near the end, Martin has to illegally cross the inner German border from the West to the East. He first tries walking through the woods until he gets in sight of the first watch towers, at which point he reconsiders. (He later crosses another way.) Scriptwriters, Martin supposedly starts out as a soldier with border duties. He'd have better reasons than most to know that crossing the German/German border on foot is a death sentence because the border era on the East side is full of mines. Todesstreifen ("Death Zone"), anyone? I realise you have to demonstrate to your young audience why he can't simply walk, but there should have been another way.
Overall: between going "I remember that" or "nah, it wouldn't have happened this way", this was an 80s nostalgia fest with an entertaining spy plot. Not as good as The Americans, but definitely better than a certain show starting with H which shot its latest season in Germany, too was after its first season.
Overall conclusion: entertaining but not a must. Mostly good actors. Also a sometimes unintentionally hilarious mixture of German and US tv habits.
What it's about: After Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, the East German secret service decides the US wants to blow everyone up to kingdom come and decides that (more) action is called for. Our hero, Martin Rauch, hitherto employed as a regular soldier working at the border (which implies he's very loyal), just happens to be a perfect doppelganger of a young West German soldier, Moritz Stamm, who is about to be deployed as the sidekick of a West German Nato general, so Martin is substituted for real Moritz, who gets killed and isn't heard of again. (He was an orphan, and while the show early on has a short suspense subplot when someone shows up who knew real Moritz, in doesn't otherwise use anyone from real Moritz's life.) He also has to do a crash course in spying and in West German vocabulary, and off he goes to work for General Edel.
A first remark here: I think the main reason why Martin starts out as a regular soldier instead of a trained spy is to make him more sympathetic to the audience. Otoh it requires some suspension of disbelief that he doesn't get tripped up more while trying to play a West German in West Germany. (He has a few mishaps, but not that many.) When hearing the premise, I was very curious how they'd handle the accent, because that's one of the most obvious giveaways. That part actually works for me, because Moritz supposedly hails from Braunschweig, and Jonas Nary, who plays Martin/Moritz, sounds vaguely North-East enough that it would work for both someone from Braunschweig and someone from the various East German provinces speaking Hochdeutsch. (However, I have to point out that none of the other East German characters, of which there are a lot, sounds as if they're from the East. Not a single Saxonian or Thuringian accent among them. Given that former Minister of Foreign Affairs Genscher left Leipzig as a young man but still sounds distinctly Saxonian after spending most of his life in the West, and for that matter Angela Merkel, who was born in Hamburg but moved East as a young girl, still immediately is identifiable as an Ossi when she speaks, I find that... unlikely. It's especially noticable when you get newsclips featuring Erich Honecker speaking, and then we cut to various secret service folks who all sound like Wessis...
Anyway: the show uses the various spy tropes, sometimes successfully (Martin/Moritz has to romance a secretary, and naturally this does not end well for the secretary, making him feel like dirt, as well it should), sometimes less so. (In episode 2 or 3, there's a Chinese spy showing up just when Martin has retrieved a supersecret McGuffin, and not before or after do we have any indication that the Chinese are involved. She's simply there so there is a naked Chinese assassin trying to kill Martin via Kung Fu. Did someone watch Marco Polo and decided that is a must when pitching a show to the US market?) It's at its best in the little moments - Martin experiencing a walkman for the first time, for example -, or when making fun of bureaucracy (the East German secret service priding himself not not needing any stinkin' US IBM computer in order to read the supersecret stolen flobby disc, no matter that their own computers don't have the proper equipment to read it), or turning clichés upside down (the prostitute accidentally taken hostage with a US general expresses the hope the hostage situation is over by 4 pm which is when she has to pick up her son from school).
As far as the 1983 setting is concerned, I'm partially impressed (the computers, the West and East newsclips interwoven with the tv action) but have to complain about a pretty big change from history, which is: public awareness of AIDS. At one point, you see the Spiegel article which was the first German article to report about AIDS in a major media outlet... in 1985, not 1983. Yet in this show, a mother warning her daughter to use condoms is aware of AIDS enough to use it as an argument. This isn't a minor issue, because there are three male gay characters on the show, and guess what becomes hugely plot relevant?
Not a nitpick, just an observation: something really odd to me for the first few episodes was the thing with the uniforms. If you'd asked me what the colour of the German military uniform is, I'd have to think really hard and probably would have to google anyway. This is because you very rarely see Germans soldiers in uniform, and even less so in the 1980s when I grew up. The biggest chance to see one is on Friday afternoon when they go home for the weekend, but even so, soldiers usually change to civilian clothing first thing. As this witty tv tropes entry notes: The Bundeswehr is not especially popular with the German public. While other Forces around the globe might be the pride of their countries, the armed forces of Germany are rather seen as a necessary evil by most and as an unnecessary evil by quite a few. There is no "our boys" or "we must support our troops" feeling over here; call it the inevitable result of detoxing from a century of overglorification of the military.
So when Martin, undercover as Moritz, wears West German uniform nearly all the time in the first three or so episodes and is surrounded by lots of other uniform wearers because, after all, he works for a general, it really felt WEIRD to me. (I think I saw more West German uniforms there than I saw in my entire 46 years old life.) However, the show was careful to show that the general's son, Alex, gets out of uniform as soon as he's not on duty, and after the early episodes, Martin himself is wearing civilian outfits when not with the general as well.
Also not a nitpick but an observation: one of Martin's handlers who later also gets involved with Alex is a character who already has been in the West since 1962, a university professor whose cover is being a big deal in the peace movement. His name is Tobias Tischbier. The alliteration and the last name makes him sound like he ought to be a character from a German children's book, preferably by Michael Ende or Paul Maar. Every time someone addressed him as "Tischbier" I was expecting either the Sams (from Maar's novels) or Bastian from the Neverending Story to show up.
Definitely a nitpick more than an observation: laudably, one of the show's subplots deals with one of the most unpleasant aspects of life in the East: the way citizens were encouraged to spy on each other all the time. However, the MacGuffin for this subplot is an illegal book circle (since a great number of books, not so subtly George Orwell's 1984 in the show's instance, were not allowed to be read in East Germany. Which, fine, but: why doesn't a single civilian East German character watch West German tv? Because this is what was done far more often than trying to get your hands on illegal books. It was far easier (and no less forbidden). (There was only one region in the GDR, nicknamed "the valley of the clueless", where you couldn't get West German tv.) I assuming because watching tv doesn't look subversive to a tv audience today?
Gender: the series has no lack of female characters, sometimes going neatly against expectations with them, as in the case of Martin's mother Ingrid (set up as the passive victim via which emotional leverage on Martin is had) and her sister Lenora (stationed in Bonn as the coordinator of East German spy activities and set up as the icy spy mistress) - turns out Ingrid is one of the strongest and most sovereign women of the show, and Lenora is both not cold and far less secure about her job than she'd like to be.
The main West German family, otoh, feels like an US tv export: Dad is an emotionally remote hardass general who can't connect to his sensitive gay son but does connect to Martin/Moritz, son Alex is the sensitive gay son politically opposed to his father and looking for meaning in his life, rebellious daughter Yvonne is sexually liberated and not the brightest but means well. (Yes, scriptwriters, I, too, watched Dynasty in the 80s.) I guess the one thing going against cliché is that Yvonne's living with a commune doesn't turn out to be a disaster (they don't brainwash her, take her money or anything like that), and her musical talent actually secures her success: she gets a job as a backup singer for Udo Lindenberg (which, believe me, means she's doing really well in 1983 German pop scene), which is also the show's excuse for using the song I was waiting for all the time: Lindenberg's Sonderzug nach Pankow (link leads to a 1983 performance. I should add here that the soundtrack in general is good because the 1980s songs are used with meaning re: the overall context. (Glaring case in point: Nena's 99 Luftballons. The film version of Watchmen bizarrely used this for Laurie's reunion lunch with Dan, never mind that the lyrics. Deutschland 83 uses it in the pilot as a bookend, and given the overall theme of the Cold War and East and West coming ever closer to blowing each other up, the lyrics are spot on.)
Speaking of families, there is a very soap opera twist near the end, which, well, it's the early 80s, which means Unexpected Relations are definitely in the narrative cards. It also gets foreshadowed. But the way it is used is unexpected (and welcome).
Ideologically speaking, the show thinks both East and West governments are full of self important bureaucrats, which, fair enough, and Martin's goal through the show becomes not concluding the Western way is better but to save both from starting World War III. Which is another sympathetic trait of the show.
Most unlikely thing to happen not related to AIDS or Martin not tripping up nearly enough for someone who isn't a trained spy: near the end, Martin has to illegally cross the inner German border from the West to the East. He first tries walking through the woods until he gets in sight of the first watch towers, at which point he reconsiders. (He later crosses another way.) Scriptwriters, Martin supposedly starts out as a soldier with border duties. He'd have better reasons than most to know that crossing the German/German border on foot is a death sentence because the border era on the East side is full of mines. Todesstreifen ("Death Zone"), anyone? I realise you have to demonstrate to your young audience why he can't simply walk, but there should have been another way.
Overall: between going "I remember that" or "nah, it wouldn't have happened this way", this was an 80s nostalgia fest with an entertaining spy plot. Not as good as The Americans, but definitely better than a certain show starting with H which shot its latest season in Germany, too was after its first season.
