This ambitious history of post war East Germany, spanning more than 40 years from the war’s end in the late 1940’s to 1989, is told with the history of the Berlin Wall as its focal point. Remarkable for a number of reasons, not least for its success at distilling a long, complex period into a manageable, yet precise summary, it gives a consummate visual and aural picture of the experience of life behind the iron curtain.

Using archival footage and interviews with many of those who lived through the anxiety and fear generated by a government desperate to keep its citizens from defecting, director Beller provides fascinating insight and historical perspective on the period. With piercing clarity, she distills the effects on the people of the authoritative government in East Germany, known as the GRD, the German Democratic Republic, a government that shaped and patterned the culture and climate of fear that incorporated the investigation of nearly half of its population.

In the early years after the war, the propaganda machine of the GDR replaced the ubiquitous image of Hitler with that of Stalin as the savior and regenerator of Germany. One interviewee describes his belief that they were all unwitting Stalinists. Another recalls that she so worshiped him that she secretly wished as a little girl that her father were Stalin. The country was so completely defeated, and the people were so eager to restore their country, the notion that loyalty to socialism was paramount.

Many of the interviewees were children during the war and were attempting make sense of the conflicting things. Some asked their parents what they did during the war to resist the Nazis. Not getting satisfying answers, they were easy targets for the new propaganda machine, whose strategies included capturing the minds of youth through the Young Pioneers, much as the Hitler Youth had done in the 1930s.

Many of the interviewees are writers and musicians, who were systematically vilified and slandered in order to squash individualist ideas. Clips and interviews are from Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Gunter Grass, and songwriter Bettina Wegner, whose simple songs of the consequences to children of repression earned her the agony of constant surveillance and harassment. Friends and neighbors were suspect and residents were encouraged to spy and report on each other.

Chronological in structure, we see the dramatic moments and major revolts that occurred beginning in 1953, right up to the joyous fall of the wall in 1989. In Beller’s attempt to present a complete picture, not a frame is wasted, and includes illuminating details about the construction of the multi-layered wall, and the impossibility of simply jumping to the other side. While those in the west enjoyed post war prosperity, the dismal failure of economic and social experiment that was Soviet communism made life miserable in East Germany. Added to this were the constant betrayal or fear of betrayal, and the pounding lesson that individuals and their desires were the evil enemy of the larger community. Beller makes the period as lucid and clear as perhaps it can be; it is a film that warrants more that one viewing. One of the effects of this film, as in all authentic history, is to beg comparison to current global conflicts and acknowledge that one’s point of view radically alters one’s perception of it.