Die wunderbaren Jahre (1980)

In August 1968, tanks from the other Warsaw Pact states roll into Czechoslovakia to brutally crush the Prague Spring. Young Cornelia is just nine years old at the time. Seven years later, at the school in her small Thuringian hometown, she still feels the consequences of this act of violence in her life as a citizen of the GDR. Her teachers keep a close watch for any critical or nonconformist remark or action. They carefully record every comment that might turn adolescent Cornelia into a traitor to socialist ideology. For Cornelia is the daughter of Dr. Bergmann, a translator from Czech who once left the SED in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, since GDR troops had taken part in the attack alongside Soviet forces. Cornelia meets Stephan, a year older than her and musically gifted. Under his influence, she gradually finds the identity she has always sought as a young person who thinks for herself. With Stephan, she can discuss things, exchange ideas freely and without socialist paternalism, and explore the value of life in a world that needs much to change. Regular meetings with the pastor, around whom she and some of her friends gather, offer an escape from the narrow-minded, bourgeois confines of socialism and the formulaic routine of a dictatorial system. The man of God engages with their questions rather than evading them or answering with rehearsed phrases. A joint effort to prepare an organ concert becomes a formative experience for the young people. Cornelia’s conversations at the pastor’s house and her work on the organ concert cause the state’s suspicion of this independent-minded young woman to grow ever stronger; socialist ideology reacts with extreme disapproval, at times even aggressively, to people who think and act for themselves in a country where the masses count for everything and the individual for nothing. The inner system of values Cornelia has built for herself, beyond the SED’s influence or reach, is seen by the regime as a constant threat that must be eliminated as a top priority. One day, the state authorities see an opportunity to make an example of one of the young people they consider rebellious—namely Stephan. After he makes a critical remark to his school principal, an SED member, the young man is denied the chance to devote himself entirely to music in the future. Despite the intense relationship between them, which has grown into love, Cornelia cannot stop Stephan from taking a desperate step. At the moment of his death, she collapses. Cornelia organizes a public show of mourning and silent protest: all her classmates wear black mourning bands. But soon she, too, can see no way out and decides to do as Stephan did, escaping in the ultimate way from the murderous confines of this country, above all from those in the minds of Party comrades. At the end of the film, a car sits with its hazard lights on: Cornelia’s parents managed at the last moment to stop their daughter from following Stephan’s desperate act. Yet the question remains open as to whether, in the GDR of 1979, when this film was made, there was really any hope left for young people with their own ideas and thoughts.