Jahrestage (2000)

Living in New York, Gesine Cresspahl tells her eleven-year-old daughter Marie her family’s story over the period 1967–1968. In flashbacks, she describes life in Germany before and during the Nazi era and in the early years of the GDR. She also recalls events that took place before she was born. Key episodes in the story include the following: During the November pogrom, Gesine’s mother takes her own life; her father spies for the British army during the war and, after the war ends, is imprisoned by the Soviets for several years in the Fünfeichen camp. After the GDR is founded, Gesine and her lover Jakob come under pressure from the Stasi because they refuse to carry out certain assignments. Gesine eventually emigrates first to West Germany and then to the United States. Alongside these glimpses into the past, there is a second storyline set in the present. It deals not only with Gesine’s work for a major banking conglomerate, where she is supposed to arrange a dollar loan for the Dubček government in what was then Czechoslovakia, but also touches on the current situation in the United States, where issues of racial segregation and the Vietnam War divide the population into two political camps.