Meier (1986)

Ede Meier is a wallpaper hanger and lives with his girlfriend Lore in East Berlin. After his father, who died in West Berlin, leaves him a small inheritance, Ede, a GDR citizen, buys a makeshift West Berlin identity card from the escape helper Kretschmer so that he can set off on a trip around the world. When he returns, his uncle Werner and aunt Inge in West Berlin are appalled not only that Ede does not want to use his inheritance to establish himself in the West, but also that, now a Westerner, he wants to re-enter East Berlin on a day visa. Lore and Ede’s co-workers suspect nothing when, after three weeks, he supposedly returns from a vacation in Bulgaria. Frustrated by the socialist shortage economy, which produces only ugly patterned wallpaper, Ede now wants to improve renovations considerably by using Western woodchip wallpaper. Repeatedly entering at midnight on a day visa and leaving the following night, Ede smuggles woodchip wallpaper across the Wall into East Berlin and claims there that he has invented a machine that can turn patterned wallpaper into woodchip wallpaper. The constant border crossings, already limited to just forty days a year, seriously complicate his love life with the socialist Lore. But Ede’s wallpaper becomes hugely popular, and his wallpaper-hanging brigade achieves legendary quotas in fulfilling the production plan. Now nobody wants patterned wallpaper in their homes anymore. Ede Meier is honored as a “Hero of Labor.” On the day of the award ceremony, however, Ede arrives at the border too late and is exposed. He had accidentally shown his GDR identity card. The Stasi officers interrogating him, however, face a dilemma: they would now have to put the newly crowned “Hero of Labor” in prison. That would be too great an embarrassment for the workers’ and peasants’ state, so they let him go. It turns out that the woodchip wallpaper Meier smuggled was being produced in Karl-Marx-Stadt solely for export to the Federal Republic of Germany, in order to earn foreign currency.