Preis der Freiheit (2019)

The film tells the story of three sisters during the upheaval years from 1987 to March 1990. The eldest sister, Margot, obtains foreign currency for the economically struggling GDR at the East Berlin agency “KoKo.” Lotte, a single mother, runs a bookshop and joins the young environmental movement in the GDR. The youngest sister, Silvia, is believed to be dead, but lives in the West under a new identity and has had to leave her two children behind in the GDR. The film shows how the rivalry between the two German states could affect East German families in the GDR’s final years. The upheavals are all the more pronounced because the same family is depicted as encompassing an exceptionally wide range of possible behaviors and personal allegiances: from the dogmatically Stalinist grandmother Else, to Margot, a careerist socialist who raises the children of her supposedly deceased sister Silvia (who was in fact taken to the West and works there at the level of federal ministries to dismantle the East German dictatorship); Silvia’s children, Roland (who is bought out of prison after a failed escape attempt and establishes himself in the West) and Christa (who desperately searches for room to maneuver within the GDR); their middle sister Lotte, who, as a system-critical bookseller, joins the opposition group at Berlin’s Environmental Library; her son Ingo (who first comes under Stasi scrutiny and is humiliated in a youth work camp, and later falls under the sway of East German far-right extremists); and finally Margot’s husband Paul, who, as the manager of a refrigerator factory, sees a technological innovation succeed in the East—one for which Western industry has nothing comparable to offer, yet nevertheless manages to prevent its commercial success. The real-life case of the East German refrigerator manufacturer Foron served as the model for this part of the story.