Every turning point is unexpected. August 12, 1961, a Saturday, is a perfectly normal day. Ingrid Taegner and her husband and child visit friends who have fled to West Berlin. It’s summer, the two families spend a few pleasant hours together, maybe not completely carefree, it’s Cold War after all, but at least with nice chat. The number of people who “make it over” is rising steadily. At the end of the day, the hosts ask whether they want to stay with them in West Berlin. On the Landwehr Canal, a few meters from the border, Ingrid Taegner lives with her family in a beautiful, new apartment. She would never give up her home, why should she? She has a job as a teacher that she would most likely have to give up in the other part of town; in the GDR she feels recognized and safe. “The West wasn’t cute for me,” she says at the premiere of the ZDF film One day in August – construction of the Wall ’61And so it happened to many, by the way. Taegner refuses the offer and drives home. The day after, when she wakes up, Berlin is a divided city.
Ingrid Taegner is one of the many contemporary witnesses in the docu-drama One day in August – construction of the Wall ’61 to speak. Among the others is a woman who manages to escape through the window at the very last moment, a young carpenter who had gone into hiding months earlier in the west and wants to see his buddies again that evening and thus gets stuck in the east, or a member of the combat group, which is sent to Bernauer Strasse to secure the border to the west there. So normal people who now, exactly sixty years later, talk about the hours immediately before and after the construction of the wall – with many memorable memories.
The many details of the stories create a great closeness to the audience
It is now the case that the many details make many things easier to imagine, and that in turn creates the longed-for closeness to the audience. A closeness that is explicitly sought here: The protagonists look directly into the camera and thus at the audience, their strong narratives are not only combined with impressive archive material, but also with staged scenes: “The great attraction of this story lies in it, for the To make something almost unimaginable tangible for viewers, “says Florian Huber, who directed together with Sigrun Laste. One only wonders whether the scenic documentation, which combines the entertainment value of the drama with the educational aspect of the documentary, is the right solution to make complex content like this tangible and understandable. Especially since the strongest scenes in the film are not played but come from the archive material – the historical film material and the interviews would have been enough to make the film attractive to a large audience.
Manfred Migdal, the young carpenter from the docu-drama, said at the film premiere in Berlin that you can hardly imagine how small he felt back then, how tied his hands were over his own fate. It doesn’t take a re-enactment of scenes to understand the extent of this tragedy.
One day in August – construction of the Wall ’61, ZDF, August 10, 8:15 p.m., from Sunday on in the Media library.