A German television drama, and its de facto sequel, look at life before, during and after the wall
Before the review, a plea: These are great series — they’re also damn complicated, especially if you are neither German nor a student of recent German history. If not for Wikipedia, YouTube, the website of German network ZDF and, especially, a website called https://www.fernsehserien.de/ (TV Series Germany) I could never have figured out much of what was going on.
It’s a testament to the power of these programs that they work anyway — but one shouldn’t have to be a detective to get basic context. So please, streamers like Walter Presents / PBS Masterpiece, and MHz Choice, start producing episode guides for viewers like me. Thank you.
And in this case, you could do something else: The German networks that aired these programs also produced companion documentaries. That’s exactly what we need to figure out how much is true, how much is embellished and how much is pure fiction. If you speak German you can enjoy them here and here. But for the rest of us, how about it, Walter and MHz? Can you get them for us?
And one caution: Though I don’t think there are any full-out spoilers, this review contains more plot information than most of my reviews.
Coincidence? Apparently not.
At first, I thought it was a coincidence. Two excellent television series produced by two different German public broadcasters. Both set around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The same actress in both. But the characters are different and so is the tone. So, I figured, it must be a coincidence that Divided We Stand (German title: ZERV: Zeit der Abrechnung (ZERV: Time of Reckoning)) feels so much like a sequel to Berlin Wall (German title Preis der Freiheit (Price of Freedom)).
In fact, the two series have the same producer and the same writer, Gabriela Sperl, and according to Variety:
Sperl sees this [ZERV] as picking up from where her 2019 drama “Preis der Freiheit” — which portrays the hypocrisies and corruption evident during the last days of [East Germany] — left off.
Berlin Wall
In Berlin Wall, produced by German public broadcaster ZDF and streaming on Walter Presents (part of the PBS Masterpiece channel in America) we learn about the decline and fall of East Germany through the fate of a single family that is, if anything, more divided than Germany ever was.
In the first scene, the wall has fallen and those who propped up the East German regime are racing to cover their crimes and their tracks. That’s where we meet sisters Lotte Bohla (Nadja Uhl) and Margot Spindler (Barbara Auer). Lotte, once a dissident, is holding Margot, a stalwart communist, at gunpoint.
Naturally, most of the rest of the series unfolds as a flashback. In Germany, the series was presented in three episodes, one just before the fall of the wall, one during, and one after. In the United States, each has been split into two parts.
The central character in the story is Margot. She is a prominent official at the Kommerzielle Koordinierung (Commercial Coordination), known as KoKo, a firm that propped up East German communism by acting as the quintessence of capitalism. Here’s Wikipedia’s description:
KoKo operated 180 front companies in the West and brought their hard currency profits to secret accounts in East Germany … KoKo was involved in illegal arms deals with Iran, Third World regimes, and even the CIA; “selling” East German political prisoners to West Germany; purchasing of high technology products despite a Western embargo; selling antique artworks to the West; and importing luxury items for the top nomenklatura of [East Germany’s Communist Party, known as] the Socialist Unity Party.
They also negotiate deals allowing the West to dump toxic waste in the East. That and the sale of those political prisoners — negotiated legally with the West — are important parts of the plot.
Margot’s hard line drives a wedge between her and her husband, Paul Spindler (Joachim Król). Paul runs a nationalized industry making refrigerators. A communist in the mold of Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia or Imre Nagy in Hungary, he sees that East Germany must change or die. Even Lotte and her boss realize that the country is going bankrupt and KoKo can’t keep it afloat any longer. But their pleas are ignored by hardliners in the secret police — the Stasi. (Though by the end, even as they seek to cover their tracks, the Stasi prove to be the most adept capitalists of all.)
But if you think Margot is hardline, wait until you meet the family matriarch, Else Bohla (Angela Winkler). As the ZDF website explains Else fought the Nazis in the resistance “and therefore belongs to the so-called ‘red nobility’” of East Germany. The extent of her commitment to East German communism is revealed in one harrowing scene — her response when she finds out that, thanks to all that Western waste dumped in the East, the ground in which she planted her vegetables is poisoned.
Lotte, in contrast, runs a small bookstore, and she’d be arrested if the Stasi knew some of what she was selling. Eventually, she joins the new environmental movement that helps expose the toxic waste dumping. But her biggest heartbreak is her son. After spending time in jail and a juvenile detention center, he becomes a neo-Nazi; a movement starting to take hold among youth in the East even before the wall fell.
There’s also a third sister and some other children — but to say more would involve spoilers.
What makes Berlin Wall so fascinating is what it reveals about the fighting within East and West — and the extent to which the worst instincts of each fed the other. The dissidents with whom Lotte fought for freedom are part of a faction that doesn’t want to be part of a unified capitalist Germany — they want a kinder, gentler, democratic socialism. But they are shouted down, literally and figuratively, by the allure of West Berlin, and a lot of Western money. We see similar divisions in the West.
Divided we Stand
Only a year after the fall of the wall, Germany was reunified. So now, suppose that after unification Lotte decided to change her name and become a homicide detective. She’d be Karo Schubert, played again by Nadja Uhl, in Divided We Stand. Both the character and the actress are commanding figures. Her character’s self-assessment: “Don’t mess with Karo Schubert” proves accurate. Meanwhile, the government of now reunified Germany has set up a special unit known as ZERV (Zentrale Ermittlungsstelle für Regierungs — Central Investigative Office for Government and Unification Crimes) specifically to pursue some of the same crimes we saw being committed in Berlin Wall.
ZERV was a real agency, but since I can’t understand the companion documentary without subtitles, I have no idea how realistically it’s portrayed. In Divided We Stand a key investigator in ZERV — brand new as the series begins — is Peter Simon (Fabian Hinrichs).
As producer Sperl told Variety:
After 1989, the East Germans “gave up an identity that they had,” Sperl says, and were told “everything they had been believing in for 40 years was totally wrong.”
Simon is the personification of that attitude. He’s just been transferred from the West and he is contemptuous of all things East. But when a whistleblower is killed just before he was about to tell all to ZERV, Simon and Schubert have to work together.
At first, it appears that this will be much lighter going than Berlin Wall. Indeed, it looks like that most common of television tropes, the mismatched-cops-hate-each-other-but-come-to-respect-and-like-each-other cop show.
There’s plenty of typical banter for such shows, usually at the expense of Simon and the West. “In the East, we act like idiots,” one character says. “In the West, it’s not an act.”
And it’s not just a personality clash. Simon doesn’t know whether to trust Schubert since, as he tactlessly but correctly points out, one-third of East Germans had been informers for the Stasi.
The banter continues throughout. But by the second episode, things get much more serious and stay that way. (In fact, the one false note in the series, to me, was its failure to take one tragedy seriously enough, though that might change if there’s a second season.)
The whistleblower’s death quickly leads Simon and Schubert to, of course, KoKo (or CoCo, the subtitlers can’t agree on this). KoKo may no longer exist as an organization, but former members are still up to their necks in illegal deals, including arms trading. And once again it’s not as simple as East vs. West. It looks like the ex-KoKo villains are getting help from people in high places in the West. One prominent East German official is now a high-powered lobbyist in the West. Schubert and Simon have to sort the good guys from the bad guys from the even worse guys.
Or as Schubert says to Simon: “The culprits of the past are the culprits of today — and your beautiful West is deeply entwined in it all.”
By this point, Simon is convinced. In a scene that, at first, seems totally out of place, they even sing a duet at a Karaoke bar. But it makes sense if, as I’m sure most Germans would, you understand the significance of the song — and the joke they make about its origins. In the absence of an episode guide, I found the answer on YouTube. This is not a scene from the series, but it’s a performance of the song with an explanation.
There’s also an intriguing subplot involving forced adoption of East German dissidents’ children and ongoing corruption in child protective services. The cruelty of the juvenile justice system also is a theme in Berlin Wall. Even the fact that Schubert’s ex-husband is a taxi driver seems like a link to events in Berlin Wall.
And, as with Berlin Wall, there are plenty of family complications. Was Karo Schubert’s father part of the corruption at KoKo? Did he really die in a car crash? How much does Schubert’s mother know? And, at the very end, we learn a bit more about a tragedy in Simon’s life.
Enough is tied up by the end of the six episodes for a satisfying conclusion. But there also are plenty of loose ends to provide fodder for another season.
This is another time when a Schubert’s symphony may be unfinished.
If you want to know more, either before or after watching the series:
Episode synopses for Berlin Wall (Price of Freedom)
Episode synopses for Divided We Stand (ZERV: Time of Reckoning)
Synopses are in German but my browser’s translate function worked well. Since these recap entire episodes, there are a lot of spoilers.
