Transit

Summary

May 1968: The student protests in West Berlin are in full swing, and in the middle of it all, my 21-year-old brother Reinhard. He openly flirts with socialist tenants, partly out of protest against our conservative father. Reinhard resolves to take drastic measures and relocate to East Germany – a complete scandal. It is the last we hear from him.


Eight months later, in January 1969, Reinhard is found dead. His suicide is baffling. What drove him behind the Iron Curtain, and what happened to him there? Nearly forty years later, I go in search of traces of his short life in East Germany. Along the way, I encounter several people who, like my brother, went “against the current” from West to East, like the exiled Berlin Jew Salomea G, who chose the other system and joined the communist party as an unofficial employee. Or Henriette S., who as a child moved to East Germany with her mother, only to flea to the West with her daughter in 1974. Later she was imprisoned by the State Security.


Twenty years after the demise of East Germany, Transit uses my family’s story as a point of departure for examining the reasons behind all these decisions and the allure of the other Germany.


Source: German Films Service & Marketing GmbH