The search continues for Das Deutschlandspiel.

Who does subtitles for a 175 minutes film and then throws them away?

I have pursued this documentary about the fall of that wall and German re-unification for years. Broadcast on SBS with English subtitles, I found it insightful and powerful as my several previous posts evidence.
Then a couple of students –Tom and Will – joined in the search and turned up some leads. The main one was a listing on the film web site of the Goethe-Institut Sydney, a few minutes away from the University by car.
This entry is detailed and refers to English subtitles. I took it to mean that the local Goethe-Institut possessed a copy of it. I made an interlibrary loan request specifying this location in July 2007. (These days librarians call interlibrary loan “document delivery” for some reason.) This request was delivered a few days before I left in August for field-trip described on this blog. Eagerly I rushed home with it to have a look, and soon enough discovered it was indeed Das Deutschlandspiel in the original languages (German, French, English, and Russian) without English subtitles. I watched quite a bit of it to be sure and see how much I could follow it. This copy came from a university library, and not the Goethe-Institut. I left for my trip thinking I would try again and be even more specific about the source. Yes, when I completed the request form I did indicate the local Goethe-Institut in the other information field, but perhaps it had been missed.
I found the web entry above, snagged it thanks to Snag-it, printed it, and went to the University Library to collar an Interlibrary Loanean for a talk. Lucky Bruce was there when I arrived. I explained my quest to him with my usual terse, clear, and short sentences. He took a copy of the print I had, and we agreed I would make the request again that afternoon and put his name in the other information field. I did.
The next day there were telephone messages, two of them, from Bruce. Leaving aside the narrative and cutting to the punch line, no go. He did what I did not have the wit or will to do, so committed is the Bureaucratic Man within me to working through channels, and telephoned the Goethe-Institut to learn that the entry on which so many hopes were pinned was a chimera. ‘Chimera,” you say. I say. “Look it up.” That entry is derived from the SBS screening and nothing more. I was chasing a shadow. Once he found that out he tried some of the things I had already done with no luck. So after a few happy and hope-filled weeks of anticipation we have arrived where we started: Square One.
By the way Bruce did what one of the students did, and telephoned SBS with no joy. Indeed whomever he talked to knew nothing about it and could not lay keyboard fingers on anything about it either. Gone down the Memory Hole. (Get it?)
What has got me wondering is who does those subtitles for a 175 minutes film and then throws them away. That subtitling would have taken a considerable amount of work, because remember it includes German, Russian, French, and English. So there is a financial investment in the intellectual property of the subtitles that is lost, like a Sarah Bernhardt interpretation of Lady Macbeth. (Don’t get the allusion? Try Wikipedia.) The difference is that today, unlike in Bernhardt’s day, we have plenty of means of capture.
Amusing asides. One of the students who joined the quest contacted the German distributors such are the wonders of email who offered the Australian rights for subtitling for Euros 10,000. No deal. My review of Das Deutschlandspiel on IMDb elicited a discussion board offer to sell the German version to me. No deal.
The search goes on. I cannot be the only one who would like to see it again with English subtitles.