From “Das Deustchlandspiel” to “The German Gambit”

Persistence pays off again.

The German Game
Between them, Will and Tom, have made progress on my long running (three years at least) quest to find a copy of “Das Deustchlandspiel” with English subtitles. It was broadcast by SBS in 2004 as a two part series. It recounts the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It does so superbly. The IMDB indicates it is not available at all.

The German flag in the image above is a link to Amazon.De. The DVD box is grey, indicating that it is not available. Using the flag as a link takes one to Amazon.de but not to Das Deutschlandspiel. To see the IMDB banner properly double click on it to get the pop-up to, well, pop-up. In normal display it is blocked by the column on the right.
That is false. Amazon.de has it but without subtitles, not even German ones for the Russian, French, and English in it. A fact that commentators on Amazon.de complain about.
Thanks to the dynamic duo we now know that SBS does not have it and does not have any plan to screen it again, and that the distributor does not have an English subtitled version. That is the bad news.
The good news is that their web searches bore fruit where mine did not. They found a DVD copy in the on-line catalog of the German Consulate in Boston. Titled not “The German Game” which is a literal translation of the title, and which I have stuck to, but “The German Gambit!” Even better the Goethe Institute on Ocean Street in Woolhara also lists “The German Gambit” with the right description in its on-line catalog.
Amazing.
Below is my review from the IMDB:
The film is a documentary about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of East Germany, and German re-unification. It is essential viewing for those interested in national and international politics. It combines film footage of the time with subsequent interviews and re-enactments. The result is dazzling panorama with three layers. First we see archival footage of Helmut Kohl, West German chancellor bumbling through a media conference in 1988 and then in a re-enactment we see him in private negotiating the purchase of Germans from the East and finally an interview with him for the film in 2000. (Yes, he bought Germans from the East German regime.) In addition there are interviews with most of the other major players in this great game, Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush senior, Margaret Thatcher, and François Mitterrand. It is a brilliant investigation into one of the most extraordinary events of Twentieth Century politics. In a 1979 article that respected magazine the National Geographic opined that East Germany was the one place where communism worked. A 1961 film with Jimmy Cagney, “One, Two, Three” had a more realistic judgment of East Germany – a good place to leave – than the august National Geographic. The IMDB link for “One, Two, Three” is http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055256/
Within ten years of publishing that article East Germans voted with their feet and left. The film charts the spontaneous exodus that started by a mistake, but once started it could not be stopped. Those who marveled at the strange and small micro world of divided Berlin in The Promise (Das Versprechen 1995) (IMDB link http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111613/) may find the macro perspective of “The German Game” provides a context. Kohl emerges as something of a hero. He was pressured by all of his allies, starting with the closest and more important one, France, not to interfere in tottering East Germany, least it upset the balance of power and draw a reaction from the Soviet Union. To Mitterrand’s voice President Bush I and British Prime Minister Thatcher both added theirs, insisting that West Germany remain passive. Kohl has been described, even today, by journalists who should know better as “not a bright man” (Jean LeCouture) and a “wooden Titan” (Neil Ashendon), but he seems to have known one thing, that this was Germany’s chance and he took it without hesitation. He pressed ahead despite the demands of his allies, and they were demands, especially from Thatcher, invoking fears of World War II and making it clear she did not want a unified Germany, and Mitterrand, much more subtly (he was called Le Chinoise because of his famed inscrutability), equally preferred a divided Germany dependent on its closest and most important ally, France. But the real heroes of this story are the individual East Germans, who after forty years of ruthless oppression and murderous hegemonic rule, made their own decisions and drove those Trabants (an automobile built in East Germany and famed for its unreliability, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant) on the circuitous route west at far greater risk than Chancellor Kohl faced. I saw it but once on television with subtitles but I have been able to find a subtitled DVD. It is available from Amazon Germany (despite the blank link to the right above for Amazon Deustchland)but only in German with German subtitles (for the English, American, French, and Russian speakers). My comments are based on a single viewing a few years ago.
I have already as the Fisher Audio Visual Librarian to follow up. Here’s hoping.
My thanks to Tom and Will for pursuing this.