Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Floating weightless, calling, calling home April 28, 2021

It’s 1983, and a young man runs, in panic, through bucolic German farmland. The sun is shining, and he flees as if death is at his heels. After several moments, the scene changes to more suburban surroundings, and we follow the young man into a brightly-lit supermarket. Once inside, the man is disoriented and overwhelmed, rendered immobile by the dazzling array of riches on the supermarket shelves. The sheer variety and abundance of what’s on offer to shoppers stops him in his tracks, and we see, in those silent moments, an utter transformation take place, as he realises everything he’s been told about the deprivations and hardships suffered by the capitalists in the West was a lie. Meanwhile, upbeat 1980s synthpop plays. Those early moments of showrunner Anna Winger’s Deutschland 83 tell you exactly what you’re going to get: a TV show that’s hard to pigeonhole, at once political drama, tense spy thriller, family saga, black comedy, with a healthy dollop of Ostalgie and a blaring 1980s soundtrack. The first season was followed with Deutschland 86, and, later Deutschland 89, which has just concluded airing in the UK. It’s a show that keeps you guessing, uncertain — the effect is as disorienting for the viewer as living in the dying days of the DDR is for the show’s East German characters. Over the course of its six-year chronology, it tells the stories of seemingly unimportant people swept up in the seismic shifts of geopolitics and history.

The first season, set in 1983, begins when 24-year-old border guard Martin Rauch finds himself in Bonn, in West Germany, blackmailed into spying on the West German military for the HVA (East German foreign intelligence), constantly terrified of discovery, and slowly realising that everything he was told about the West was a lie. Meanwhile, he meets an interesting cast of West German characters, and comes to know more about his own family history. In Season 2, Martin has been exiled to Angola, but is called by into the spying fold, ostensibly to help the anti-apartheid movement, but in reality cynically to undermine it, as the DDR’s desparation for cash has led to them selling arms to the apartheid regime. (The East German government did a lot of extremely shady things to raise money in those years, including selling blood abroad without checking it for HIV, selling arms to both sides in the Iran-Iraq war, and even appropriating antiques and funds from its own citizens and selling them abroad.) The third and final season begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then gives viewers a whirlwind tour around Germany on the brink of reunification, as well as other parts of Europe emerging from behind the crumbling Iron Curtain.

All three series anchor their characters’ personal stories with real historical events — the Able Archer 83 crisis in Season 1, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Season 2, and, in Season 3, terrorist attacks by the Red Army Faction which led to the murder of the head of Deutsche Bank — as well as the fall of the Wall, the reunfication of Germany, and the violent collapse of the Ceaușescu in Romania. While I think this works well, as the series progresses, I have to admit I found parts of it less convincing, as the contortions it required to justify Martin’s involvement in such affairs became ever more flimsy and tenuous. The spying element always felt like the weakest of the show, because it required us to treat the rather hapless and sentimental Martin as a ruthlessly competent spy, quick to inspire trust across both sides of the political divide. (And the fact that so many women kept falling into bed with him felt even more silly — James Bond he is not!)

Where the show truly succeeded was as a family drama, letting the tensions, secrets, and small deceptions and revalations play out against the tense backdrop of the Stati surveillance state, and the no less claustrophobic atmosphere of the upper echelons of political and military authority in the West. The show had a great knack for puncturing the absurdity of the dying days of the Cold War — the assumptions on both sides are shown to be false, the power they’re used to prop up is hollow, and this shines through most clearly in the experiences of the show’s characters. There’s a particular poignancy in watching the series from a distance of thirty years: all the characters’ efforts to make better a world whose end was imminent seem bittersweet and futile. There is suffering and cruelty — indeed, some characters face moments of genuine menace and danger — but there is love, too, and people just trying to muddle through their own complicated lives.

There are some great moments of farcical humour, too. When Martin finally manages to smuggle out the requisite information for his East German handlers in Season 1, it’s in a file format compatible with a computer that no one in East Germany possesses, so there is a mad scramble to try to locate the requisite equipment. In Season 3, when the wall comes down, one Stasi functionary anxiously demands that all the shredders in the building be fetched immediately. An underling whispers something urgently in his ear, and he revises the request: ‘bring me all the functioning shredders in the building.’ These humorous moments are a great contrast to the scary and serious politics and spycraft — but they also do a great job of puncturing the seemingly unshakeable authority of the dictatorial regime, and perhaps offer insight into how ordinary people in the 1980s gained the courage to question the realities of their lives. They could see the whole thing was a house of cards, and they simply required the right moment to knock everything down.

So, did the show stick the landing? I’m not convinced. The conclusion was so absurdly, melodramatically over the top that it pushed the suspension of disbelief even further than I was prepared to tolerate. But, in the end, I found that this didn’t matter. The destination made little sense, but the journey to get there had been so gripping and enjoyable that I felt the whole thing had been worthwhile.