GERMANY:Katharina Thalbach opened a can of worms when she told an interviewer she was glad she grew up in East Germany, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
KATHARINA THALBACH is acting royalty in Germany, born into a theatre family and raised in the wings of Brecht's Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin.
But when she said in an interview last week how she was, by and large, glad to have grown up in East Germany, she had little idea of the fuss it would create.
"Of course I experienced the terrible side of , and the division affected me personally," said Thalbach to Super Illumagazine. She remembered how her family was broken up when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, and her joy when it crumbled in 1989.
"But I'm nevertheless happy that I participated in this experiment."
Her remarks were welcomed by some but attacked by others, accusing Thalbach of belittling the regime behind the wall and the feared secret police, the Stasi.
"It brings tears to my eyes," wrote an incensed reader of Focusmagazine. "Katharine Thalbach finds it pleasant that Germany had a go at socialism. Do you think, Frau Thalbach, that the victims of the wall their relatives . . . found the GDR quite so pleasant?"
Nearly two decades on, the GDR lives on in two strict straitjackets of memory. One is eastern nostalgia - "ostalgia" - championed in the film Goodbye, Lenin!, with its buffoon apparatchiks and Trabant jokes.
Then came the prison state portrayal of East Germany in the Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others", a grey world populated exclusively by perpetrators and victims.
The fact that millions of the GDR's 17 million citizens carved out normal lives for themselves is rarely raised in public discussion. The Thalbach furore shows why: attempts to do without first donning sackcloth and ashes, will be attacked by people who think that merely living in the GDR was a passive form of collaboration with the regime.
"I have to say I was amused by the reaction to the interview," Thalbach told The Irish Timesyesterday.
"I left the GDR 30 years ago and I feel my remark would have prompted less reaction back then than today."
Best known outside Germany for Volker Schlöndorff's film of The Tin Drum, the 54 year-old Thalbach is one of Germany's most talented, versatile and in-demand actors.
She was born into the relative privilege of an East German artistic family but came face-to-face with the harsher side of the regime aged 12 after her mother died.
When she applied to move to her grandmother in West Berlin, she was refused. Later she became involved in regime critical circles before leaving the GDR for good in 1976.
In Thalbach's view, the reaction to her interview says a lot about continued skewed western views of the east.
"The west propaganda was far more effective on the wessisthan the eastern propaganda about the west was on the ossis," says Ms Thalbach. "At least we knew we were being lied to about life on the other side."
Still, she remains hopeful that it will one day be possible to have a frank public dialogue about the GDR past.
Until then, the gap where that discussion should be is being filled with kitsch. Like the Stasi-themed bar that opened near the former secret police headquarters in Berlin last week. Regular patrons can undergo a mock interrogation or even sign "collaboration declaration" to get a loyalty discount card on drinks.
The Thalbach row isn't new - it began the day after the Berlin Wall was breached - but the anger the row continues to generate, two decades on bodes ill for Germans east and west ever reaching a truce over how to remember Germany's vanished socialist state.