Every once in a while you step back and notice a pattern in what you're watching, reading, listening, or whatever. I've recently noticed how many movies and TV shows I'm watching that are about the last few years of the Cold War.
The big one for me at the moment is FX's The Americans, which I'm getting on Netflix DVD because I'm stubborn like that. But before that it was Deutschland '83, then Atomic Blonde, and it feels like there are a few others. And it's not just me catching up on things - for some reason the Cold War and especially the way it played out in Germany seems to be a really popular theme with Hollywood these days.
It might be a tenuous link, but I think it's there. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow came out about the same time, and seem to be about roughly the same thing (though I haven't seen Red Sparrow, so I don't know if it's got the same twists and turns as Atomic Blonde). They're both also very similar to Deutschland '83, which has as its backdrop the Able Archer exercise, but what's funny to me is that more than one of the actors in that show has done other 80s period pieces - for example 2014's Dessau Dancers, about an East German breakdance troupe.
It's not hard to figure out why German media is interested in going over this ground, three decades after the Berlin Wall fell. On the one hand for a lot of Easterners (or Ossis) the certainties of the previous 40 years were replaced by the uncertainty of making your way in a society where you weren't being constantly surveilled and controlled - the best example from recent years is Goodbye Lenin, where a woman's family pretends that the DDR never fell, because they worry the shock of the truth would kill her.
On the other hand, movies like The Lives of Others (another which I haven't seen) talk about the actual mechanisms of coercion the state used, in this case snooping on citizens and encouraging them to rat one another out to the authorities for not expressing sufficient confidence in communism. Turning people on their friends and families as a way to control them creates a wound that's slow to heal, if ever, and the Germans are still working out what that meant, to the extent that authors like Christa Wolf have seen their reputations destroyed when hints emerge that they worked for the Stasi.
What's harder to guess is why American media is so fascinated by it at the moment. Deutschland '83 was a joint-production of Germany's RTL and the US's Sundance Channel, the first German-language TV show to air on an American network, and one of the creators, Anna Winger, is American by birth. Atomic Blonde and Red Sparrow are both American movies, and even X-Men Apocalypse, which was set in the 80s, chooses Berlin as one of its settings, suggesting to me that there's something in the air.
I can't think of a real political reason for this interest appearing in the last few years. It doesn't seem to fit with other media that's grappling with the current Trump situation, although shows like the Americans at least reference the West's relationship to Russia. And very few of these are particularly triumphant about America beating the Commies - the protagonists are frequently on the USSR's or the DDR's side, which makes it uncomfortable to consider whether we're rooting for the "bad guy" against our own side (a theme that the AV Club's coverage of the Americans took on frequently).
Part of it may also be that my generation has come of age, and one of the things we're mining for content is that first decade we remember, where nuclear war became a real possibility again. Deutschland '83 is full of cultural signifiers that would have been familiar to Americans in particular - Nena's 99 Luftballons, Peter Schilling's Major Tom (Coming Home), and so on.
In a lot of ways, the 80s were the last decade that America even paid attention to a lot of places like Germany. That, in particular, would have been because the presence of East and West Germany was likely to be the start of any conflagrations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, but we also grew fascinated by places like Australia (see all those Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious movies), in a way that we wouldn't be again.
I don't get a sense, looking back, that we were so outwardly focused in the 90s, possibly because America had retreated into self-satisfaction after seeing off the Soviet threat. And then in the 00s, of course, 9/11 meant we approached the world on a more adversarial and contemptuous basis, which has colored our relations with everyone else ever since.
Though the self-satisfaction may be present in these movies as well - Deutschland '83 has a scene where Jonas Nay's protagonist is struck dumb by the amount of choice in a West Berlin supermarket, which is already getting a bit cliche. Which I guess means there's some triumphalism remaining - a fiction that I've seen coming up more and more recently is that our "economic" ideals were part of what beat the Soviets. This is partly true, in that East German teens wanted to buy the same jeans and music that their Wessi cousins had, but as Goodbye Lenin pointed out, they didn't sign up for gross income inequality or the increasingly dog-eat-dog nature of capitalism.
Anyway, this all might be fantastical - some themes go in and out of fashion, and it's hard to point to any one reason for their popularity. I guess the test will be seeing how the third and final season, Deutschland '89, tackles the fall of the Berlin Wall.
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