“Sex for me is like eating cake,” says one of the characters in Christian Schwochow’s second feature film, Cracks in the Shell. “I eat and I eat and I can’t get enough.” Schwochow’s mother, Heide, he says, had insisted that the line should be: “Sex is like eating butter-cream cake.” But he decided to change the script. Butter-cream was a bit much.
Talking to your parents about sex can be awkward. Discussing the minutiae of an erotic scene with your mother, one imagines, would be an ordeal. But the Schwochows do it for a living: Christian and Heide form one of the most sought-after writer-director duos in contemporary German film.
The start of their collaboration was accidental. At film school, Schwochow struggled to find a scriptwriter he wanted to work with, so he passed screenplays on to his mother, who had been a journalist for East German radio until the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I found her feedback a lot more helpful than that of my tutors,” he says. They wrote the screenplay for his debut feature, November Child, with Heide lying on the living room floor and Christian typing away at his desk, bouncing lines of dialogue off one another.
Ten years later, they are on their fourth joint production. West, a spy drama set in a camp on the borderland between the old east and old west, is in UK cinemas now. Last year, Bornholmer Strasse, a comedy about the farcical scenes at the first opening of a Berlin border checkpoint in 1989, was commissioned to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall and won the Grimme prize, one of the most prestigious awards in German TV.
Wouldn’t it be easier for Schwochow to collaborate with someone his own age? “You get families cutting up sausages together in village butchers, and you wouldn’t think anything of it. Of course, writing is different. You can’t so easily shy away from conflicts, and especially when it comes to sex and humour, you have to be very honest with each other, which can be tricky. But it’s easier to talk about a character’s sex life than your own.”
Do they fight? “Of course. But if you know each other well, you have more honest fights. Every now and then one of us slams a door or puts down the phone in the middle of a conversation, but it’s relatively easy to make up again when you have nothing to hide.”
West tells the story of Nelly Senff and her son Alexei, who cross the border into West Berlin in the late 70s, after Alexei’s father, a Russian physicist, disappears during a work trip. But the “golden west” turns out to be an emergency refugee centre, in which Nelly is interrogated by American and West German secret service agents who suspect that her ex-boyfriend may have been a spy. The distrust that filled every pore of her being in the east seems to have followed her across the border like a bad smell. “Why did you want to leave the GDR?” a CIA agent asks Nelly. “I tell you why: because of questions like these.” Only when her paranoia threatens to erode the trust between mother and son does she begin to question what it takes to make a new start.
Based on an autobiographical novel by GDR-born writer Julia Franck, West is also, in a less obvious way, a portrait of the team behind the camera. Unlike Nelly and Alexei, Heide and Christian Schwochow made the leap across the Iron Curtain with a husband and father, and whereas their cinematic twins get stuck in the twilight zone between two states, they managed to find a new home in a cramped flat in Hanover. But the feeling of alienation the film portrays was all too familiar.
“We had to learn everything from scratch: how to speak, how to act, how to behave in civil society. We felt like we had landed from another planet, and people looked at us accordingly,” says Schwochow. For all the socialist totalitarian tendencies, Schwochow says his teachers in East Berlin had always been open to debate. Yet in the west, when he made a “no blood for oil” banner in protest against the first Iraq war and tried to hang it out of his classroom window, his parents got a call from the head teacher.
Over the past decade, Germany’s amply funded but often sluggish film industry has learnt to appreciate the history of the Democratic Republic as a rich seam for worldwide exports: films such as Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003), Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006) and Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012) showed the world how much comedy, suspense and human drama could be salvaged from the rubble of a collapsed political system. West doesn’t mine the emotions quite so effortlessly – reviews in Germany were mixed, and at times one wonders if the intergenerational harmony behind the film prevents it from fully exploring the despair of Nelly and Alexei’s situation. But as cinematic portrayals of East Germany go, it’s an important antidote.
“There have been so many stories about the GDR as this deeply unjust country, which end with someone leaving the east and then happily arriving in the west,” says Schwochow. “You can tell that story once, perhaps even twice, but you can’t tell it 20 times and then not make a note of the fact that there are a lot of people who still haven’t emotionally arrived in this reunified Germany.”
- West is out now
