‘The Burning Wall,’ A Comprehensive 2002 Documentary on East Germany, Is Available to Stream For the First Time

When The Burning Wall came out in theaters in 2002, the events the documentary depicted were still fresh in the public’s memory.  After all, it had only been a decade since the Berlin Wall was torn down, symbolizing the end of the German Democratic Republic state. As of Tuesday, The Burning Wall is finally available to stream, for the first time ever, on iTunes ($8.99 to buy or $4.99 to rent). Three decades later, the public memory of East Germany might a little hazy, but that’s why this film is a more vital watch than ever before.

The Burning Wall is the second film from documentary filmmaker Hava Kohav Beller, whose first film, 1992’s The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Within Germany 1933-1945, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. (Her third film, 2018’s In the Land of Pomegranates, took on the Israeli-Palestine conflict via an annual gathering in Germany known as Vacation From War.) With The Burning Wall, Beller documented another oppressive regime: The Communist regime in East Germany from 1949 to 1990, officially known as the German Democratic Republic. Through talking head interviews and archival footage, Beller illustrates the slow rise of the Communist Party. (Interviews include, to name a few, author Günter Grass, singer Wolf Biermann, actor Corinna Harfouch, minister Ehrhart Neubert and Czech statesman Vaclav Havel.)

As Beller outlines, after World War II, many Germans looked positively toward communism. Communists were persecuted by and fought against Hitler in the war, and the public was told the only way to avoid another fascist regime was by putting total faith in the party. People believed that to be true—until anyone who refused to comply with the German Democratic Republic government started getting executed.

A key figure in Beller’s story is Robert Havemann, a former communist and East German dissident who died in 1982. During WWII, Havemann, a chemist, became a spy on the ground working against Hitler, while telling the Nazi party he was building them a weapon. Havemann idolized the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin but eventually spoke out against his own party publicly, as he watched it grow more and more totalitarian. When workers protested their unreasonably high work quotas via demonstration in 1953, the state sent in police and Soviet Occupation Forces to strike them down. At least 50 people were killed, and thousands were jailed. “This state called itself the worker’s state, but here are the workers demonstrating and striking against the worker’s government,” notes writer Stefan Hayn in the film. When the Berlin Wall—an 11 layer barrier—was built in 1961, one person remembers realizing that the purpose of the wall was not to keep anyone from entering the state, but to keep its own citizens from fleeing.

Watching The Burning Wall in 2019, it’s impossible not to think of President Donald Trump and his border wall. Of course, the situations are not precisely parallel, but it’s hard to remember a time when the person erecting a wall remained on the right side of history, and The Burning Wall is an all too powerful a reminder.

Stream The Burning Wall on iTunes.