BERLIN: THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME

Can it be true? Is it nearly 20 years ago that the Berlin Wall came down, wiping the East Germany of my youth from the world map? Playwrights and film-makers are providing us with plenty of memorials to 1989--unforgettable, especially to those of us who were there. Berlin’s recent International Film Festival made an excellent start, with quite a few intriguing documentaries on the subject.

One of the funniest and most jolly was “Comrade Couture” (pictured), directed by Marco Wilms, once a fashion model in East Berlin. Inspired by his longing for the joie de vivre of his wild youth in a country that no longer exists, Wilms journeys back to the bohemian netherworld of fashion designers in the East Berlin of the 1980s. At the screening I was joined by an English friend, who could not believe that such a colourful fantasy world could have existed at the time. But it did, as Sabine von Oettingen, a designer, Robert Paris, a photographer, and Frank Schäfer, a stylist and hairdresser, tell us with great excitement, alongside a wealth of photos and video clips from the period.

Their now legendary avant-garde fashion theatres--“Chic, Charmant and Dauerhaft” (chic, charming and enduring) and “Allerleihrauh” (All-Kinds-of-Fur)--attracted fashion freaks and individualists from all over the country, but also the suspicious snoopers of the Stasi. Working underground made their events more exciting and imaginative. Lacking real leather, these designers crafted collections out of “Erdbeerfolie” and “Eingeweidetüten” (gardening foil and organ bags). Such necessity-driven innovation dictated many areas of life in East Germany, but in this case generated renowned collections, now stored in Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum).

When sweatshirts were in fashion, I recall having to make my own from men’s undershirts and long knickers--the only cotton textiles available--which I dyed yellow, red and turquoise. Once my little son no longer needed his cotton nappies, I dyed them and they served me well as bandeaus. “While these strategies were at that time perfect for a self-determined life, they are almost useless for us today, under the total freedom of turbo capitalism,” muses Marco Wilms, with some melancholy.

But such energy and resourcefulness is hardly gone. Just watch “In Berlin”, another documentary about the city timed for 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

This time the gaze is less retrospective, more trained on the united Berlin of 2009: a “poor but sexy” metropolis, according to Klaus Wowereit, our governing gay mayor. Michael Ballhaus, a rare German who made a career as a cinematographer in Hollywood, returned to Berlin after two decades in America and no longer recognised his native city. Together with Ciro Cappellari, his younger colleague (both pictured), Ballhaus rediscovers his hometown with the love, curiosity and admiration of a wistful outsider.

While some German filmmakers have painted a rather grim picture of their country lately, Ballhaus and Cappellari have provided a heartfelt declaration of love to a mesmerising city filled with wonders taken for granted by its residents in their daily routines. The directors reveal the enormous creative potential of a city often seen as a “big village”, when compared with London, Paris or New York. But it is that very accessibility--that liveability--that makes Berlin so attractive to young and original fashion designers, DJs, filmmakers, artists, actors, architects, writers, photographers, Turkish kiosk owners and students. I left the cinema reassured: I am living at the right place at the right time.

After premiering at the Berlinale, both “In Berlin” and "Comrade Couture" ("Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie“) are slated to open throughout Germany in late April. Negotiations with foreign distributors are underway.