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CINEMA A perfect crime of rapacious capitalism

West German politician Detlev Rohwedder was responsible for selling off the GDR’s public industries after the fall of its government. But a documentary on his 1991 assassination still leaves unanswered questions about both his death and the West’s takeover of East Germany, says DENNIS LAUMANN

WHILE German reunification, which marked its 30th anniversary on October 3, is recognised as one of the major events marking the end of the cold war, many East Germans were opposed to what they considered the annexation of their country by the West.

In A Perfect Crime, a new four-part documentary series on Netflix about the 1991 assassination of West German politician Detlev Rohwedder, we hear some of those dissenting voices and discover why reunification was catastrophic for many East Germans.

Rohwedder was chairman of the Treuhandanstalt (“Trust Agency”), the government body  that oversaw the denationalisation and privatisation of East Germany’s state industries in the months leading to reunification.

While millions of East Germans abruptly and permanently lost their jobs, the beneficiaries of this process were West German capitalists.

Masses of unemployed East Germans regularly protested in front of the Treuhandanstalt headquarters in Berlin, where Rohwedder and his colleagues sold off East German firms with no concern about the dire consequences for workers, their families and communities.

On the evening of April 1 1991, Rohwedder was fatally shot at home as he stood near the window of his library in an exclusive neighbourhood of Dusseldorf.

Evidence found at the scene implicated the Red Army Faction — often called the Baader-Meinhof Gang — a West German militant anti-capitalist group founded in the early 1970s.

But Rohwedder’s killing has been likened to the assassination of John F Kennedy, as many unanswered questions about the official version of events remain to this day.

While A Perfect Crime focuses on Rohwedder’s assassination, it also offers insights into life in the former GDR and the realities of reunification for many East Germans.

Unlike most Western documentaries, which either depict its citizens as constantly spying on each other or always trying to escape to the West — most notoriously in the film The Lives of Others — the East Germans in A Perfect Crime are proud of their nation’s achievements, want to reform and not dismantle its socialist system and oppose reunification.

The first episode introduces Rohwedder and the Treuhandanstalt, with subsequent episodes each exploring a different theory about who may have been responsible for killing him.

In the frame are the Red Army Faction, former agents of the East German Ministry for State Security — the Stasi — or mercenaries hired by the West German government itself. It is up to viewers to decide which theory sounds most plausible.

In each episode, we hear from East Germans who were directly involved in the reunification process or negatively affected by it.

In dramatic news footage from the time, unemployed East German workers, distraught and in tears, contemplate suicide.

One woman proclaims: “We’ve never been screwed like this before!”

As Peter-Michael Diestel, the last interior minister of the GDR, laments: “Many people were just fired and got no recognition for their life’s work.”

One of those people was Lt Col Eberhard Bottcher, who rose through the ranks of the East German Ministry of State Security.

In A Perfect Crime, he explains: “My sole reason for joining the Stasi was my deep wish to prevent yet another war.”

When West German security agencies took over the East and all Stasi employees lost their jobs and were demonised by the capitalist media, his world came crashing down.

After reunification, numerous former Stasi agents were employed as private security guards by West German capitalists because of their skills, as was Bottcher.

Many East Germans were proud of their history of resistance to Nazism and several interviewees in the series highlight the political differences between the two Germanys.

As Kurt Hillmann, a Jewish official in East Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Trade, states: “The GDR was an anti-fascist state and that made it the better Germany.”

In A Perfect Crime, we learn that not all East Germans were longing for capitalism and unity with West Germany but rather wanted to protect, reform and strengthen East German socialism.

Beyond the individual voices, the series features footage of the “Monday protests,” the mass demonstrations during 1991, when tens of thousands of East Germans called for the resignation of German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the architect of reunification, and new elections.

Kohl dismissed their demands as “absurd” and East Germans got their first taste of so-called Western democracy.

As gripping as any true-crime story, A Perfect Crime is both entertaining and informative as it sheds light on a tumultuous and complex period in recent German history.

This article first appeared in People's World, peoplesworld.org.

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