“It’s a misconception that the West won the Cold War”: Who are the baddies in Deutschland 86?
Deutschland 86; UFA Fiction GmbH; Anika Moln
The second instalment of the international hit German series turns on capitalism.
In 1986, when the future TV producer Jörg Winger was 17 years old, he went on a school trip to visit east Berlin. Having grown up in rural Cologne, near the Belgian border, life behind the Iron Curtain had been distant for him until that trip.
He was struck by the cameras on top of buildings. “Oh my god, they’re watching their own people,” he thought at the time.
Thirty-three years later, the second series of the hit show about an East German spy that he created with the screenwriter and his wife Anna Winger is set in the same year, 1986.
Its predecessor, Deutschland 83, became the most-watched foreign-language drama in British TV history when it aired in 2016.
But rather than the horror he felt at the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) surveillance state, Jörg is concerned today about modern-day curbs on our freedom.
“They had no freedom, it was awful,” he tells me over the phone with Anna before the second series is released on Channel 4’s foreign drama platform, Walter Presents.
“We all have our smartphones with us and most of our cities are under total surveillance and our homes are surveilled by Alexa or Siri,” he says. “It’s amazing how we have given in to surveillance – which, it’s true, doesn’t use the data in the same way as the East Germans, where you ended up in jail very easily – but it is still something we’d like to tackle.”
Laughing, he adds: “Full disclosure: this is an Amazon show in Germany.”
When Amazon sent the Wingers, who live in Berlin, an Alexa (a voice-controlled virtual assistant system) as part of their marketing, Anna recalls her incredulity. “We were like, ‘err, I’m not sure if we want an Alexa system!’” she laughs.
“We have so many scenes where people have wires. It’s so funny how we live in a time how everything is wired with microphones and no one thinks about it. We were like: ‘Have you watched the show?’ They said they’d send a guy to set it up. ‘You’re gonna send a guy to set up recording devices all over my house?’”
Threats to privacy are just one aspect of modern life the Wingers have become increasingly aware of while televising Soviet communism’s last gasp.
The 10-part series sticks to a real historical timeline and is based on events they’ve dug up from the archives and anecdotes from advisers to the show, who worked in or with the security services at the time.
The characters, like the perpetually baffled and morally compromised protagonist, Martin Rauch (played by Jonas Nay) – an East German border guard who is co-opted into the foreign secret service – and some of their antics are imagined.
Deutschland 86’s first episode opens in apartheid South Africa, where the cash-strapped GDR uses its allies in the African National Congress (ANC) to help fix an illicit deal between two of its enemies: selling West German weapons to South Africa in order to bomb... communists in Angola.
Confused? So is our hero, Martin, who asks: “East, West – who are the good guys?”