“Every town,” says American historian
Brian Ladd, “has its ghosts, but Berlin is something special because
it has seen so many changes, so much destruction and so many traumas
in the twentieth century.” In “After the Fall”, it
seems as if the camera is scanning the skies for precisely these ghosts.
After the Fall is a documentary about the almost total disappearance
of an edifice that was once 160 kilometres long. Today, some ten years
after the fall of the wall in 1989, virtually nothing remains of the
structure that once surrounded West Berlin. Meanwhile, some 50,000 new
buildings have been erected in the capital. The total eradication of
the wall is described here by different people and from different points
of view.
Interviewees include an American historian, a church minister in Berlin
and a Bavarian demolition expert. The common tenor of their views is
that the wall and its traces were eradicated too quickly with the intention
of clearing away the past.
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