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Missed spy thriller: The class enemy in my bed

2019-10-01T15:26:27.417Z


A double life for real socialism: "Wendezeit" tells of a woman who spies at the same time for the CIA and the GDR. Unfortunately, we have already seen this better in "Deutschland 83" or "The Americans".



The iron fist of the anti-fascism does not stop in front of their own daughter: In a flashback, we see how the young fiery socialist from her own father, an officer of the Central Administration Enlightenment (HVA), gets out of nowhere a punch in the stomach. A tip for the envisaged intelligence career: Never give up the cover, honey!

The father of André Hennicke, who was seen on Sunday in the Stuttgart "crime scene" as a devil worshiper with hellish blazing look is played. The delusion is Hennicke now written in "turn time" in the face. And it is precisely in this grotesquely portrayed anti-fascism that manifests the main problem of this failed espionage thriller: He hypocrites psychology and political complexity, where he really only relies on rustic facial expressions and brute force.

The blow to the pit of his stomach at the beginning of the seventies made it clear to even the simplest among the audience why the two-time mother and double agent named Saskia Starke (Petra Schmidt-Schaller) lived in West Berlin nearly 20 years later despite all the temptations of the beloved class enemy to the foreign intelligence service of the GDR holds: She got it in the youth so einblasen.

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Now she works under the identity of a West German woman who once immigrated to the GDR out of idealism, the CIA. The fake Saskia is romantically involved with a jazz-loving and whiskey-sipping American professor (Harald Schrott), but regularly lays out a report on the class enemy in her bed in front of the vodka-drinking HVA boss Markus Wolf (Robert Hunger-Bühler).

Forget Gorbachev's Perestroika!

As the GDR begins to dissolve, the arrangement threatens to fly up. Also because in the CIA department in West Berlin a new boss from the headquarters in Langley (Ulrich Thomsen with glasses as from magnifying glasses) is flown in, which has already unmasked some moles and warned: "Let us not let the so-called policy of detente Gorbachev dazzle! "

That the cold Ami warrior despite massive lie detector use and the detailed observation of his employees through his magnifying glasses does not see through the game of the false Saskia, while her husband only once to visit the hometown of the real Saskia to understand that his wife him, the friend of the free market economy, cheating with the real socialism, is one of the many plot blunders in "turning time" (book: Silke Steiner). Plot blunders, which may also be due to the fact that the story was first created as a mini-series in the "Weissensee" or "Ku'damm" format, but then had to be broken down to two hours.

Directed by Sven Bohse, who had shown with the two "Ku'damm" stints, how to develop biographies and sparkle at high speed, while in the background, the history lights up in the most beautiful and ugly colors. At "Wendezeit", however, neither the biography sparkles, nor does contemporary history shine. All torn topics have been seen more succinctly elsewhere: the crazy, ambiguous masquerades of the ideological overwhelming theater during the Cold War, such as "The Americans" or "Germany 83".

Family as ideological assets

This complexity is only faked in "turning time". Among other things, the Rosenholz files are discussed, the comprehensive data collection, which was tapped in 1989 by the CIA and could be unmasked by the GDR spies. In addition there was a Berlin "crime scene" from the year 2003, which illuminated the difficult topic of the decoding of these files from the present with a depth of field, which does not want to adjust now with "turning time".

But not only the side strands remain partly diffuse, but also the theatrical core of the story, the double life of the heroine with the inherent contradiction of politically motivated relationships and autonomously flying feelings. This is all the more noticeable when compared to the fantastic German Oscar nominee "Two Lives" about an Ostagentin in Norway, in which it was painstakingly shown how authoritarian systems can exploit the family as a means of disposal.

In "Wendezeit" there is only one scene that puts it in a nutshell: When Saskia gets her first child, she is taken via detours to her patron and fatherly friend Markus Wolf. At a party, the spy man lifts the baby like a loving grandpa in the sun, although it is mainly pledge in deal with the agent. An image that captures the entanglements of family and ideology much more cruelly than any blows to the pit of the stomach.

"Wendezeit", Wednesday, 20:15, ARD. At 22.45 clock runs a "Maischberger" talk on the subject

Source: spiegel

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