IN LOVE WITH THE GDR

Das traumhafte Leben des Ronald M.Schernikau
52 min. RBB/ Arte Produktion: FLORIANFILM 2010

In Love with the GDR His contemporaries called him a "sharp political mind," a "Stalinist simpleton," a "highly gifted artist," a "failed man of letters," a "western Easterner," an " aesthete," and an "arrogant queen." The biography of the young writer Ronald M. Schernikau reveals a dramatic and highly contradictory story played out between East and West — it doesn't fit into any given narrative or trend. Schernikau was gay and also a dedicated communist. Only a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 he migrated to the GDR — as the very last citizen of the German Federal Republic to be naturalized in the dissolving GDR. He had long nourished a most unusual dream: to become an East German writer with a two-bedroom apartment in a bare-bones socialist housing project. Shortly after he realized this exotic dream he died of AIDS — Schernikau never saw his thrity-second birthday. Ronald M. Schernikau left behind an unwieldy, astonishingly expansive literary oeuvre. However, only three of his many manuscripts were published as books: his early, highly praised kleinstadtnovelle (small town novella), which made him famous when he was a very young man and turned him into a sought-after talk show guest, reliably acting out the role of the enfant terrible. This success was followed by die tage in I ("the days in I"), a recollection of his experiences as a fellow at the Leipzig Literature Institute, and his lifework, legende ("legend"), published only eight years after his death. The film tells a very personal and haunting German-German story: surprising and subtle, conveyed through rare archival material (from both public and private sources) as well as statements by critics and close friends of this most extraordinary man.

04.10.2010

Berliner Zeitung, "Verliebt in die DDR - das traumhafte Leben des Ronald M. Schernikau"
Berliner Zeitung >>