Quella Trabant venuta dall'Est

This is not necessarily the best movie ever made, but it is a very precise look at a weird moment in history. Mankind had been sliced in half for more than 40 years by the Cold War. Suddenly it is all over and some people suddenly feel they have a lot of catching up to do.

I enjoy watching this movie with my friends from East-Germany as they always laugh at the Struutz-family's impossible misadventures, because it reminds them of their first contacts with the west. Like cheeky Jacqueline always getting the upper hand in all her encounters with respect-less and unsuspecting boys from the west. Or Udo Struutz marveling at the beauty of a West-German public toilet. Or Rita Struutz's attempts at communicating with an Italian police officer. And of course the unforgettable Diether Krebs serving up a never ending assortment of "Trabbi"-jokes as a manic, arrogant West-German trucker. These moments reflect upon many "Ossis'" (East-Germans) experiences when they first visited the west after the wall had fallen.

If you look for a document of the times, this is probably the most truthful you will find, although some scenes are pure satiric overstatement and Jacqueline makes an absolutely unnecessary escape from her family at one point just to come up with an unconvincing song, possibly directed at starting a singing career for Claudia Schmutzler, which luckily never really took off.

Stay away if you want to learn German, however! The Struutzes speak in a very, very broad Saxon dialect which sounds very different from "clean" German.