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Deutschland ‘83
I’ve just finished watching Deutschland ‘83, which I think may have been recommended by someone here, though all I can say for sure is that it had spent some time in my bookmark folder of things to watch. At any rate, it follows the adventures of a rather unwilling but nevertheless remarkably successful East German agent injected into the West German army.
In some ways it’s a bit on the daft side; Rauch/Stamm is remarkably successful at plundering the Bundeswehr’s and NATO’s secrets (not to mention a couple of West German hearts) and nobody really tumbles to it despite him standing suspiciously near two major breaches. It also suffers a bit from the tendency of many of the characters to be needlessly horrible to each other, and there’s a couple of plot threads that require some fairly persistent stupidity, one rather less plausible than the other.
Still, it was an engaging watch and by the last couple of episodes I couldn’t wait and watched them back to back. The arc plot is based loosely on real events; an appreciation of some of the history of the era certainly helped although I suspect it would work perfectly well without that background. The score was fairly obvious in places (you will probably not be surprised to learn that 99 Luftballons turns up pretty early) but also had some particularly good choices.
Jonas Ney was pretty good as Rauch/Stamm but for my money Maria Schrader, as the senior HVA officer in the west, put in the best performance, walking off with every scene she appeared in.
Finally, throughout the series, I found the HVA office interiors remarkably familiar, and eventually an establishing shot made me realize why: they’d filmed it in the Stasi offices, now a museum which N and I visited a few years back:
In some ways it’s a bit on the daft side; Rauch/Stamm is remarkably successful at plundering the Bundeswehr’s and NATO’s secrets (not to mention a couple of West German hearts) and nobody really tumbles to it despite him standing suspiciously near two major breaches. It also suffers a bit from the tendency of many of the characters to be needlessly horrible to each other, and there’s a couple of plot threads that require some fairly persistent stupidity, one rather less plausible than the other.
Still, it was an engaging watch and by the last couple of episodes I couldn’t wait and watched them back to back. The arc plot is based loosely on real events; an appreciation of some of the history of the era certainly helped although I suspect it would work perfectly well without that background. The score was fairly obvious in places (you will probably not be surprised to learn that 99 Luftballons turns up pretty early) but also had some particularly good choices.
Jonas Ney was pretty good as Rauch/Stamm but for my money Maria Schrader, as the senior HVA officer in the west, put in the best performance, walking off with every scene she appeared in.
Finally, throughout the series, I found the HVA office interiors remarkably familiar, and eventually an establishing shot made me realize why: they’d filmed it in the Stasi offices, now a museum which N and I visited a few years back: