Wieland Speck | Westler / 1985

west of the wall

by Douglas Messerli

 

Egbert Hörmann and Wieland Speck (screenplay), Wieland Speck (director) Westler / 1985

 

Superficially you might be able to describe Wieland Speck’s German language film Westler as a romantic comedy in which two young gay men discover one another in an urban landscape meet-up, and fall in love, seeking a way to make their relationship permanent. And both Felix (Sigurd  Rachman) and Thomas (Rainer Strecker) are beautiful enough that anyone who’s not a prude might love to watch them as they increasingly fall in love, the director even in 1985 showing increasing nudity and hot sex.

     But this film, shot illegally mostly in East Germany during the days of the foreboding Berlin Wall, is not only about these two boys’ increasing romantic attachment, but about how the Berlin Wall and East German authorities intruded into every aspect of these individual’s personal life, even their time in bed enjoying sex.

      Moreover, the film does not even begin in Germany, but in Los Angeles, the furthest West, as the central character and his American friend Bruce (Andy Lucas) note, that European culture was able to go in its thousands of years march through indigenous cultures as it made its way gradually to the Pacific Ocean. As the two boys take it the sights of Los Angeles of 1985, driving down Santa Monica Blvd. in a red convertible, driving through the old Hollywood region of the city—where, in fact, very few films were ever made except at the nearby Paramount Studios—and finally entering Griffith Park as they glide past the Observatory where James Dean first met up with local toughs, before stopping by the famous local gay cruising spot, it’s also clear that a young West German gay such as Felix feels more at home and knows more about the far Western city of Los Angeles than he does about East Berlin and, even more so, what lies beyond that.

      Even in 1985 West Berlin, finally able to carry on what began in the Weimar Republic, was known as a wild queer city, spiritual home to the many of the central figures of the New German Cinema which included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Wolfgang Petersen, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schroeter, Margarethe von Trotta, Rosa von Praunheim, and Wim Wenders, several of whom, who were not even gay, but still made queer films.

       Felix, in fact, might never have traveled again across the wall if it were not that, after his Los Angeles visit, Bruce chooses to visit him in Berlin, and after a full day seeing the West Berlin sights asks if he mightn’t visit East Berlin.

       Felix attempts to put him off, suggesting that it takes a lot of time to cross. And indeed, it does, as I remember from personal experience the day I took a subway to the end of the West German line to visit Alexanderplatz. The film almost comically reiterates the suspicion with which particularly non-Germans are met, the multiple stampings of documents, the endless waiting and questions, and the final “payment” for entry as in those days you handed over your German marks for a much smaller East German equivalent.

       These young men do not even visit the nearby museums but wander the large square looking at monuments and tasting the street cuisine. They might have found a bevy of cute young East German soldiers jacking off in the underground Alexanderplatz toilet. But Felix spots something far better, a lovely blond-haired boy, who as he and Bruce go souvenir shopping again, and again later in the square.

     So taken is Felix by the boy that he finally goes up to speak with him, bringing back to his American friend to introduce him. Together the three boys take in a very private beerstube which appears to be largely gay, but requiring a recommendation before entering. The owner clearly knows Thomas and permits his friends to join him.

       Bruce drops out of the picture, leaving Berlin; but Felix has been so enchanted with Thomas that he visits him his next free Monday at his one-room apartment. Once more the two hit it off so well, that Felix repeats the visits regularly, the actions shifting from afternoons of tea and talk to outright sex. Yet each visit, Felix must hurry off like Cinderella to meet the midnight deadline of when all West Germans must leave the Eastern part of the city.

     And as the visits continue, the authorities finally begin to question his motives, making him go through an entire strip search and requiring the name of who he is visiting. Thomas is not troubled by the events, claiming that the authorities know all about his sexuality and that, of course, they have begun to be suspicious. He has more to worry about regarding his employment. Having been working as a waiter, he is suddenly ordered to show up to work in a meat-processing plant.

    Soon the midnight deadline, however, chafes at both boys. They can’t even spend a night together, and there is no way that Thomas might be allowed to visit West Berlin. The boys’ frustration begins to take its toll, with Felix, at one point, getting drunk in West Berlin gay bar after his return home. At the bar he meets a friend drag queen (Zizi de Paris) who invites him to one of her special performances where an American drag queen, Sex Ecstasy, sings what might almost be described as a theme song for this film, “West of the Wall”:

                                     West of the Wall

                                     I’ll wait for you.

                                     West of the Wall

                                     Our dreams can all come true.

                                     Though were’re apart a little while

                                     My heart will wait until we both smile.

 

       Felix begins to suggest outrageous methods of escape, but Thomas secretly determines to escape for real, partly through visiting his friend Pavel in Prague, Czechoslovakia, another country at the time under a Communist dictatorship and therefore possible for East Germans to visit. Finally, he gets permission and flies to Prague.

       There, against all common sense, Felix meets him. And for a couple of days, they bliss it out in bed, feeding one another breakfast tidbits under the covers, fearful, perhaps, that at any moment Thomas will have to leave and their splendor under the covers may forever disappear.

 

     In fact, it does, as Pavel arrives, having made escape plans. A man will meet Thomas at 4.00 AM the next morning at the Charles Bridge, asking him where is the next bus stop. He will take Thomas to Hungary, but Thomas must find his own way to Yugoslavia, where, evidently he can fly back to West Berlin.

      Thomas is hopeful, the far more skeptical Felix is disturbed. What if his friend is caught? What if he can’t find his way to Yugoslavia? The two wander through the night, Felix dropping away when the morning arrives as Thomas waits on the Charles Bridge.

      Speck’s film ends there. And we have no way of knowing what happened. Felix can only fly home and wait “West of the Wall” for the miracle to occur.

       As Thomas’ female friend, Elke (Sasha Kogo) puts it: "It's men who are the problem, not the wall."

      I was in Berlin shortly after the wall came down and German reunification became law, October 3, 1990. Enjoying a beer in a Frankfurt Croatian restaurant across the street from the august German publishing house of Rowohlt Verlag, I was joined by German reporter. He was terrified of the reunification, he proclaimed: “What will happen with all of those Easterners, with no understanding of the West, when they are asked to participate in a democracy.” he asked? The Westerners suspicion of their fellow countrymen was potent, even if somewhat deserved. He, like Felix before meeting Thomas, only feared the world to the East, a man clearly looking only to own West Germany, to Europe and, ultimately, to the US. As the American Bruce notes early in the film, even notions of what our cities mean are vastly different. Bruce argues in this remarkable film, “For an American a city means the future. For a European a city means above all the past.”

      Perhaps today things have changed; certainly, the US in no longer everyone’s ideal of a place to which to escape, particularly for the far happier and often better off Europeans. Speck’s movie, more than any other, captured that moment when all eyes were on the West.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).