Eastern Europe Year One

The first year after the Wall

About a year after the upheaval that swept through the countries of “real socialism”, as the Greek press called it, George Petritsis set out to record what was happening there. The questions were the ones everybody was asking: how did the new leaders of these countries think, how did they face the present and the future, what had they achieved since the start of their democratic course, and how did the different peoples’ mentality shape what came next?

With his special adviser Dimitris Dimitrakos and the crew, he visited the seven countries that only two years earlier had formed the Eastern bloc: the Soviet Union, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the former East Germany. He examined each country in every field, political, economic, social and cultural, and the films combined interviews with officials with short interviews with ordinary people.

Germany and Poland

The episode on Germany began with the reunification of October 1990: after 45 years apart, East and West formed a single state again, and, in the words of the series, the country was living through the first year of its democracy. Berlin, once the centre and the symbol of the Cold War, stood at the heart of the film. Ingrid Stahmer and Anke Martiny of the Berlin city government spoke, along with the president of a newly founded academy for East–West cooperation and the German ambassador to Greece, and many East Berliners talked about the inequality in living standards between East and West.

The episode on Poland, filmed entirely in Warsaw, recorded the economic, social and political situation after Lech Wałęsa’s election to the presidency. It included two exclusive interviews: with General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the country’s former leader, who gave his assessment of the present situation and his predictions for the future, and with Bronisław Geremek, a veteran of Solidarity.

Summing up

In the eighth and last episode George Petritsis tried to sum up the conclusions of the journey: the positive and negative elements in the social structure and the economic life of these countries, and their place in the developments still to come in Europe. The press described it as the result of months of research, of interest to everyone who wanted to know what was happening in such a vital part of the continent.