When I first watched this movie, I thought it's just a fun movie, a comedy mixed with *Nostalgia* (a German word that's a fusion of *east* and *nostalgia*) . As a west German it's of course great to learn about the GDR, which was to me always like a totally foreign country. I was still a kid in 1989 and it was not before 1989 I realized there's another Germany in the east. And like most west Germans I didn't really know who *Siegmund Jähn* or even the *Sandmännchen* was or what cultural significance they had.

Watching it a second time, I think there's actually more to it. It's a time capsule of 1989/90. More a serious tragedy than a comedy. It shows the revolution, the rapid change that steamrolled East-Germans and it shows so much of what made Berlin's culture between 1990 and the early 2000's that exciting. The emergence of so many subcultures could only happen in such times.

Plus, the love story is lovely.

So much better than *Sonnenallee*. It's the best portray of this era in German history. I must say though, that I'm still waiting for a movie like *The Downfall* which depicts the final days of another German dictatorship. We need something like that for the final months of East-Germany.