End-of-Season Sale of the GDR - History of the Trust Company (Treuhandanstalt) 1990-94, part 1

The End-of-Season of the GDR is the first comprehensive documentary about the history of the trust company on TV, an explosive mixture of politics, human fates and economic crime story.
1st part:
July 1990. Wellguarded money transporters bring the hot goods from the last corner of the GDR scarcely still existing in reality. The German mark (DM) comes overnight and with it market economy. The trust company seated in Berlin shall regulate it and control the restructuring from a planned to a market economy. Its task is to privatize 8,000 formerly
nationally-owned enterprises. Modernizing of thousands of enterprises and closing down of thousands of others, from gigantic combines
comprising a staff of umpteen thousands up to small family enterprises. Yet, the state of the enterprises in the east of Germany is dramatic. Irrespective of the fact that the eastern markets disappear the heritage of
GDR economy is a heavy load. 500 billions of Eastern marks of national debts, the productivity totals just fifty per cent, as compared with West Germany, the concealed unemployment is about fifteen per cent. So
far the balance at the time when the GDR collapsed.And thus news of success from the trust company managers are ever rarer. The "raisins" are quickly sold, already soon it is more talked about scandals and
collapses than about flourishing industrial landscapes.
In March 1991 2.7 million people are jobless in the new Federal laender. The trust company becomes the synonym for an economic descent of the east, the scapegoat for raging unemployment, destructors and
gamblers this was the concept of the enemy. The films by Michael Juergs and Axel Grote do not hide that they the destructors and gamblers existed in reality. But the authors draw, at the same time, a
differentiated picture of the work accomplished by the Berlin authority. They furnish proof of which glaring wrong assessments politicians were subjected to and which difficulties the responsible people in the trust
company had to fight against. The protagonists of our first part are managers from the west such as Dr. Otto Gellert, member of the
governing board and member of the supervisory board at EKO Stahl and factory committee member Peter Schaaf from the Hartmetallwerk Immelborn in Thuringia. Others are the former prime minister of the GDR Lothar de Maizière and the PDS member of the Bundestag Christa Luft. Both of them were cofounders of the first trust company after the political change. Yet, one person determined, in particular, the course of
the first part: the president of the trust company Detlev Rohwedder who had been paying a contribution to the construction of this biggest industrial holding of the world which is historically not to be underestimated. His death was a break in the complicated process of German reunification. The first part of the documentation ends with his murdering on April 1, 1991.
script: Axel Grote, Michael Jürgs
direction: Axel Grote
camera: Niels Bolbrinker, Uli Köhler
sound: Gerd Jäkel
editing: Dominik Busch
production: Ingrid Günther, Peter Felger, Annette Rupp
Produced by Tele Potsdam for ZDF / 3sat
© 1999, License Ventana Film- und Fernsehproduktion mbH
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