Coming Out

26 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, only few can imagine what it must have been like to be gay under the repressive East German regime and experience a constant fear of being found out by the neighbours or the Stasi. All the more kudos to the successful East German filmmaker Heiner Carow (1929-1997), then, for tackling a controversial issue – that of a young teacher coming out. It finally gave a face to the gays and lesbians of East Germany.

Carow”s portrait of Philipp Klarmann, a teacher living in East Berlin who starts a relationship with a woman and makes her pregnant while at the same time having a passionate affair with the young Matthias, was a real eye-opener. The film premiered in East Berlin on 9 November 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell, and won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival a few months later. The footage of the gay underground scene, shot on location in East Berlin, was all of a sudden a thing of the past.