Time to Open a Window ­ Die Träumer by Jürgen Karl Klauss

From the Preproduction Notes:

Jürgen Karl Klauss, author and filmmaker, is planning a new film with his favorite actor, Michael Gwisdek. Originally marked for production back in 1991, Die Träumer (The Dreamers), needed the success of Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin! to finally get the project off the ground and into the realm of production possibility. »When someone spends the greater part of a century living under five different bureaucratic systems, as the German people have, then the schizophrenia doubles with each successive generation,« said Billy Wilder. »Unlike anyone else in this world we have stored in our heads so many comic absurdities that everyone abroad likes to laugh at Germans, who seem a bit oversized in tiny little Europe.«

        The Dreamers is the story of Karl-Heinz Dobbeck, a stone-age communist from the former GDR who becomes a capitalist and whose utopian dreams end in a nihilist deadend. In this tragicomedy absurdities mount and are modified by attenuating circumstances ­ until Dobbeck’s creative vision of a communist utopia is doomed ­ and his dream sinks into the swamp of oblivion. Dobbeck decides to become a capitalist boss, a monopolist, someone who hopes to sidetrack hated capitalism. He visits on occasion his own nostalgic »GDR Park« in order to recapture that old masochistic feeling of humiliation and snooping. As in his earlier films on German-German themes ­ Ohne Rückfahrkarte (One Way Ticket) (1981) and Die Grenze (The Border) (1981) ­ Jürgen Karl Klauss is relying stylistically in The Dreamers on mime and gesture to get his point across, wrapping the tragicomic in cool realism and casting his lead actors from their respective native backgrounds in East and West. As a master-student under the late East German director Konrad Wolf, Jürgen Karl Klauss learned to place the highest priority on the making of a film. Consequently he makes sure that a solid narrative handwork takes precedence over art for art’s sake, whether the production is a realistic thriller or a slapstick comedy. Most important of all, Klauss practices the »onion-peel principle« in the construction and realization of his tragicomedy. When the outer surface of The Dreamers is peeled away ­ that is, when the narrative gives way to the complex world of the human experience ­ the tragicomedy acquires a panoply of evolving absurdities.

        Only in this manner, believes Klauss, can all generations of spectators join in the common experience of shared feelings, of laughter and tears, of cinema as the most public of art forms. As for the soundtrack, Jürgen Karl Klauss is collaborating with Simon Stockhausen, son of renown composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen.

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