Views from the German-Polish Border: The Exploration of Inter-National Space in Halbe Treppe and Lichter‪.‬

With the fall of the Wall and the unification of the two Germanies, the new country recovered its status as Europe's largest land and as the country with the most neighbors on its borders. Its neighbors, not always allies, share histories with Germany that are not always happy, such that Germany must continually situate itself geopolitically and politico-historically vis-a-vis these neighbors. Poland, immediately to Germany's east, has a similarly passionate relationship to its borders. For many years Poland experienced repeatedly forced annexations by German and Russian empires. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Gold War raised and intensified old anxieties, especially along the Polish-German border. (1) Over the last decade this border has been the site of intense geopolitical and cultural transformations. Unification in 1991 recodified the Oder-Neisse line as dividing Germany and Poland, but by 1992 European Unification drew a new line that turned this border from a national border into the demarcation of the European Union's new Eastern "frontier." (2) Only a decade later, when Poland entered the EU as part of a larger Eastern expansion, the significance of the border was transformed yet again. It is thus noteworthy that in 2002, on the eve of the eastward expansion of the EU, two films emerged as separate and distinct projects that took as their setting the German-Polish border in the town of Frankfurt Oder/Slubice: Halbe Treppe [Grill Point] (Andreas Dresen) and Lichter [Distant Lights] (HansChristian Schmid). These two films mark a historic re-imagining of community and of territory at this significant moment of political union. They remind us that borders are not only lines drawn on maps. They are not simple spatial distinctions. They run through lives and cultures, structure economies, represent collective identity, and give rise to a particular form of "borderland." Whatever else they are, borders are first and foremost ideational before they are material. The imagining of community precedes the spatial political claims demarcated by borders. (3)