Abstract
One night an east Berlin mother of three locks her now ex-lover in her flat and goes off to work her usual night shift. The east German playwright Ulrich Plenzdorf's Wrongful Detention begins as the mother herself is locked in a police cell and threatened with a charge of 'wrongful detention' unless she hands over the keys to her slum-like tenement flat immediately. This much is common to all three versions of the play (1989, 1990 and 1998), analysed here by Andy Hollis. His essay centres on the boundary shifts which have developed in a literal sense owing to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989/1990. In the first version of the play, the heroine, an East Berliner and East German with a capital 'E', calls for glasnost and perestroika; in the second, she continues to do so, but at a time when the frontier to the west had dissolved and the Deutschmark was about to become the common currency of both German states. In the third version, the butt of her criticism is no longer the East German authorities, but what she perceives as the west German colonialisation of eastern Germany. However, she does not switch from an anti-GDR outlook to simple 'Ostalgie' (yearning for the GDR). Her attitude within the new Germany towards the old East Germany is an ambiguous one, combining outrage with tongue-in-cheek nostalgia and a sense of loss.Among these changes in borders, two things have remained constant: the protagonist's appalling living conditions and her sense of humour, also a matter of shifting boundaries. In the GDR humour was meant, among other things, to maintain the ideological boundaries of the Cold War. It was often used, however, to reinforce barriers between rulers and ruled. In this play it was originally exploited as a weapon during the struggle to end the Cold War; but now it is being deployed, ambiguously, both to decry the excesses of the past and to criticise the present. 'Wrongful Detention' illustrates how almost the same material can be manipulated to call for the removal of the Berlin Wall and then to depict the further existence of the Wall, both in the minds of the protagonists and, just as importantly, in those of the audience. For it is argued that the play depends for its effect upon the fact that both mother and audience are united in their east Germanness.
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