“Occasionally, the man was to be seen,” said the former German Federal President Joachim Gauck on Monday about the documentary “30 years of the fall of the wall – Joachim Gauck’s search for unity”, which was shown this evening at the zeughauskino of the German Historical Museum in advance. Most of the stages of his journey to the people that have re-shaped Association in one way or another, or to the current debates in the East and the West involved, Gauck in the Film, the documentarists Stephan Lamby and Florian Huber in the dark twisting of the statesman, chauffeured in a black official car and Bodyguards. But at the same time, there are some very personal moments, and this is not only because he has swapped the suit for denim and casual shirt.

Stephan Lamby and Florian Huber have not invited Gauck to a journey that led him back to his own biography. According to Wustrow on the Baltic sea, where he spent the Childhood. At the top of the Church tower, he looks at fish land, the Bay, talks about how his father came to the Siberian labour camps, but also the fact that he can feel here home. At the same time, the documentary is a journey through time with images of the Monday demonstrations of 1989, the last national chamber meetings, of the storming of the Stasi Headquarters, with pictures of ailing German companies and a permeable become wall between East and West. After the Premiere of the film, Gauck said, the difference between East Germans and East Germans was often more pronounced than between East Germans and West Germans. A Jubilee for Gauck’s inventory is not.

A journey of democracy, a teacher

Gauck has the reputation to be a journey of democracy, a teacher. Since two years he is in office, he can now determine free. Without the burden of the office he can speak at the same time, more open about the feelings with which he went into the talks for the documentation. For Marianne Birthler, his successor as head of the Stasi records authority, was in a relaxed mood, obviously, a conversation among former companions. When Wolfgang Schäuble, the President of the Bundestag, with swings of respect between the two senior representatives of the state. As Gauck, took first as a member of the people’s chamber, Stasi legacy, was Schäuble Minister of the interior. Respect for the work and life performance, Gauck intended to pay tribute to Lothar de Maizière, the negotiating, the last GDR head of government, the Treaty on German unity. But in this conversation they both went with noticeably less enthusiasm. De Maizière has it wound still, the Gauck authority considered it at the time as unofficial employees of the state security – what he had always denied.

The former Rostock youth pastor Gauck does not want to convert, but to enlighten. He appealed to the principles of reason, to convince the less simple conversation partner. In Torgau Gauck meets the Dresdner Pegida-co-founder André Jahn. 2016 of the Federal President, in Saxony, has been reviled as a traitor. Gauck listen to Jahn, this is none of that dull his hatred out roars, but rather someone who wants to achieve a free group of voters of his goals in a democratic way. “Because Civility starts in the policy, if out of anger, and Shaping is to Think,” says Gauck in an interview with ZDF-editor-in-chief Peter Frey. “That’s when I realized it would be wrong not to talk to him.”

Frauke Petry of patience

tearing his conversation with Frauke Petry, the former AfD spokeswoman, is different. When she speaks of the powerlessness of the people in East Germany was often the same as at the time, the times of the GDR, tears Gauck of patience. “You’re talking to a clientele who do not belong to myself.” They stand rather for the opportunities of this state and the democracy would offer.

30 years have passed since the fall of the Berlin wall. Peter Frey wanted to know from both sides, if it takes as long again until the unit is actually completed? “Yes, it was,” he said. And the East will catch up at all materially? “We don’t know.”

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Alexander Fröhlich

“30 years of the fall of the wall – Joachim Gauck’s search for unity”, ZDFinfo, Thursday, 20: 15, as well as ZDF, 9. April, 20 at 15, and on Phoenix on 11. April 21 at.