"You don’t have a chance, so use it!” was the saying that more or less described the balance of power in East Berlin back in December, 1989.
On one side, the state apparatus still desperately clinging to power, the National People’s Army, military groups, a vast battalion of Stasi workers and the Soviet Armed Forces, whose actions were nothing if not unpredictable. On the other, a handful of fragmented opposition groups from the New Forum to Democratic Awakening composed of an estimated 600 activists, and a nation that was just beginning to see itself as such. For the first time, representatives from both sides met face to face at the Central Round Table.
With the aid of never-before-seen footage, this film from Dörte Franke and Marc Bauder reveals how power was wrestled from every word and taken with every inch. At stake was nothing less than the fundamental political legitimization of the state’s monopoly on the use of force and the Office for National Security. Had there ever really been a chance for a “Third Way,” as opposition groups had hoped, it would have been because they’d forced a constitution through. Ulrike Poppe from Democracy Now, Markus Meckel from the Social Democratic Party and Reinhart Schult from the New Forum reflect on that four-month-long power vacuum, a time when utopia was close enough to touch. (DOK Leipzig, 2010)