Dolce Vita in the GDR - An Elbe steamer full of exotics

Film screening and discussion

The GDR was a kind of island. Since the world around it could not be visited, artists, intellectuals, but also "ordinary citizens" took flight into the interior: the escape on an Elbe steamer. They boarded a ship of dreams, without a helmsman, without laws, without a destination. A ship whose existence was possibly the product of the passengers' imagination. Because today no one can know what was fantasy and what was reality...

The Ahrenshoop organ builder Kristian Wegscheider had the idea for these escapes into a world beyond all GDR realities. His love of opera and the fine arts prompted him to rent a steamer for the first time in 1986 and spend a day with a select group of happy "dropouts", just like in an Italian movie. Frederico Fellini's "Ship of Dreams" served as inspiration. Wegscheider was so annoyed that Fellini's film was not shown in the GDR that he quickly recreated the scene himself, with opera singers and musicians on board.

Photos, private film footage and of course the records in Stasi files document the wondrous journeys of Kristian Wegscheider.

Kristian Wegscheider and his wife Britta Schwarz will tell more about these "journeys", which were actually impossible in the GDR, after the film screening (44 min.). These journeys are proof that the desire for the lavish, gaudy, exaggerated and loud was very much alive in the East.