goEast Film Festival Day Two: Crossing Borders

Wiesbaden and Mainz, Hungary and Romania, Russia and the World

I have a particular obsession with ticking countries and states off my never-ending list, so when I realised that Mainz was a mere ten-minute train ride away, I hopped aboard the regional, crossed the Rhine, and landed in the capital of Rhineland-Pfalz. Now I have only three more states in Germany to visit. 

But the more things change in Deutschland — cuisine, dialect, customs — the more the country feels more or less the same. The same chain restaurants, supermarkets and train station shops; the same mannered politeness; the same mixture of ugly modernist buildings with traditional elements in the town squares. I yearn for the uniqueness and variation of Italy. 

But once you push past the area surrounding the Hauptbahnhof (commonly the worst, most antisocial area in every German city, Hamburg and Nuremberg being special contenders), past 100s of small raucherlokals, driving schools and kebab shops, Mainz (briefly glimpsed in the space of two and a half hours) maintains worthwhile charm, like the open-air market selling everything from fruit and veg to Tyrolean meats to fischbrotchen (essentially, a baked fish chucked in a bread roll), and, its centrepiece, St Stephen’s Church. 

It’s the only church in Germany adorned by Jewish-Russian-French artist Mark Chagall. Its piercing blue stained glass windows, commissioned in the late 70s, point both towards Jewish-Christian reconciliation and the ways modernism can reinvigorate tradition. All Churches feel holy and sanctified, of course, but the subtleties of the design and the soft light that permeates the building, even during the middle of the day, make it a truly special place. 

There is some friendly rivalry between Wiesbaden and Mainz. While Wiesbaden has goEast, Mainz has a festival dedicated to German Kino; perhaps it's unintentional, perhaps it shows that both cities have different cultural aims. They should host both festivals on the same dates to see who is more popular. After all, their respective football teams, separated by three divisions, rarely have a chance to play together. 

But these differences (hyper-local, probably indistinguishable to most outsiders), are more symbolic than literal. There is no actual border between Wiesbaden in Hessen and Mainz in Rheinland-Pfalz, and there probably hasn’t been since Bismarck unified the entire country back in 1870. With a Rewe supermarket in every single city (probably), Germany, despite many issues (more pronounced between East and West) is more or less a unified state. 

But while borders can be literally removed — whether it’s through the Schengen zone, more relaxed checks, visa-free schemes, and so on — they can’t be erased permanently. The effects linger, creating ramifications to this day, across Europe and beyond.

Once I finally got back to Wiesbaden, the three films I saw all dealt with literal borders in one way or another, exploring our common humanity despite arbitrary divisions.

Read the rest over at Journey Into Cinema!