3 - Absurd Endgames: Peter Welz's Banale Tage

Summary

When the wall fell, Peter Welz was twenty-six years old and about to graduate with a degree in feature-film direction from the film school in Babelsberg (HFF). he was lucky: unlike his mentors and teachers in the HFF and film studio, he did not have to wait long years to debut with his first feature film but joined his mentor Jörg Foth and older colleagues Herwig Kipping and Helke Misselwitz in directing one of the only three films that the newly founded production group DaDaeR produced. Peter Welz was well known to his older colleagues because of his two student films, Willkommen in der Kantine and Unsere Familie (Our Family, 1989), which were written by Frank Castorf and Leander Haussmann respectively and had attracted significant attention for their unusual aesthetic at the film school as well as at a film festival in Munich, where Welz experienced the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989. After the founding of the DaDaeR group in January 1990, DEFA dramaturge Timothy Grossmann found the story Banale Tage by author Michael Sollorz when he was looking for suitable scripts. It was contained in an anthology of stories by the youngest generation of writers in the archive of East Berlin's Association of Writers (Schriftstellerverband). The anthology was originally intended for publication in the fall of 1990, but like many other projects became a casualty of the political changes.