Western hubris is unpicked as a new series of the hit German drama explores the deeper consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall
It’s midnight on 9 November 1989 and the mood in the American embassy in East Berlin is smug. “This is the end of the cold war,” West German agent Brigitte Winkelmann tells CIA counterpart Hector Valdez. A few streets away, the Berlin Wall has been breached by East Germans bent on trading up from Trabants to the KaDeWe department store. Border guards are experiencing something new – being hugged by their compatriots. All that remains, you’d think, is for Francis Fukuyama to proclaim that history is over and the west has won.
“Hopefully not,” retorts Hector drily. “We’d have to find a new enemy and who would that be?” In a matter of years, according to Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, the west would find an Islamist surrogate for red peril, but for that moment, history was poised. “I don’t know, I mean everybody loves America,” Brigitte counters, proving, not for the first time in this show, that Germans can do sarcasm.
