A young man with a cadet’s haircut in blue jeans, box-fresh trainers and a Puma T-shirt runs for his life through a shopping arcade in Bonn. This is Martin Rauch, an East German border guard dispatched to the west to spy on them. Rashly attempting to bolt from his Stasi handlers (one of them his aunt), he ducks into a supermarket. Inside, all thoughts of escape leave him as he gazes in awe at endless rows of colourfully packaged western groceries and eugenically perfect fruit and veg. Over the tannoy comes the decadent capitalist pop song Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by the Eurythmics: “Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you.”
It’s a perfect moment in a near-perfect series. Deutschland 83’s first episode of eight was the most-watched foreign-language drama in UK history. With the least ambiguous title ever, American-German husband-and-wife team Anna and Joerg Winger created an irresistible export: a funky exercise in pop nostalgia underpinned by actual events – crucially, the Nato war game codenamed Able Archer, deliberately misconstrued by a paranoid east as a cover for an actual preemptive strike that almost sparked World War III.
Martin is superbly played by Jonas Nay, a boyish 25-year-old with an interesting scar above his left eye (following a car accident) that renders him a strikingly singular leading man. Although the trajectory of Deutschland 83 is potentially apocalyptic and takes the morally compromised Martin to a very dark place mid-series, it’s shot through with a wry sense of humour that’s not typical of, say, German films that do well here – such as Das Boot, Downfall or the similarly Stasi-themed The Lives of Others.
When Martin steals a vital floppy disk from the western elite, the Stasi’s boffin is hilariously seen pointlessly slotting it into a gaping aperture on his Robotron A5120 (“the newest computer we have”), before concluding: “I think it’s the wrong kind of computer.” His boss replies, “Really? How many different kinds are there?” A moment of pure, understated farce, it also makes a point about Reagan’s trade embargo and the gulf between east and west consumer durables.
It’s not all retro-smirking at oatmeal computer hardware and 99 Red Balloons, though (even if the latter is sung at a youthful East German house party as if it is the coolest tune in town). Deutschland 83 is a serious thriller driven by jeopardy of the all-out nuclear kind. Austere-looking East German newsreaders continually pop up against mustard backdrops with updates on the deployment of mid-range Pershing II missiles.
In a strategy successfully employed by This Is England, the Wingers are developing a sequel set in 86, followed by a conclusive series in 89, when the Wall came down. Though very much an international package, it has been a bigger comparative hit abroad than at home. Massive hype only generated 3 million viewers for its co-maker RTL (just above the channel’s average). It was beaten by The Voice on the other side. I wonder if Germany’s sense of nostalgia is more complicated and less commodified than ours ...
As Annie Lennox once sang across the ideological divide: everybody’s looking for something.
• This article was amended on 30 March 2016. An earlier version referred to a “Bundeswehr’s boffin” when “Stasi’s boffin” was meant.
