"For people living in Berlin, claims Morhäuser, there are not two Berlins but rather one-and-a-half: for those in the West, Berlin and East Berlin; for those in the East, Berlin and West Berlin.... In recent years the thematics of the wall have played a role in a number of films.... Lienhard Wawryzn's German Dreams (1985) avoids crass polarities and Cold War chiaroscuro.... In (the film) (whose English-language title evokes the occupation of a postwar nation's fantasy life as well as referring to a cocktail whose ingredients-half vodka, half scotch-suggest a precarious East-West rapprochement), Wawrzyn makes us look at life in West Berlin from the point of view of two recently arrived emigrants from the GDR, a mother and her daughter...women starting anew in another country both strange and familiar, leaving behind a body of memories and trying to find roots in a different terrain. The debut feature impresses above all in its sense of perceived detail, an attention to surface appearances that unveils tensions and contradictions in the capitalist everyday. Wawrzyn approaches the seemingly self-evident from eccentric angles... German Dreams defamiliarizes Berlin, rendering life there as a foreign experience even for those whose mother tongue is Deutsch." Eric Rentschler