1983 was an apt choice for the setting of this story about the East Germans thinking they are about to be invaded.
In 1983, Ronald Reagan learned through secret intelligence that through a series of misinterpretations of routine military manoeuvres in Western Europe, and some bureaucrats at Russian embassies trying to inflate their own importance and knowledge of the workings of their host governments, the Soviet leadership came to the impression that they were a ruse for war and they were under the threat of imminent attack. The Russians started to prepare to counter attack.
At the same time, a Korean airline was shot down by the Russian air force. Privately, Reagan and his advisers are horrified that such a thing could happen through a comedy of errors and that could lead to something far worse through mutual alarm and tests of will.
Historians now regard 1983 as the closest time there was a possibility of a nuclear war since the Cuban missile crisis. It all arose through a series of misunderstandings of a series of routine military manoeuvres against a background of worsening relations with the Soviet union.
East German postage stamp commemorating 25 years of the “Anti-Fascist Defense Rampart” or as it is better known, the Berlin Wall.
Some spoilers for the first four episodes of Deutschland 83 as well as the general plot points of the films The Lives of Others and Bridge of Spies.
The voice of Ronald Reagan ominously calling the Soviet Union an Evil Empire opens the new television series Deutschland 83, but our perspective as the viewer comes from the woman listening: Stasi agent Lenora Rauch. She sees the speech as an open threat of war and a dire warning of imminent attack by the West. Rauch’s (Maria Shrader) interpretation is shared by her colleagues in the German Democratic Republic’s intelligence services who also see Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric as the first step toward nuclear war. Throughout the whole series, the driving force of the narrative is the quest of Martin…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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