Herwig Kipping was born in
Meyhen, a hamlet of fewer than 200 people located between
Weimar and
Leipzig, nearly 9 km south of
Naumburg. At that time the area was part of the
Soviet occupation zone. His father was a farmer and headed a local
Agricultural Production Cooperative shortly after the boy was born. at a
VEB "Walter Ulbricht" Leuna chemical plant in southern
Halle. However, before completing the course at the plant he returned to school to pass the final exams. According to another more succinct source, he discovered that he was being prepared for a career in the Central Statistical Office. The next year he produced a short documentary film with the title "Sechs auf dem Dach" (1984) about a team of
roofers. However, this was modified before release, and Kipping became involved in a furious dispute about the changes made to it. and responded by resigning from the Deutscher Fernsehfunk. In the end he was also thrown out of the country's ruling
SED (party). Between 1984 and 1989 Kipping worked as a free-lance script-writer. He regularly submitted scripts to
DEFA, the state-owned film company, but none of his scripts was accepted. It was also during this period, in 1986, that he studied with
Heiner Carow at the
National Arts Academy.
Everything changed in November 1989 when the
Berlin Wall was breached by protestors and it became apparent that the fraternal
Soviet forces had received no orders to suppress protest, nor to restrain people crossing the hitherto lethal border dividing Berlin. This opened the way to an end for
one party dictatorship and indeed, within a year,
German reunification. A few years later Kipping would describe himself as a child of
"Die Wende" (the changes triggered in November 1989), while insisting that the many people who encountered the "experience of no longer being needed" when the
German Democratic Republic collapsed also deserved sympathy. It was something he himself knew, in a different context, from the years when his film scripts were routinely rejected by the only film company in town. After 1989 Kipping experienced the freedoms and the disappointments of a career in the newly reunified Germany. DEFA now accepted his film scripts, the first of which, "Das Land hinter dem Regenbogen", was screened in 1991. He had been working on it since 1986 and the film was well received. Set in a fictional East German town called "Stalina" in the critical year
1953, the allegorical film deals with a girl called Marie who dreams of another world, beyond the rainbow. Her grandfather at this time speaks to his iconic bust of
Stalin and confidently expects the creation of paradise in their hometown. Dreams turn sour and the arrival of Soviet soldiers triggers a cruel dénoument.{{cite web|url=http://www.filmportal.de/film/das-land-hinter-dem-regenbogen_6a7f72091b744f1e99977c27c76ee2ed ==References==