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All but a few stretches of the Berlin Wall were torn down in the first heady months after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). Yet some east Germans still cling to memories of the 40 years they lived under communist rule — memories that have grown more affectionate with time. Speciality shops and some websites offer east German board games, 15-packs of the infamously rough Cabinet cigarettes, Be Ready condoms, even cans of Trabi Duft — fumes from the iconic Trabant car — and the very brand of hair gel preferred by former east German leader Erich Honecker. Young Berliners still gather at "authentic" G.D.R. parties, where guests don the uniforms of state organizations, swill Little Red Riding Hood sparkling wine and dance to ballads like In the East, which sold 300,000 copies a few years ago. This phenomenon of nostalgia for the lost east, dubbed Ostalgie, was neatly encapsulated in the 2003 hit film Goodbye Lenin!, a sweet-tempered comedy about a son who protects the feelings of his ailing mother by pretending the Wall is still standing and the G.D.R. is intact.

That may be an amusing concept for most cinemagoers. For many east Germans, struggling to find their feet in the new realities of a reunited Germany, and missing the rigid certainties of life in a totalitarian state, it struck a deeper chord. In retrospect the G.D.R. really didn't seem all that malign, just a bit comical with its puttering cars, camp displays of military might and empty shelves. But now, it seems, east Germans may finally be ready to take a colder, harder look at their communist past.

Just as films like Full Metal Jacket and Platoon captured the dark memories in the U.S. about the Vietnam War more than a decade after the conflict had ended, several German movies indicate a toughening of opinions about the G.D.R. A handful of new releases, including one by the makers of Goodbye Lenin! called The Red Cockatoo, explore the G.D.R. and its 100,000-strong secret-police force, the Stasi, not as the subject of comedy but of cruelty and farce. The Lives of Others, which swept the prestigious Lola German Film Awards this month in Berlin, is going strong at the German box office with its story of a successful stage actress whose life is destroyed by a lecherous Culture Minister and the Stasi.

The director of The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 33, says he did not set out to make a political point but wanted to personalize the period. "Cinema is a good barometer to show what is going on in a country," Von Donnersmarck told Time. His film is being heralded as the first major feature to examine the personal cost of entanglement with the Stasi. "There has been a tendency to see the former G.D.R. as a state in which no one really suffered and the Stasi was just a laughing matter," says Peter Schneider, a German author and Lola awards jury member. "Now we have the first real attempt to show how the secret service poisoned the lives of millions of citizens."

The Lives of Others is part of a wider and growing debate in Germany about the G.D.R. And it is far from one-sided. Some former members of the old regime and retired Stasi officials, buoyed by the electoral gains of the Left Party, the successor to the G.D.R.'s Communist Party, have become increasingly vocal in defending their former lives. In one incident, 80 ex-Stasi officers sought to block a series of memorial plaques to 40,000 local people arrested by the state security forces from being erected outside Germany's Stasi memorial, an old interrogation center and prison that now serves as a museum. "They are telling lies!" shouted the group's organizer, Wolfgang Schmidt, a former agent, who also used his website to accuse the museum's director, Hubertus Knabe, of being a "professional agitator." Earlier this month, Schmidt was ordered to stop communicating with or about Knabe, or face a fine. Two new books by ex-Stasi agents also portray the secret police as professional men upholding the law of the land. "In our intelligence work we never used methods that led to serious crimes, terror or murder," said one of the authors, Gotthold Schramm, at a press conference. Stasi victims in the audience greeted that statement with loud jeers.

Germany was one of the first countries to provide public access to its communist-era secret police files — an estimated 6 million were made available in 1992. But last week, a commission established by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to consider new ways to examine the legacy of the G.D.R. recommended that the Stasi archive containing millions of personal files on ordinary citizens be closed to public view. The proposal drew accusations that Germany was trying to bury its past, although commission members insisted they merely wanted to place the study of the period with qualified experts.

Though it opened up the files early, in other respects, Germany has been slower than its neighbors in Eastern Europe to examine its communist past. That may be about to change. "A struggle is going on over how Germans will think about the G.D.R. in the future," says Knabe. "Either it was a strange country with complete social security and no unemployment and kindergarten for everyone; or it was a dictatorship that killed 1,000 people at the border, forced more than 4 million to flee, and jailed tens of thousands."

Wounds from the communist period are still raw. Take the real-life experience of Ulrich Mühe, the lead actor in The Lives of Others. He says after the Wall came down, he discovered that his ex-wife had been informing on him for more than 10 years. She denies the claim, saying the details in her Stasi file are false. Whatever the truth of that case, more than 1% of all east Germans either worked for the Stasi or informed for them, a higher proportion of informers than in any other communist country. The result, says Knabe, is that many feel that "if you criticize east Germany you criticize them and their lives." That may help to explain why the only new party to emerge from the transition to democracy was not a postdissident grouping calling for a purge of the old élite. On the contrary, supporters of the Left Party, which controls 53 seats in the German parliament, are drawn mainly from the ranks of the former Communist Party itself.

The Left Party is pushing to increase pensions for former Stasi officials and other former bureaucrats. "We don't think that history and past crimes should be dealt with through the pension system," Petra Pau, a Left Party deputy and Vice President of the Bundestag who was a top official in the east German youth organization Free German Youth, told Time. There has never been much support for the kind of truth and reconciliation processes undergone in nations such as South Africa, not least because many former communist officials continue to serve in public life. Thousands of investigations of Stasi officials have produced only a small number of convictions of mostly minor officials. Marianne Birthler, chief custodian of the Stasi archive, told Time that even though interest in Stasi files remains strong (some 1.5 million people have applied to see them to date), "the question is whether the broader public is sufficiently informed about the nature of the dictatorship. And I'm afraid the answer is no."

Still, there are signs that young Germans are getting an education that may help them transcend the divisions of their elders. Attendance at Stasi museums in Berlin and elsewhere is increasing. Visiting the grim former prison that now houses the Stasi museum has become a recommended part of the school curriculum in Berlin. Teenagers fill the cells each day. Many arrive laughing and smoking and drinking soft drinks, but leave soberly, asking questions about the methods of a police state.

Students in the north German town of Schwerin are putting on a play about a local man who was shot by the Stasi at the border and buried in an unmarked grave. "Kids today have a totally inaccurate picture of what life was really like in the G.D.R.," says Gabriele Banner, 46, a teacher who took her students to see the play. "They learn everything from their parents, who only remember the good parts." She also organized a class trip to see The Lives of Others. The film "hit them like a bomb," she says. "That was a shock. They saw what impact these [Stasi] activities had on people's lives."

All of this gives succor to victims of the Stasi, most of whom suffered for years in silence while Germany was dreamily forgetting its past. Edda Schönherz, 62, was a well-known presenter on east German television. Back in 1974, she made the mistake of believing that détente between east and west Germany would loosen travel restrictions. Schönherz promptly applied for a visa to visit west Germany and the U.S. A few days later, 11 Stasi officers burst into her bedroom: "Get dressed! There is a matter we have to clarify," said one. She told her 11-year-old son: "Mommy will be right back." It was three years before Schönherz saw her family again, after the west German government had paid the east Germans for her release.

Schmidt, 69, Knabe's critic and a former Stasi agent, insists that his comrades have been unfairly demonized. "We [the Stasi] were necessary and useful," he says."The G.D.R. was not a lawless state ... there were laws and there was a legal system." Maybe a conversation with Schönherz would put him right.

• ANDREW PURVIS | Berlin
• Nostalgia has sweetened memories of east Germany. But now Germans are facing up to the unromantic realities of life under communist rule