In The Documentary 'Karl Marx City,' A Grim But Enlightening Homecoming

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, documentary filmmaker Petra Epperlein had painful personal reasons to return from the United States, where she now lives, to her hometown of Chemnitz in what was once East Germany. The city had been renamed Karl Marx City under the German Democratic Republic, a Soviet satellite from just after World War II. A decade after the Wall came down in 1989, Epperlein's beloved father destroyed all his papers and hung