Nobody wants to leave here

The 20-minute film shows the life of a family of showmen in the former GDR, whose special way of life survived not only several generations, but 5 different government systems.
The Alberti amusement park is run by an extended family of 40 people and travels 10 months a year through the former GDR. The amusement park originated out of the Alberti Circus, which had its license revoked by the GDR authorities in 1972. Stefan Frank cites as the reason for the license being revoked is that the authorities found their circus too big and their structures too opaque. Although individuals from their family were offered contracts with the state circus, they turned them down because they wanted to stay together as an extended family. After tough negotiations, they obtained a license as showmen and founded the "Alberti Amusement Park".
Stefan Frank says that to this day, no one in his family has ever left the traveling life. Either they would be with the circus or with the carnival. Since the "Komödianten" marry almost only among themselves, they are related as a family to almost all private circuses in Germany. At Stefan Frank's wedding in February of this year, there were 350 people, exclusively comedians from East and West Germany; if he had invited all relatives and acquaintances, there would have been over 1000 guests.

Stefan Frank doesn't know how many generations their family has belonged to the traveling folk. But her great-grandmother, who died two years ago at the age of 96, already belonged to the Alberti circus. She came from a family of jugglers and puppeteers who had also been traveling through the area for several generations.

In the past - as Stefan Frank explains to us - people called them gypsies, and some of them would have been gypsies, but they themselves have always called themselves "comedians" or "traveling people" and have nothing in common with the traveling showmen in the West. They have been Traveling People for generations. They run their businesses as showmen primarily to be able to preserve their way of life and to continue to bring pleasure to people.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, nothing has changed in their actual life, and yet the social changes have left their mark. After the fall of the Wall, for example, GDR citizens turned down the small carnivals and preferred to spend their money on the big fairs in the West or on new consumer goods in department stores. In order to survive, the "Albertis" invested in new (used) carousels and new stalls from the West and are now heavily indebted. Meanwhile their business is doing better again, but of course they are dependent on the economy: in "bad times" there is not so much money spent on amusement.

But the Albertis are confident, because they survived the Kaiser, the Republic, Fascism and the GDR, why shouldn't they also survive in capitalism?