East German agrarian engineer, Hellmut Naderer, with the direktor of the coffee collective Viet Duc, mid 1980s. Img: Naderer / Berliner Zeitung

“And now for something completely different.” I don’t know if you know this classic Monty Python catchphrase. In the TV sketches, John Cleese used to sit somewhere ridiculous, like a forest or a beach, at a desk, in a dinner jacket and say that line in a serious BBC sort of way before the show would start and the audience be exposed to the first absurd sketch.

The phrase sprang to mind earlier this week when I sat in the front row of one of Germany’s oldest cinemas, UT Connewitz in Leipzig, which began life in 1912. On stage, a man said something like: “And now for a short film about a Leipzig bakery entitled ‘People will always eat food’”. The room went dark, and 1980s-style synth music began to play. Then we saw Trabant cars whizzing through Leipzig. Loaves of bread being put into an oven. A room being tiled. More loaves of bread.…