This spring has seen an incredible amount of media hype for The Da Vinci Code, which I guess is raking in $$millions even though the critics have been less than enthusiastic. German cinema rarely gets any notice in the US press, which is why it is an event worth noting when the Boston Globe has a front-page story about Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). The article discusses how the film has started a new discussion about the darker side of the DDR:
The film “Das Leben der Anderen" — “The Lives of Others" — has triggered what some call the first debate in the reunified nation about the realities of the communist regime, a Soviet satellite state that came into being in 1949 and collapsed with the Berlin Wall four decades later.
“In trying to rebuild a unified country, Germans have to some extent put the topic off-limits," said Jochen Staadt, a researcher at Berlin’s Free University who is a specialist on the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, the formal name of East Germany. . “Criticism of the GDR has been muted because many East Germans have felt that it was criticism of their lives."
Indeed, a recent poll found that 56 percent of Germans surveyed felt it was inappropriate to discuss wrongdoing of the fallen communist system.
But the drama directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a dark tale of love broken by the manipulations of the state security apparatus, has made the Stasi the talk of Germany and beyond. The movie this month won seven top awards from the German Film Academy and is quickly moving into theaters across Europe.
“German cinema has tended to portray the GDR as this funny place with quirky characters that no one takes seriously," Henckel von Donnersmarck told Der Spiegel magazine. “This is really very different [from the true] atmosphere of great fear, of great mistrust."
The unsettling film comes just as former officers of the Stasi are mounting a controversial campaign to revise their image. With articles and books, rallies and swaggering takeovers of public meetings, the former officers seem determined to paint themselves as upholders of a firm but fair system that provided stable jobs, safe streets, and state-run day-care centers.
The film has not been shown in the US, so I haven’t seen it (I’m still waiting for Sophie Scholl to be available on Netflix). If any readers have seen it and care to share their impressions, please leave a comment.
Not sure where I come down on the moral issues at play here. It is easy for us who never lived in a totalitarian system based on fear and violence to condemn those who made their lives a bit easier by collaborating with the Stasi (as IM – Informelle Mitarbeiter). On the other hand I understand the permanent rage of the victims who will never forgive those who persecuted them and their families. In any event, I am anxious to see Das Leben der Anderen.
I can recommend a couple of novels that deal with the topic. Alexander Osang’s Die Nachrichten is a fascinating portrait of an Ossi who has made it big as a television news reader in Hamburg. He is thrown into an existential (and career-threatening) crisis when he is accused of being an IM. He then begins a search for his own past in what used to be East Berlin. Osang, who is from East Berlin but is now the US correspondent for Der Spiegel, is an excellent writer and a keen observer of the human comedy (and also happens to be a nice guy). Another novel – lesser known but quite good – is Novembermärchen. Keine bleibende Stadt by Otto Emersleben, an east German writer who, by a twist of fate, now lives just a few miles from me (he showed me the file the Stasi maintained about him). The novel deals with the momentous events leading up to Die Wende, as seen through the eyes of a woman activist whose husband is an IM (and who writes reports for the Stasi about his own wife). Novembermaerchen is one of the few novels I know of that deals with Die Wende – the collapse of the DDR. If there are others, please recommend.
Das Leben der Anderen stasi DDR
