“The Lives of Others” and Contemporary German Film: A Companion Edited by Paul Cooke (review)

Why devote an entire anthology to one single film? Editor Paul Cooke has undertaken such a project with his companion volume to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2005). Considering that anthologies can help shape the canon, set the critical agenda for the field, and directly influence curricular development as textbooks in the classroom, what is it about this motion picture that merits such prominence in the academy?

Von Donnersmarck’s feature film is by all accounts a singular achievement that stands apart. A debut film financed on a shoestring that nonetheless starred many of Germany’s most celebrated actors and featured a memorable musical score by renowned composer Gabriel Yared, it became an international blockbuster and garnered numerous awards including the German Film Prize, the European Film Prize, and the Oscar. At the same time as it enjoyed worldwide success at the box office, it unleashed heated debates on the construction of GDR history and memoryscapes in the Berlin Republic as well as equally contentious deliberations on the merits of popular cinema and genre.

In “The Lives of Others” and Contemporary German Film: A Companion, Cooke brings together the director, the historical consultant, and ten established and emerging Anglo-American scholars of German cinema to examine the significance of the film and its place in film history. The strength of the volume is that it not only provides new interpretations of The Lives of Others, it also presents the film as “a case study to take stock of the state of both German film and German film studies, highlighting some of the key fault lines at work in contemporary critical discourses” (2). Moving beyond the authenticity debate that dominated the discussion at the outset, the authors present original essays that compare The Lives of Others to seminal Hollywood, British, and DEFA films, examine its various genre identities as spy thriller, heritage film, literary film, and melodrama, and present new insights by analyzing production history, star persona, sound, production design, and intermedial configurations.

It is a credit to Cooke’s expertise as an editor that the volume includes many components that make reading productive for novice and specialist alike. There are excellent illustrations, a comprehensive bibliography, and a helpful index. For the most part, the essays are nuanced and jargon-free and the authors explicitly acknowledge where they connect to other scholars in the volume. The work is divided equally into three parts that are roughly grouped around issues of production, the filmic text, and German culture and film history.

One of the most valuable discussions in this volume is an appeal to broaden the conceptual framework for German film studies by reevaluating the overdependence on consensus and heritage film as catch-all terms to explain the complexity of individual films and trends in contemporary German cinema. Citing The Lives of Others as a prime example of a film that “categorically exceeds the templates of both consensus and heritage cinema,” Lutz Koepnick suggests that we abandon the quest for an all-encompassing taxonomy supported by a single concept: “we need to expand our critical vocabulary rather than force the film’s images and sounds into a corset of existing concepts and expectations” (130). Focusing on the film’s depiction of audio surveillance as something unruly, ostensibly aimed at disciplining its victims but also capable of manipulation, deception, and the creation of an alternative reality, Koep-nick aptly demonstrates how the film deviates from mainstream cinema’s conventional integration of sight and sound. He shows how Wiesler’s dream of overcoming the normative boundaries between auditory and visual fields is indicative of the film’s epistemological search for answers in a world without belief.

Eric Rentschler, by contrast, continues to see value in his coinage of the term consensus film and suggests that it is useful beyond the original context of romantic comedies from the nineties...