Totalitarianism on Screen: The Art and Politics of The Lives of Others

9. The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows

9 the ghosts are leavIng the shadoWs Wolf Biermann Translated by Lucy Powell There are increasing numbers of West people in Germany who dilettantishly play the role of the noble procrastinator. In an argument about the involvement of East people in the crimes of the GDR regime, they prefer to opt out for the worldly-wise option of holding their tongues. This sort of eloquent silence always sets a twisted Hamlet soliloquy ringing in my ears: To be or not to be . . . No . . . to get involved or better not . . . that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to keep stubbornly quiet about the Stasi troubles of the Ossis, or to dive headlong into a sea of slanging matches . . . No! I’m a Wessi, who has never had to suffer that sort of repression and who has never lived under the weight of a dictatorship. So I won’t take an inflated moral stand; I prefer to confess modestly to being one of the little people, with fears and weaknesses. Whether I would have been courageous in the GDR or cowardly, whether I would have gone along with everything or at least cautiously refused, or whether I might even have dared oppose the regime—I cannot say. And this is why I’d rather not judge these things, not to mention judging the people who—who knows—only swam with the tide or, in good faith that they were doing the right thing, collaborated with the secret police or, simply in ignorance or fear, and with great sadness in their hearts, inflicted misery on others. I’ll keep out of all this. I thank providence that I 183 184 Wolf Biermann was never forced to denounce, inform on, or torture anybody, and I’m very thankful that I never had to find out. Luckily it’s all over, it’s all in the past. You come across this bogus declaration of bankruptcy more and more. But this sort of shabby modesty is nothing but a cowardly flight to what Immanuel Kant called “self-imposed immaturity.” Anyone who says, “Who knows if I would have become a pig?” is only issuing themselves a precautionary whitewashing coupon for swinishness. No matter how you might have behaved back in the days of fear and danger, all that matters in the here and now is that you don’t deny or downplay the wretchedness of others. Twomonthsago,IwassittingintheformerlyEastGermanKollwitzPlatz in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district with five friends. Marianne Birthler gave us a sneak DVD preview of a film from a young unknown director about the GDR: The Lives of Others. All of us watching the film had opposed the regime; some of us were even its scarred jailbirds. When I read the name of the director, it occurred to me that this Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had sent me the draft script for his film about the GDR secret police (the Stasi) two years or so ago. At the time I had flicked through it irritably. I wanted nothing to do with a project like this. I was convinced that this novice, this naïve upper-class kid who had been graced with being born so late in the West would never ever be capable of tackling this sort of GDR material, either politically or artistically. When we’d finished watching the film, I was astounded, confused, pleasantly disappointed, and cautiously enthusiastic. A heated argument ensued. Two of my friends thought the film was full of inaccurate details. A minister of culture could never have had so much influence on the Stasi apparat as the film showed. After all, the MfS, or Ministry for State Security, was strictly and staunchly what it was set up to be and what it wanted to be: “the shield and sword of the party”—no more, no less. A lieutenant colonel in Erich Mielke’s company would never ever have taken marching orders from some comrade minister!Thedecisionswerealwaysmadebythepartyleadership;thestatewas onlytheexecutiveorgan.AndtherewasabsolutelynowaythattheStasiwould have been drawn into exercising its powers at the behest of a cultural functionary just because this flaccid individual had got the elderly hots for some GDR starlet who lived with her ambitious and successful GDR playwright. And another inaccuracy: the film portrayed the young writer as someone who conformed to the system. But only truly oppositional writers were The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows 185 “operatively handled,” informed on, tapped, and followed to...