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

10. Against Forgetting

10 agaInst forgettIng A Conversation with Joachim Gauck Paul Hockenos Joachim Gauck, born in 1940 in the Baltic Sea port city of Rostock, was a Protestant pastor in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He was a staunch proponent of democracy and human rights, though not a member of an oppositional group. When the Berlin Wall fell, he was one of the cofounders of the New Forum alliance and was elected on its ticket in January 1990 to the first (and last) democratic parliament in East Germany. Mr. Gauck was also chairman of Gegen Vergessen—Für Demokratie (Against Forgetting— For Democracy), an NGO that fights left- and right-wing extremism and promotes coming to terms with the legacy of the two totalitarian regimes in German history. He remains a prominent voice in Germany on these issues, appearing regularly in the media and in public. This interview (conducted for this volume) took place on September 29, 2011, in Mr. Gauck’s offices in downtown Berlin. Paul Hockenos conducted the interview and subsequently translated it into English. Paul Hockenos: When did you first see The Lives of Others and what was your initial reaction? Joachim Gauck: I saw the film before it opened to the public since I was asked to write a review for the German magazine Stern. I was greatly impressed from the get-go, not least because the film had an incredible cast, from the lead roles all the way to the smaller supporting roles. Donnersmarck succeeded brilliantly in inspiring this cast, which included some of 189 190 Paul Hockenos Germany’s most famous actors and actresses. But above all I was moved by the atmosphere of fear that it conveyed. The film was a haunting expedition into a bygone world. I titled the review “Ja, so war es!” (Yes, It Was This Way!).1 The film revisits a time when people’s everyday lives were blighted by fear and conformity. I call this the “fear-conformity syndrome.” The film portrays the audacious, arrogant attacks of the state against “the others,” in this case artists. Everyone who sees the film understands why the past for so many isn’t really past. The injuries or even just the impressions that we carry around are evident even today, long after the demise of the dictatorship . So intensive was the pressure to conform, so omnipresent was the fear. PH: But not everybody was as impressed as you were, particularly many of those who had lived in the East. In fact, the film provoked a good deal of fierce criticism. JG: I knew from the beginning that there’d be resistance and from three very different corners: from the former dissidents, from part of the old establishment , and from the broad ranks of the conformists (die Angepassten). The former anticommunist dissidents inevitably retorted, “Here comes a Wessi trying to tell us an East story.” They pointed out that there’s a lot that’s not strictly factual, as if the film were a documentary. So they latched onto inaccuracies in certain scenes, like the construction of the surveillance system in the attic of an apartment building. This was indeed a bit bizarre. It never happened that way. But the scene provided a great, evocative image, and after all it’s a feature film. Yet many took scenes like that one as proof somehow that the director and the scriptwriter hadn’t engaged adequately with the material, which simply wasn’t the case. They had prepared very thoroughly, in fact for several years. This reaction from the ex-dissident circle is a protest against what they understand as an expropriation of their experiences. They were victims and now they’re concerned they’re no longer in possession of their own narrative. They feel like they’re just ingredients in a larger-than-life story that others are telling regardless of the facts. Because a feature film is not a historical documentary, it can be freer with the historical facts. It can portray the Stasi protagonist as better than this type really was, as long as it doesn’t sugarcoat the whole story and end up an outright falsification. But the opposite is the case with this film: it unmasks; it doesn’t sweeten. Take the figure of the culture minister who Against Forgetting 191 must have the beautiful actress. He gets her. Where allegiance comes up short, fear and the prospect of...