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

11. E ast German Totalitarianism: A Warning from History

11 east german totalItarIanIsm A Warning from History Peter Grieder The Lives of Others is not a documentary but a movie. The purpose of a movie is to entertain rather than to inform. So why debate its historical accuracy? Because its screenwriter and director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck , claims that the film is fundamentally authentic.1 His “close historical consultant,” the renowned historian Manfred Wilke, vigorously defends its historical credibility in this volume and elsewhere.2 Furthermore, the Oscar-winning blockbuster succeeded in renewing the debate about life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany, to which historians are particularly well qualified to contribute . Many ordinary people imbibe their history from motion pictures and cultural artifacts rather than academic publications, making an investigation of historical reliability wholly legitimate. The first section of this essay will focus on how truthfully The Lives of Others engages with the theme of East German totalitarianism.3 In so doing, it will explore certain aspects of where the movie reflects historical reality and where it does not.4 The second section will advance an interpretation of the film as a salutary warning to democratic societies in the early twenty-first century. The Lives of Others and East German Totalitarianism Totalitarianism may be summarized as “the concerted but disguised attempt by a state to exercise total control over, coerce, integrate, manipulate, mobilize , and seduce its population in the name of an ideology, regardless of the 203 204 Peter Grieder extent to which this was actually achieved in practice.”5 As Friedrich and Brzezinski explain, one of the basic features of a totalitarian dictatorship is “the terror of the secret police systematically exploiting modern science, and more especially scientific psychology.”6 It is this secret police control, in the form of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security (MfS), or Stasi, that is examined in The Lives of Others. Despite winning seven Lolas of the German Film Prize in 2006, the film received a somewhat mixed reception in Germany.7 On the one hand, “the cultural and political establishment”8 hailed it as a powerful antidote to the wave of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) that had been sweeping eastern Germany since the 1990s. This was a result of a clever marketing strategy by Donnersmarck, which somewhat unfairly compared The Lives of Others to earlier, “less serious” movies about the GDR, the most famous being Good Bye Lenin! and Sonnenallee.9 Writing in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Reinhard Mohr described it as “the first German feature film to tackle seriously throughout, without Trabant-nostalgia, Spreewald-cucumber romanticism, and other folkloric tomfoolery, the kernel of the German Democratic Republic that collapsed in 1989—the systematic intimidation, oppression, and repression of its citizens in the name of ‘state security.’”10 On the other hand, The Lives of Others was criticized by some historians and “professional film people” for having an “ostalgic” theme itself in that it depicts a Stasi captain, Gerd Wiesler, protecting the celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, whom he is supposed to be observing. There is no evidence such a thing ever happened in the GDR. Of course, this does not mean that it did not or could not have happened. If, like Wiesler, the officer had successfully covered his tracks, the incriminating evidence would either have been destroyed or never recorded in the first place. In any event, the Stasi files are so voluminous that one cannot completely exclude the possibility of such a documented case coming to light in future. Be that as it may, Dr. Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the former Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, was so incensed by what he saw as Donnersmarck’s artistic license that he denied him permission to film there. According to Knabe, a strict division of labor and internal MfS surveillance would have prevented a Stasi captain from exercising so much control over a single operation.11 These factors would certainly have disrupted Wiesler’s task but not rendered it impossible. Anna Funder, author of the acclaimed Stasiland,12 supports Knabe’s objections: “to understand East German Totalitarianism 205 why a Wiesler could not have existed is to understand the ‘total’ nature of totalitarianism.”13 Moreover, she insists, Stasi officers were “true believers” hardened by “institutional coercion.” They would never have wanted to save those they were spying...