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2 What Is a dIssIdent? The Travails of the Intellectuals in The Lives of Others Lauren Weiner During the Soviet era, intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain walked a fine line. We in the West admired those who, like Anna Akhmatova and Vasily Grossman, snatched a measure of liberty by writing “for the desk drawer” (not for publication)1 or by seeing their work passed from hand to hand in samizdat (underground copies) or those who, like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, smuggled manuscripts abroad for publication. Viewing the situation from the outside, we tended to consider it a simple matter of rebelling or not rebelling. Often it was not simple. The cultural commissars of the Eastern bloc meted out punishments that differed in severity and kind, and many intellectuals ended up accommodating the commissars to varying degrees. To Western eyes, the artists and intellectuals portrayed in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others offer a puzzling picture. Wending our way through the moral and political subtleties of the East Berlin of this film will show how amply it demonstrates the insidious effects of totalitarianism on those attempting to preserve freedom of thought and expression. Resisting Soviet power was difficult, and even the proudest resisters bowed at times. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who dared lambaste Josef Stalin in verse, also tried to placate the dictator with a poem of praise. It did not save him from the Gulag. Akhmatova, desperate for her son’s release from detention, wrote a few halfhearted odes to Stalin, to no avail.2 Varlam Shalamov, another great Russian poet, was forced in 1972 to renounce his 35 36 Lauren Weiner exposé of the Soviet labor camps, Kolyma Tales, in exchange for permission to publish other works.3 Under official pressure, Pasternak altered his writing style to be more in line with socialist realism. Pasternak felt it prudent to send a condolence telegram to Stalin upon the death of Stalin’s wife. With similar prudence, if with greater treachery toward the proletariat, the playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote a supportive letter to Walter Ulbricht, the founder of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), after Ulbricht and the Russians crushed a massive uprising of East German workers in 1953. As for Brecht’s country, East Germany had the least docile population of any of the captive nations if we measure by how many people voted with their feet. Between the GDR’s establishment in 1949 and Ulbricht’s 1961 closing of the borders lest emigration cause the regime’s collapse, one of every six East Germans fled.4 Yet from those who remained, not much was heard by the outside world. Only rarely did reports surface of an East German writer or artist running afoul of the authorities. One case that stands out, because it received international publicity at the time, was that of the poet-songster Wolf Biermann. Biermann’s outspokenness lost him his East German citizenship in 1976. In the 1980s, even as a group of Czechs organized around Charter 77, and Polish workers, intellectuals, and church members nurtured the Solidarity movement, little unrest was visible in the GDR except during a 1987 rock concert on the Western side of the Berlin Wall when youths listening in on the Eastern side clashed with police.5 Most of the action of The Lives of Others takes place in 1984 in the midst of this political deep freeze. What Donnersmarck has brought to general notice, all these years later, is that there indeed were freethinkers in East Germany, locked in quiet conflict with the largest per capita secret police force in the Soviet empire—the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi. How many resisters there were is not easy to say; the subject has thus far received insufficient study. They at least include the lyric poet Reiner Kunze (who was allowed to leave in 1977 and settled in West Germany) and the novelist Erich Loest (resident in West Germany from 1981, many years after he had served a seven-year sentence as a political prisoner). There were also ostensible freethinkers who secretly gave information to the Stasi. The Germanist Julia Hell identified some of “the former GDR’s most unsavory authors,” meaning paid Stasi collaborators or unpaid Stasi contacts: Fritz Rudolf Fries, Herman Kant, who headed the writers’ union, and Sascha Anderson, who led a “strange life as avant-garde artist in the service of the Stasi.”6 No such list would be complete without the...

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