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

Introduction

IntroduCtIon Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV “Don’t I need this whole system? What about you? Then you don’t need it either. Or need it even less. But you get into bed with them too. Why do you do it? Because they can destroy you too, despite your talent and your faith. Because they decide what we play, who is to act, who can direct.” These are the words of Christa-Maria Sieland, actress and girlfriend of writer Georg Dreyman, East Germany’s most celebrated playwright. She is being blackmailed by the minister of cultural affairs: sexual favors in exchange for permission to continue her work on the East German stage. Christa-Maria is about to attend to her duties with Minister Hempf, when Dreyman, who has recently discovered the affair, implores her not to go. “You don’t need him,” he says. Her reply, seen above, brings home an ugly truth to Dreyman. Their work, their art, their success are not theirs. Dreyman and Christa-Maria live well. They have a nice apartment with nice things. They have many friends. Best of all, they have audiences who laud their artistic endeavors. But all of this merely conceals the putrid core of the system, the “really existing socialism” of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which dominates their lives.1 The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ,2 has been widely praised for its overall excellence, especially its dramatic portrait of dissident activity and pervasive surveillance under the GDR.Releasedin2006inGermanyasDasLeben derAnderen,thefilmwould go on to win international acclaim and many awards. Lives was victorious in seven categories at the German Film Awards and in four at the German Film Critics Association Awards. In the United States, the film won Best Foreign-Language Film at the Academy Awards and was honored at the Independent Spirit Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. It was similarly honored in England, Ireland, France, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Argentina, and Canada. 1 2 Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV The brilliance of Donnersmarck’s film is that it brings the utter strangeness —the peculiar horror—of life in the GDR to audiences who have no experience of such a phenomenon. His accomplishment is all the more impressive in its recreation of this world “precisely because,” notes Timothy Garton Ash, “it was so banal, so unremittingly, mind-numbingly boring.”3 As the then thirty-three-year-old writer/director explained, “It’s not a Stasi film. . . . That’s just the setting.”4 Donnersmarck said to John Esther, “I don’t want to present someone with two hours of communist drabness.”5 After all, who would pay to see such a film? So Donnersmarck set out to make what John Podhoretz has termed “a character study in the guise of a stunning suspense thriller.”6 In the view of Matthew Bernstein, Lives “explores canonical themes of surveillance and voyeurism, using hierarchies of knowledge and recalling Hitchcock’s best thrillers and especially Coppola’s The Conversation (1973).”7 Lives tells the story of two men whose lives intersect in dramatically illuminating ways. Gerd Wiesler, a captain in the Staatssicherheit, or the Stasi (the East German Ministry for State Security), is tasked with spying on Georg Dreyman, heretofore the regime’s approved and award-winning playwright. Dreyman’s life reveals to Wiesler that the ordinary goods of love, beauty, and friendship are utterly absent from his own life. And in turn, Wiesler’s actions wind up bringing Dreyman to see the extent to which he has quietly compromised his own moral and artistic integrity for the sake of success. Wiesler and Dreyman each attempt to extricate themselves from a world of appearances and lies. So as the film brings to the fore the iniquity of communism, it also succeeds as a drama of the human soul. In Germany, the film attracted 1.7 million viewers during its first year.8 Lives would become the subject of much debate (sometimes quite heated) for its portrayal of the Stasi in particular and life in the GDR more broadly.9 It has thus attracted a good deal of criticism—some even before the filming started.10 Some critics charge Donnersmarck with distorting the truth about the Stasi by demonizing it. Others, by contrast, object to the heroic portrayal of Wiesler, a Stasi officer—there is no record of such an officer betraying his orders and protecting a subject of surveillance. Many...