Table Of ContentTotalitarianism on Screen
ToTaliTarianism
on screen
The Art and Politics of
The Lives of Others
Edited by
Carl Eric Scott and
F. Flagg Taylor IV
Due to variations in the technical specifications of different
electronic reading devices, some elements of this ebook
may not appear as they do in the print edition. Readers are
encouraged to experiment with user settings for optimum results.
Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University,
Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com
Photographs courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics/Photofest © Sony Pictures Classics.
Photographer: Hagen Keller.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Totalitarianism on screen : the art and politics of The lives of others / edited by Carl Eric
Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-4498-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4499-3 (pdf) —
ISBN 978-0-8131-4500-6 (epub)
1. Leben der Anderen (Motion picture) 2. Totalitarianism and motion pictures. I. Scott,
Carl Eric, editor of compilation. II. Taylor, F. Flagg, editor of compilation.
PN1997.L383T68 2014
791.43’72—dc23 2014010372
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
C
ontents
Introduction 1
Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV
Part 1. Truth and Dissent
1. Post-totalitarianism in The Lives of Others 19
F. Flagg Taylor IV
2. What Is a Dissident? The Travails of the Intellectuals in The Lives
of Others 35
Lauren Weiner
Part 2. Art and Politics
3. Communist Moral Corruption and the Redemptive Power of Art
57
Carl Eric Scott
4. Long Day’s Journey into Brecht: The Ambivalent Politics of The Lives
of Others 83
Paul A. Cantor
5. The Tragic Ambiguity, or Ambiguous Tragedy, of Christa-Maria
Sieland 111
Dirk R. Johnson
Part 3. The Lives of Others and Other Films
6. The Lives of Others, Good Bye Lenin! and the Power of
Everydayness 137
James F. Pontuso
7. On the Impossibility of Withdrawal: Life in the Gray Zone 155
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
Part 4. The Lives of Others and the History of the GDR
8. Fiction or Lived History? On the Question of the Credibility of The
Lives of Others 171
Manfred Wilke
9. The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows 183
Wolf Biermann
10. Against Forgetting: A Conversation with Joachim Gauck 189
Paul Hockenos
11. East German Totalitarianism: A Warning from History 203
Peter Grieder
Part 5. The Stasi in the GDR
12. The Stasi: An Overview 231
Jens Gieseke
Acknowledgments 257
List of Contributors 259
Index 263
I
ntroduCtIon
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. Drey-
man 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 Don-
nersmarck,2 has been widely praised for its overall excellence, especially its
dramatic portrait of dissident activity and pervasive surveillance under the
GDR. Released in 2006 in Germany as Das Leben der Anderen, the film would
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 strange-
ness—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 film-
ing 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 of the
essays in this volume touch on this criticism in particular. For reflections on
the historical accuracy more broadly, see the contributions to this volume
by Peter Grieder and Manfred Wilke.
For three basic reasons, the film merits continued attention and study.
First, a strong case can be made—one we endorse—that it is a masterpiece
of the cinematic art form. Second, it is one of the most insightful works in
Introduction 3
any literary medium about the nature of communism in general. Third, it
is one of the best portrayals of the particular communist regime known as
the German Democratic Republic.
Viewing The Lives of Others leaves most people deeply moved and still
intrigued by the plot’s complex development. It is a film that invites discus-
sion and multiple viewings, and that invitation becomes even clearer upon
listening to the director’s DVD commentary. While much of Donnersmarck’s
commentary rightly focuses on the excellence of the actors, he also reveals
the great care he took with all the details of the script and filming.11 We
learn, for example, that he insisted upon recording with analog sound, that
he obtained authentic Stasi surveillance equipment for the relevant scenes,
that he chose the names of the characters very deliberately, that he took
pains to borrow a particular painting for the apartment set and, astound-
ingly, that he had the entire costume and decorative scheme coordinated to
exclude certain colors, blue and red, that he felt were uncharacteristic of the
look of the GDR.12 Closer viewing and consideration show that these are
not the only details that Donnersmarck attended to—as many of the essays
in this volume demonstrate, plot structure, dialogue, music, composition,
and even props are all deployed to create a fully realized poetic “world” and
drama. Time will tell how this finely wrought artwork holds up when judged
according to the highest standards of cinema, that is, when compared with
the greatest films, and whether it achieves lasting popularity, but obviously,
the initial judgments have been remarkably favorable. It is our hope that the
essays in this volume, which in our estimation are far from exhaustive of the
interpretational discoveries available to students of the film, will demonstrate
the literary depth and landmark stature of Donnersmarck’s achievement.
A truly great work of art typically requires a truly great subject. There
can be no question that the triumph of totalitarian ideology, occurring more
briefly but more catastrophically with Nazism in Germany and at far greater
length with communism in the Soviet Union and a number of other nations,
has a powerful claim to be the signature event of the twentieth century. It is
our contention that The Lives of Others deserves a place as one of the truly
great works of art touching on the phenomenon of communist totalitarian-
ism. Though there are many great literary works on communism—George
Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Czesław Miłosz’s The
Captive Mind, to name a few—the number of good films on the subject is
surprisingly small.13
The Lives of Others is particularly successful in elucidating the nature and
