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The Dreams of Others

By tying the drama to a mere personal whim, The Lives of Others fails to capture the true horror of the GDR

By Slavoj Zizek

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others—this year’s Oscar-winning film on life under the Stasi, the East German secret police—has often been favorably compared with Ulrich Becker’s 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin!. The claim is that it provides the necessary corrective to Lenin’s sentimental Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East), illustrating how the Stasi terror penetrated every pore of East… return to article

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    After squirming through “The Lives of Others” in a Potsdam movie theater last year, I’ve been searching in vain for a commentator who would do it justice. That’s why I’m grateful to Zizek for finally putting the record straight on this shamelessly overrated Oscar winner. The film’s opening sequences certainly do capture the drabness of the East German experience (which I became intimately acquainted with in the 1980s, Stasi and all), but Donnersmarck immediately resorts to the flimsiest of cliches to get his “message” across. The phoniness of the loyal but noble East German intellectual is particularly cloying (what country did he think he was living in?), and the Stasi agent’s corresponding emotional vacuity (symbolized by his drab high-rise apartment and his flabby prostitute) makes everything just a bit too easy - as if middle aged Stasi operatives didn’t have wives, children, suburban allotment gardens, hobbies or even housecats just like everybody else. The ensuing melodrama is all too predictable. Having said that, if “The Lives of Others” - like “Schindler’s List” - had actually been based on a true story, these plot devices could perhaps be forgiven. However, as far as I can discover, Wiesler’s sentimental conversion to a “good person” is pure fantasy - the Stasi did not work this way, and certainly wasn’t impressed by phony bourgeois intellectuals who were, by definition, the “class enemy.” Ironically enough, instead of revealing the genuine evil that underlay the East German system, the film actually makes us feel good about the regime - or about how it could have been if there had been more people like Wiesler, as if we all would have done the same in similar circumstances ("Schindler’s List,” which is about a “good Nazi,” also has this paradoxical effect, making it into one of the popular movies ever shown in Germany). In fact, the last thing we need are feel-good movies about Communism, or Nazism, or any other inhuman system of this kind. And as Zizek points out, by leading nostalgia for the GDR *ad absurdum*, “Goodbye Lenin” does a much better job of demolishing the regime’s “humanistic” pretensions than the sugar-coated “Lives of Others.”

    And what exactly IS the film’s message? That redemption is available to all of us and that if we would show kindness to our neighbors then the world would be a more humane place? Fair enough, but then again Dickens did a much better job expressing this sentiment in his “Christmas Carol,” but nobody has ever mistaken his fairytale for an accurate description of life in Victorian Britain.

    Germany Posted by Alan (Berlin) on May 18, 2007 at 7:26 AM

    A new interview with Zizek on, among other things, Antonio Negri, “food riots,” Hezbollah and “liberated territories"…

    “Divine Violence and Liberated Territories: SOFT TARGETS talks with Slavoj Žižek”

    from SOFT TARGETS v.2.1

    United States Posted by SOFT TARGETS on May 23, 2007 at 11:36 PM

    Unfortunately, I fear Slavoj Zizek’s really thoughtful and interesting piece above does not entirely live up to its apt subtitle : “By tying the drama to a mere personal whim, The Lives of Others fails to capture the true horror of the GDR”.

    The French quality newspaper, Le Monde, ran a month ago an interview with Hubertus Knabe, a historian and the curator of the former Stasi main prison and interrogation center in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, now converted into a national Memorial.

    Knabe, I think, outlined more effectively the scenario’s two fundamental weaknesses, because of which he had finally declined to help with the shooting of the movie. For him, the film’s success is explained especially “because it meets the basically human need to refuse a reality without hope and to believe that, even in evil, it is possible to find good”, and indeed, anyone that sees it is at first gripped by the intrigue, but the movie is in fact built on two absolute impossibilities :

    1 - “unlike Schindler’s List which, however loosely, is nonetheless based on a true story (...) such a scenario never happened and, furthermore, never could have happened, because Stasi supervised its own agents in a very effective way, and the least treasonable act could be punished with death”, so this is all wishful fiction;

    2 - especially, he denounced the fact that the same agent could never, as in the film, where this is the scenario’s main engine, be in charge of his victims from A to Z, from the installation of the listening equipment to their imprisonment, which is what lets him grow fond of them. “Actually, the functions of Stasi operators were tightly partitioned : those who listened did not even know who they were listening to and had to transmit their reports and transcripts to another department. It is this partitioning which has always made the effectiveness of dictatorships.”

    This second point is indeed central. The monstrosity of totalitarianism lay in the extreme ordinariness of everyone and every act involved. There is no “good” vs “evil” epic fight taking place, just ordinary people doing ordinary things, through a mechanic and partitioned system, and that is what we should fear and, indeed, fight. So the heroics of the film are fully counterproductive. They indeed not only “fail to capture” but effectively HIDE “the true horror of the GDR”.

    The same point was also made by Timothy Garton Ash’s in his piece on The Lives of Others for the NY Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20210) : he had lived in the GDR and had a large Stasi file. After the Wall came down, he personally interviewed “the acquaintances who had informed on me and the Stasi officers involved in my case. All but one agreed to talk. They told me their life stories, and explained how they had come to do what they had done. In every case, the story was understandable, all too understandable; human, all too human” He wrote a book about the whole experience, The File.

    France Posted by Henri, Paris on May 27, 2007 at 11:57 AM

    Sorry, but Mr. Zizek should loosen up. We’re talking about a theatrical film, not a documentary. How many theatrical films have you seen that come even close to fact???? The idea is to entertain. I found “Lives of Others” entertaining and thought-provoking. I left wanting to know more about how it really was.

    As for homosexuality...I guess you can read anything you want into anything. I saw a man identifying eventually with a fellow man, one who wasn’t so different from himself.  But, then, I’m a woman, so I probably see things differently.

    While I have not lived in the GDR and I don’t doubt it encouraged neighbors and spouses to spy on one another, I found the film interesting and well done, a study of individuals surviving in a system.  Perhaps some who were most ardent did come to see that things weren’t necessarily as the “government” said (shades of the US today). Had it been faithful to reality and depicted life as it really was, i can imagine no one would have gone to see it. The film introduces the contradictions of life in the GDR and encourages members of the audience who want to know more to do some research.

    As for “Good Bye Lenin!” this was a film showing devotion of a son to his mother, who had suffered a heart attack. He worried that she would die and, by providing special news after the fall of the GDR, he was trying to protect her, as she had him when he was a child. This film was a humorous theatrical film, not a documentary. It’s been a while since I saw this film; I remember finding the ending less satisfactory. But...it’s a movie.

    Since when does fiction have to adhere to facts?

    United States Posted by diane on May 27, 2007 at 11:34 PM

    Re Diane’s comment above : “Since when does fiction have to adhere to facts?” - Well, Hollywood’s low standards do not have to apply to the rest of the world, you know. The point is “The Lives of Others” is a German film, NOT an American one, and thus one does not a priori shrug it off as just another mass-produced piece of illiterate fiction made for purely economic reasons. Indeed, as Germans have a reputation for painstaking attention to detail and lack of frivolity, one expects something closer to a documentary than to the wide screen rendition of a video game.

    The Lives of Others’ depiction of life in the GDR indeed sounds and looks highly realistic and overall is very plausible.  So the present discussion is a welcome one.

    True, as Diane says, had it been faithful to the boring grey reality of the GDR, no one would have seen it… and this discussion would not be taking place.

    True again, as Diane says, some of this discussion is idle : the accuracy of some details, the homosexual angle, etc.

    But, in Germany, the film has caused some real outrage in some quarters, because it gave a posteriori a human face and brought some sort of redemption to a totalitarian system that was wholly inhuman - and that is indeed a serious matter.

    Indeed, the tale is so gripping and strong and the film so well made that people leave the theater with the idea that totalitarianism was after all a fight between some good and some bad people, just another cowboys vs indians thing. How many of the millions that have seen it will make the effort of delving further into the matter?

    France Posted by Henri, Paris on May 28, 2007 at 4:17 AM

    Re: comments from Henri to my comments:  Points well taken. Thanks.

    United States Posted by diane on May 28, 2007 at 11:58 AM
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