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Features > May 18, 2007

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

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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 Germans’ private lives. But is this really the case?

Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.

Equally troublesome is the film’s portrayal of Dreyman. He is idealized in the opposite direction—a great writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, who is personally close to the top regime figures. (We learn that Margot Honnecker, the Party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people.) One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.

To ask some obvious questions: If he was such an honest and powerful writer, how come he did not get into trouble with the regime much earlier? Why wasn’t he considered at least a little bit problematic by the regime, with his excesses tolerated because of his international fame, as was the case with famous GDR authors like Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Muller and Christa Wolf? The film takes place in 1984—so where was he in 1976 when the GDR regime did not allow Wolf Biermann to return from a West German tour, leading nearly all great East German writers to sign a petition protesting this measure.

Likewise, during a reception at the film’s beginning, a dissident directly and aggressively confronts the culture minister, without consequences. If such a thing was possible, as is assumed in the film, was the regime really so terrible? Finally, there is a weird twist to the story that blatantly contradicts historical fact. In all known cases of a married couple where a spouse betrayed a partner, it was always a man who became an informant—in Lives, it is the woman, Christa-Maria, who breaks down and betrays her husband.

Isn’t the reason for this weird distortion the film’s secret homosexual undercurrent? The film’s hero, Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent whose duty is to plant the microphones and listen to everything the couple does, becomes attracted to Dreyman. It is this affection that gradually leads him to help Dreyman. After die Wende—the “turning point” when the Wall came down—Dreyman discovers what went on by gaining access to his files. He returns Wiesler’s love interest, secretly following Wiesler who now works as a modest postman. The situation is thus effectively reversed: The observed victim is now the observer. In the film’s last scene, Wiesler goes to a bookstore (the legendary Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung on the Stalin Alee, of course), buys the writer’s new novel, The Sonata for an Honest Man, and discovers it is dedicated to him (designated by his secret Stasi code). Thus, to indulge in a somewhat cruel irony, the finale of Lives recalls the famous ending of Casablanca: With the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” between Dreyman and Wiesler, now that the intruding obstacle of a woman is conveniently out of the way—a true Christ-like gesture of sacrifice on her part. (No wonder her name is Christa-Maria!)

In contrast to this idyll, the very superficial appearance of light-hearted nostalgic comedy in Good Bye Lenin! is a screen that covers a much harsher underlying reality (signalled at the film’s opening by the brutal intrusion of the Stasi into the family home after the husband escapes to the West). The lesson is thus much more desperate than the one of Lives: No heroic resistance to the GDR regime could be sustained. The only way to survive was to escape into madness, to disconnect from reality.

Good Bye Lenin! tells the story of a son whose mother, an honest GDR believer, has a heart attack on the night of the demonstrations that ultimately led to the regime’s demise in 1991. She survives, but the doctor warns the son that any traumatic experience could cause her death. With the help of a friend, the son thus stages for his mother, who is contained to her apartment, the smooth continuation of the GDR: Every evening, they air the video-recorded fake GDR news. Toward the film’s end, the hero says that the game got out of hand—the fiction staged for the dying mother became an alternate GDR, reinvented as it should have been.

Therein resides the key political question, beyond the rather boring topic of Ostalgie (which is not a real longing for the GDR, but the enactment of the real parting from it, the acquiring of a distance, de-traumatization): Was this dream of an “alternate GDR” inherent to the GDR itself? When, in the final fictional TV report, the new GDR leader (the first GDR astronaut) decides to open the borders, allowing the West German citizens to escape consumer terrorism, hopeless life struggle and racism, it is clear that the need for such a utopian escape is real.

To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: “Good Bye Hitler” instead of “Good Bye Lenin.” Doesn’t this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany toward the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a Lenin-statue carried by the helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may appear.

This, of course, in no way implies that Good Bye Lenin! is without faults. The weak point of the film is that (like Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful) it sustains the ethics of protecting one’s illusions: It manipulates the threat of a new heart attack as the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty. Isn’t the film then unexpectedly endorsing Leo Strauss’ thesis on the need for a “noble lie”? So is it really that the emancipatory potential of Communism is only a “noble lie” to be staged and sustained for the naive believers, a lie which effectively only masks the ruthless violence of the Communist rule? Here mother is the “subject supposed to believe”: through her, others sustain their belief. (The irony is that it is usually the mother who is supposed to be the caretaker, protecting children from cruel reality.)

The lesson of all this? We are still waiting for a film that would provide a complete description of the GDR terror, a film that would do for the Stasi what Varlam Shalamov, in his unsurpassed Kolyma Tales, did for the Gulag.

Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He is the author of, among many other books, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

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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.

    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

    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.

    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?

    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?

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

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