STASI DRAMA WORTHY OF SUBTITLES

DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN (THE LIFE OF THE OTHER)
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck; cinematography by Hagen Bogdanski
With: Martina Gedeck, Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, and Thomas Thieme
Running time: 137 minutes

¾

Reviewed by Todd Buell

BERLIN—It often takes a bit of time for German films to make it across the ocean and into American theaters. This is a pity because in the last seven years Germans have directed some stellar films that deal with the National Socialist and state-socialist horrors that blighted all or part of Germany during the twentieth century. Sonnenallee (1999) and Good Bye Lenin! (2003) are comedies set in East Germany, while last year’s hit Sophie Scholl, Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days) is a dark and psychologically compelling account of Nazi resister Sophie Scholl’s arrest, interrogation, and ultimately the final moments before her execution. This film is a more focused account of the same story recounted in the 1982 film Die Weiβe Rose.

This introduction reveals that German cinema is perfectly comfortable portraying the evils of National Socialism (though the 2004 film Der Untergang [The Downfall] received critical attention because it dared to show Hitler’s more “human” side), but it has yet to combat the totalitarian excesses that took place under East German state socialism. The director of Das Leben der Anderen, Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck (aka Henkel-Donnersmarck), stated in a television interview that Germans needed first to laugh about what happened behind the Iron Curtain pre-1989 before they could take a serious and somber look at the part of the country’s Soviet-inspired past. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film is helpful in that regard, and I hope that it is soon shown in English-speaking theaters.

The movie is primarily an examination of the abuse of power that took place within the Stasi (the shorthand for Staatssicherheitsdienst, or “state security service”) in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). At the beginning, we meet officer Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) of the Stasi as he questions a political suspect in the basement of the infamous Hohenschönhausen interrogation center in East Berlin in 1984. The person is thought to know who aided an East German fleeing to the West. This questioning scene is portrayed in concert with Wiesler teaching a class of young Stasi recruits the finer points of interrogation, while listening to a recording of Wiesler’s questioning of this suspect, at the Stasi academy.

Early on, Wiesler’s zeal for his mission is equally striking and frightening. We see him questioning the suspect for hours, asking him the same question repeatedly until the man is exhausted and in tears. He justifies this aggressive and relentless questioning to his students, saying that liars repeat the same line incessantly and become emotionally distraught because they can’t keep up the lie forever. Eventually, after Wiesler threatens to have the man’s wife arrested, the suspect capitulates and tells Wiesler the name of the man he has been seeking.

The main drama begins when Wiesler and his boss, Lieutenant Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), attend a theater production directed by the esteemed East German writer and director Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Immediately Wiesler identifies Dreyman as the “arrogant type I tell my students to watch out for.” This comment stuns Grubitz, who retorts that Dreyman is one of the few loyal East Germans who is read in the West. Regardless, Wiesler is able to convince Grubitz to allow him to have Dreyman’s apartment bugged, which he shares with his partner, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

To further our view of Wiesler at this point as a nasty, zealous, and manipulative officer, the movie gives us a scene where Wiesler catches one of Dreyman’s neighbors, who just happened to see the Stasi setting up the surveillance equipment in Dreyman’s apartment. He threatens that if she tells anyone what she’s seen, someone in her family will lose a position in a medical school.

However, as our Stasi main character begins his account from the building’s attic of the life and times of Georg and Christa, he also gets embroiled into the internal politics of the security service itself. He allows his feelings and sympathies to play a role in his work—not only those of the subject of his investigation but those within the Stasi.

A good example, and one of the funniest moments in the film, is when Wiesler and Grubitz go to lunch in the Stasi cafeteria. They sit on the opposite end of a long table from three younger officers, one of whom has a bit of an irreverent sense of humor. He starts to make a joke about the then East German President Erich Honecker. When he is admonished by his peers not to say it in the presence of Wiesler and Grubitz, Grubitz looks toward the young man and encourages him to carry on with the joke. When the joke ends (which sparked considerable laughter in the audience both times I saw the film), Grubitz laughs then, as his face quickly becomes grave, insists that the recruit reveal his name and hand over his party card.

It looks as if Grubitz has manipulated the young officer into openly betraying his party, and forever damaging his career, when suddenly Grubitz breaks out in laughter, saying he was “only kidding,” and that he has his own Honecker joke he wants to tell. (It turns out not to be very funny.) Wiesler seems amused neither at the young man’s joke nor his superior’s blatant use of fear and manipulation against the recruit.

If this experience begins to make Wiesler question the moral rectitude of the people he works for, this feeling is further exacerbated when he learns, through his eavesdropping, that Christa is engaging in a not-entirely-consensual affair with the East German minister for culture so that she and Georg can be assured of constant income through their work. I won’t give too much away, but Wiesler does cleverly intervene to discourage Christa from continuing the relationship.

Clever intervention is a good way of describing the rest of the story that focuses on Wiesler’s active surveillance of Georg and Christa, especially when he learns that Georg is crafting an essay to be published in the Western German magazine Der Spiegel (a German magazine similar to Time or Newsweek) that will make a strong condemnation of current DDR politics.

Wiesler tries to find a way to protect the couple from suspicion while also making it seem as if he’s still a good Stasi man. The resolution of this conflict leads, albeit not exactly seamlessly, into a clever, unpredictable, and subtle reconciliation with the past after Germany reunifies in 1990, with a final scene that is brilliant on multiple levels not only with its indirect interaction between two characters but also with the clash in cultures that it portrays.

Director and screenwriter von Donnersmarck said that he wanted to give a German audience a serious look at life in the German Democratic Republic, as opposed to the two well-known comedies produced earlier. Though there is some dispute among the German media as to how realistic the film is, there seems to be little dispute that the story line is plausible. Not every detail might be accurate when judged against the way the GDR “really was,” but there is no doubt that the ethos of fear, manipulation, and abuse of power displayed in the film really existed in East Germany.

I hope that a studio or production company adds subtitles to this film so that an English-speaking audience can enjoy this film with the Germans. Recent films, such as Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck., sold well, focusing on abuse of power within an American-centered context. Das Leben der Anderen examines abuses of power within a state-socialist apparatus. This leitmotif could attract American viewers of a certain political persuasion (those who love anything that reveals “the evils of Communism”), while the constant news about wiretapping and eavesdropping from America’s own security services could prompt some viewers to want to watch this film in order to question just how different we really are from our erstwhile enemies.  

 

The current Journal in print is
Winter

5 1/2" x 5" 2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just $10.00 each
More Info

More Info

© Wolf Moon Press 2002-2007 all rights reserved.

Submission Guidelines