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Das Leben der Anderen
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Two months ago, I was sitting in the formerly East
German
Kollwitz Platz in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg
district with five friends.
Marianne Birthler gave us a sneak DVD preview of
a film from an young unknown director about the GDR.
"The Life of Others". All of us watching the
film had opposed the regime, some of us were even
its scarred jailbirds. When I read the name
of the director, it occurred to me that this
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (bio)
had sent me the draft script for his film about the
GDR secret police (Stasi)
two years or so ago. At the time I had flicked
through it irritably. I wanted nothing to do with a
project like this. I was convinced that this novice,
this naive upper-class kid who had been graced with
being born so late in the West would never, ever be
capable of tackling this sort of GDR material,
either politically or artistically.
When we'd finished watching the film after a good
two hours, I was astounded, confused, pleasantly
disappointed and cautiously enthusiastic. A
heated argument ensued. Two of the friends gathered
thought the film was full of inaccurate details. A
minister of culture could never have had so much
influence on the Stasi apparat as the film showed.
After all the MfS or Ministry for State Security was
strictly and staunchly what it was set up to be and
what it wanted to be: "the shield and sword of
the party" – no more, no less. A lieutenant
colonel in
Erich Mielke's company would never ever taken
marching orders from some comrade minister! The
decisions were always made by the party leadership;
the state was only the executive organ. And there
was absolutely no way that the Stasi would have been
drawn into exercising their powers on the behest of
a cultural functionary, just because this flaccid
individual had got the elderly hots for some
GDR starlet who lived with her ambitious and
successful GDR playwright.
And another inaccuracy: the film portrayed the young
writer as someone who conformed to the system. But
only truly oppositional writers were "operatively
handled", informed on, tapped, and followed to
that extent. And and and! And young officers of the
MfS would never ever have goofed about in plain
clothes in their academy lecture hall! These and
other details are just plain wrong. And! And! And
anyway the film put a soft pedal on the totalitarian
reality.
Dramatist Georg Dreyman
(Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend Christa-Maria
Sieland (Martina Gedeck) are spied on by Stasi
officer Gerd Wiesler. Photo: Verleih
I was among those in our friendly circle of experts
who considered these fuzzinesses beside the point.
The basic story in "The Life of Others" is
insane and true and beautiful – by which I mean
really very sad. The political tone is authentic, I
was moved by the plot. But why? Perhaps I was just
won over sentimentally, because of the seductive
mass of details which look like they were lifted
from my own past between the total ban of my
work in 1965 and denaturalisation in 1976. So
uncertainty and suspicion linger on: if such
Saul-Paul conversions of Stasi officers really did
take place, where were similar shining examples
after the fall of the Wall? No one explained
themselves publicly or privately to me or my "degenerate"
friends, still less apologised for a crime, which
only the onlookers in the East and West ring seats
of the historical boxing ring could waive off
blithely...
When I watch this film through the eyes of my dead
friend the writer
Jürgen Fuchs, of course it rings home that in
the
Hohenschönhausen remand prison things were a lot
more brutal than they are in this film. The
mild-tempered Jürgen Fuchs would have had a fit had
he been sitting there with us. He would have
probably said: "Now the mymidons of the dictatorship
are being humanised! GDR life grew more brutal, more
grey and more terrible by the day. Are Stasi
criminals like Mielke and
Markus Wolf being softened in the wash
like poor old Adolf in the last days in the
Führerbunker under the Reich's chancellery?"
I cannot know whether the wonderful conversion of
the Stasi chief is a historical lie or an artistic
understatement. We are all addicted to evidence
of people's ability to change for the good.
I know that decades ago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was out to achieve the
greatest effect, but it was not in one of his
thick books where all the horrifying mass murders
and systematic horrors in the
Gulag archipelago are truthfully described and
listed with encyclopaedic meticulousness.
No, it was in his very first novella: "A day in the
life of Ivan Denisovich" that he tried to achieve
the strongest effect in the world. Here Solzhenitsyn
does nothing more than describe one of the more
pleasant days of an ordinary prisoner in an ordinary
labour camp in the Stalin era, with no attractive
torturing: a refined piece of under-exaggeration.
And it was precisely this time-old device that
succeeded in breaking down people's inhibitions in
East and West about facing unbearable truths. And
Solzhenitsyn even managed to reach people in the
USSR who knew the blow-by-blow details first-hand,
because there too, after the 20th party congress
following Khruschev's secret speech about the crimes
of the Stalin era, this little book went into print
– sadly only for a brief period. However the effect
was long-lasting and in a back-to-front way it took
effect in the GDR, back-to-front because it was only
printed in West German.
But back to our film "The Life of Others". This is
the story: a professional people "corroder",
a bull-headed "fighter on the invisible front" gets
corroded himself. The MfS Captain Gerd Wiesler is a
tough cookie but he softens up. He eavesdrops via
phone bugs on lovers and then after hours he sneaks
back to the "actually existing socialist" tiled
coffin of his modern flat and creeps into his empty
bed. Another time in his sterile room, he answers
the call of nature with a 15 minute rent girl from
the MfS sex service. This man is at least as
lonely as his victims in solitary confinement and
incomparably worse off than the actress and her
writer, whom he and his subordinates have to listen
in on and shadow round the clock.
Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe)
doing his work. Photo: Buena Vista
In the attic above the bugged flat he transcribes
word for word the discussions and the silences of
the intellectuals he is "operatively handling". And
he is increasingly seduced by their liveliness. By
the end of the story he is ruined for this wretched
job as a "people corroder". With a beautiful twist
he goes kaputt while professionally making others
kaputt and this is the fairytale variation of the "deformation
professionelle."
I have similar stories to tell involving two women
when I lived at Chauseestraße 131. I lay in the
clinch of two brave fighting ladies, who were
working in Mielke's service, and who had the special
mission of defeating the "songwriter" and people's
enemy with erotic weapons, and who then de-conspired
and deserted Mielkes erotic brigade.
This film was able to convey things to me that I
could never have imagined "being real".
In the ten thousand pages of my Stasi files,
I found around 215 (in words:
two-hundred-and-fifteen) aliases of a number of
unofficial employees, vulgo: "spitzel" or informers.
Of course I know many of their faces. The documents
are also strewn with the real family names of
umpteen official employees, all officers, in other
words higher ranking pen pushers, like comrades
Reuter and Lohr, in other words characters like
those in the film. The art work lends these
faceless scoundrels the facial expressions of
the actors which I can now read. Lohr and Reuter
worked for many years as part of the Central
Operative Operation "Poets" on systematically "corroding"
me – as the chemical terminus technicus of Stasi
jargon phrases it. Two of the twenty or so measures
against dissidents stand there, typed in a long list
by two Stasi index fingers on the office typewriter:
"Destruction of all love relationships and
friendships." Another: "faulty medical treatment".
I have never attempted to get personally acquainted
with any of these high-ranking criminals since the
collapse of the GDR. These ominous apparitions are
almost all still alive and they are drawing pensions
as civil servants of the reunified Bundesrepublik
Deutschland. And its clear that hardly any of these
perpetrators has ever forgiven his victims. And
what's more these senior lackeys of the GDR who
got off the hook so comfortably have certainly
never sought out a discussion with the people that
they systematically pursued for decades on end.
Certainly, they were somewhat altered as film
characters, but for the first time I saw these
phantoms as human beings, right down to their inner
contradictions. The ghosts are stepping out of the
shadows. Sometimes a work of art can have more
documentary clout than actual documents, whose truth
is doubted both by the perpetrators – of course –
and more painfully, by readers of the documents who
bore easily."
Captain Wiesler's superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton
Grubitz is played by the actor Ulrich Tukur. This
strong character actor lends the ideologically
encrusted silhouettes in the cave of my mind human
features at last, behind which the remains of a face
even emerge. And so the cardboard cut-out
villains in my life are finally given the
experience of real flesh and blood, and I can even
make out in each ravaged human countenance the
flashing of all the colours in the black and white
rainbow.
Stasi commander Anton Grubitz
(Ulrich Tukur) ovserves as Christa-Maria Sieland
(Martina Gedeck) is interrogated. Photo: Buena Vista
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Copyright © 2006 Albert van der Kaap
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