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<\/a>Three more interesting reviews or commentaries on The Lives of Others<\/a><\/i> came through my Google Reader account today.<\/span><\/p>\n
First, Timothy Garton Ash of The New York Review of Books<\/a><\/i>:<\/p>\n Watching the film for the first time, I was powerfully affected. Yet I was also moved to object, from my own experience: \u201cNo! It was not really like that. This is all too highly colored, romantic, even melodramatic; in reality, it was all much grayer, more tawdry and banal.\u201d The playwright, for example, in his smart brown corduroy suit and open-necked shirt, dresses, walks, and talks like a West German intellectual from Schwabing, a chic quarter of Munich, not an East German. Several details are also wrong. On everyday duty, Stasi officers would not have worn those smart dress uniforms, with polished knee-length leather boots, leather belts, and cavalry-style trousers. By contrast, the cadets in the Stasi university are shown in ordinary, student-type civilian clothes; they would have been in uniform. A Stasi surveillance team would have been most unlikely to install itself in the attic of the same building\u2014a sure give-away to the residents, not all of whom could have been reliably silenced by the kind of chilling warning that Wiesler delivers to the playwright\u2019s immediate neighbor across the stairwell: \u201cOne word to anyone and your Masha immediately loses her place to study medicine at university. Understood?\u201d . . .<\/p>\n But these objections are in an important sense beside the point. The point is that this is a movie. It uses the syntax and conventions of Hollywood to convey to the widest possible audience some part of the truth about life under the Stasi, and the larger truths that experience revealed about human nature. It mixes historical fact (several of the Stasi locations are real and most of the terminology and tradecraft is accurate) with the ingredients of a fast-paced thriller and love story. . . .<\/p>\n During a subsequent question-and-answer session in an Oxford cinema the director mentioned, in separate answers, two films that he admired: Claude Lanzmann\u2019s harrowing Holocaust documentary, Shoah<\/i>, and Anthony Minghella\u2019s version of The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/i>\u2014a thriller involving murder and stolen identity\u2014which he singled out because \u201cit doesn\u2019t bore me, and for that I\u2019m very grateful.\u201d In The Lives of Others<\/i>, Shoah<\/i> meets The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/i>. Von Donnersmarck does care about the historical facts, but he\u2019s even more concerned not to bore us. And for that we are grateful. . . .<\/p>\n The small inaccuracies and implausibilities are, on balance, justifiable artistic license, allowing a deeper truth to be conveyed. It does, however, lose something important: the sense of what Hannah Arendt famously called the banality of evil\u2014 and nowhere was evil more banal than in the net-curtained, plastic-wood cabins and caravans of the German Democratic Republic. Yet that is extraordinarily difficult to recreate, certainly for a wider audience, precisely because it was so banal, so unremittingly, mind-numbingly boring. (Or could a great screenwriter and director create a nonboring film about boredom? I lay down the challenge here.) . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Second, Anna Fulder of Sight & Sound<\/a><\/i>, via The ScreenGrab<\/a>:<\/p>\n S&S;<\/i>\u2018s Funder is equally admiring, from a distance, but much harder on the film\u2019s inaccuracies, and on the question of whether a Wiesler could really exist. In her view, no, because the Stasi\u2019s checks and balances, its internal surveillance, and its compartmentalization would not have put a real Wiesler into the situation in which the film version finds himself. Funder is also very good at pointing out certain different historical inaccuracies, and on the modern role of ex-Stasi members in contemporary society, where far from being humble lowly workers they are private sector surveillance experts and public protestors against their portrayal in society, where they are casually vicious about torturing (again) their former victims.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And finally, the incomparable Slavoj Zizek, at In These Times<\/a>, who contrasts this film with Good Bye Lenin!<\/a><\/i> (2003) \u2014 and warning, there be major, major spoilers here<\/b>:<\/p>\n Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others<\/i> misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister\u2019s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and \u201chonest\u201d bureaucrats. . . .<\/p>\n 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\u2014in Lives<\/i>, it is the woman, Christa-Maria, who breaks down and betrays her husband.<\/p>\n Isn\u2019t the reason for this weird distortion the film\u2019s secret homosexual undercurrent? The film\u2019s 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<\/i>\u2014the \u201cturning point\u201d when the Wall came down\u2014Dreyman discovers what went on by gaining access to his files. He returns Wiesler\u2019s 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\u2019s last scene, Wiesler goes to a bookstore (the legendary Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung on the Stalin Alee, of course), buys the writer\u2019s new novel, The Sonata for an Honest Man<\/i>, 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<\/i> recalls the famous ending of Casablanca<\/i>: With the \u201cbeginning of a beautiful friendship\u201d between Dreyman and Wiesler, now that the intruding obstacle of a woman is conveniently out of the way\u2014a true Christ-like gesture of sacrifice on her part. (No wonder her name is Christa-Maria!)<\/p>\n In contrast to this idyll, the very superficial appearance of light-hearted nostalgic comedy in Good Bye Lenin!<\/i> is a screen that covers a much harsher underlying reality (signalled at the film\u2019s 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<\/i>: No heroic resistance to the GDR regime could be sustained. The only way to survive was to escape into madness, to disconnect from reality. . . .<\/p>\n To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today\u2019s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: \u201cGood Bye Hitler\u201d instead of \u201cGood Bye Lenin.\u201d Doesn\u2019t 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? . . .<\/p>\n This, of course, in no way implies that Good Bye Lenin!<\/i> is without faults. The weak point of the film is that (like Roberto Benigni\u2019s Life is Beautiful<\/a><\/i>) it sustains the ethics of protecting one\u2019s illusions: It manipulates the threat of a new heart attack as the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one\u2019s fantasy as the highest ethical duty. Isn\u2019t the film then unexpectedly endorsing Leo Strauss\u2019 thesis on the need for a \u201cnoble lie\u201d? So is it really that the emancipatory potential of Communism is only a \u201cnoble lie\u201d to be staged and sustained for the naive believers, a lie which effectively only masks the ruthless violence of the Communist rule? . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n