This 2006 German film, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign language film, has raised much admiration and controversy. It concerns the redemption of a Captain in the STASI, the East German Secret Police, and a critic of the STASI and of this film, Anne Funder, wrote in Sight & Sound, The British Film Institute magazine (May 2007) that
‘Writer-Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s script (for other People’s Lives) is brilliant and his direction flawless. This film is cleverly plotted, nicely detailed, emotionally powerful, and ….it looks beautiful. The cast …are magnificent, the design and score exceptional It is the best film I have seen for a long time.’ (Sight & Sound page 16.)
But, she says, it raises the question of ‘the responsibility of art - or entertainment - in history and to justice.’ (p20) The Lives of Others falsifies a fundamental truth about the East German regime in order to make a more uplifting entertainment. Stasi men did not have a change of heart, they did not help their victims, they did not side with the oppressed. ‘This never occurred. This was impossible.’ (p16).
The director says this is ‘a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path.’ And Funder tells us that Von Donnersmarck spend four years researching this film. ‘and knows as well as anyone that there is no case of a Stasi man trying to save his victims. He has said ‘I didn’t want to tell a true story so much as to explore how someone might have behaved. The film is more of a basic expression of belief in humanity than an account of what actually happened.’
Funder ask ‘how would we feel if a wonderfully moving film, one alive to nuance and contradiction and acute about the human desire for forgiveness, was made about a Gestapo officer who had a change of heart and started trying to save Jews he had been ordered to persecute?’
But Funder Questions are more about context than content. Her objection is to the way a battle is currently taking place in the German media, the courts and on the streets of Berlin. Funder quotes from Dr Hubertus Knabe the current director of the Hohenschonhausen, the former jail for political prisoners in Berlin, now a memorial museum, who says that ’there is a creeping rehabilitation going on.’ ‘Even after 16 years after the fall of the SED dictatorship, most Stasi people are still of the view that they did nothing wrong.’ (p 20) Funder tells us that Groups of Stasi men are becoming increasingly belligerent. They write articles and books, conduct lawsuits against people who speak out against them, intimidate former victims are affiliated with the SPD (the successor to the SED) which is a powerful group in government.’ (p19).
Funder’s rage is clear, and so is her loyalty to the victims of the Stasi. These are the ones who should be heroes, she believes. But I wonder why she is so insistent that any incident resembling the change of heart and mind portrayed in The Lives of Others could not have happened. It may not have been recorded in Stasi files, and the beneficiary of such surely have kept quiet about it to protect their saviour. But maybe Funder cannot believe in this possibility because it offends her fixed views about the absolute effectiveness of Stasi indoctrination and the immutability f the human heart. Is there a contradiction here? Surely indoctrination changes minds and hearts - unless all the Stasi officers and operatives were born callous and vindictive and invulnerable to human empathy and compassion. And if they can be changed once, surely they can be changed again.
But Funder may be too close to the injustice she believes is still being done to the Stasi victims, and to the atheistic philosophy that dominated East Germany for four-year to see the possibility of redemption and the ongoing need for forgiveness and reconciliation. Funder wants justice.
The battle for the reputation of the Stasi men currently being waged in the media, the entertainment business, the courts, in personal intimidation of former victims and in demonstrations on the streets of Berlin cannot be understood without understanding that it is being waged with the Third Reich in the back of everyone's minds. The Stasi men are furiously fighting so as not to go down in history as the second lot of incontestable bogeymen thrown up by 20th-century Germany. And many Germans themselves are deeply uncomfortable about recognising the chilling inhumanity of this, the second dictatorship on their soil.
Several times on my book tour in 2004, in both former West and former East Germany, a sad and telling question was asked. At the end of the reading, after any ex-Stasi who were there had left, someone would say, "What is it about us Germans, do you think, that makes us do these things?" By "these things" they meant the totalitarian and administrative cruelties of the Nazi and the Stasi regimes. I have no answer; I do not think they are particularly German things to do. But there is such terror and tragedy in the question that I can see why a fable of forgiveness might hit the mark.’
The fable of forgiveness? I wonder how seriously Ms. Funder can take the true stories of forgiveness that followed in the years, the decades, after the Holocaust?
