by Lana Bunjevac
In recent years a whole range of very successful German movies have been produced which take place during the time of German Democratic Republic, particularly its last phase. These include Leander Haussmann's Sonnenallee, Sebastian Peterson's and Thomas Brussig's Helden Wie Wir, and Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye, Lenin!; the latter not only arousing nostalgic feelings, but also thematising positive memories of the GDR. Unlike those movies which process the GDR in a comedic way, von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen (The Life of Others) deals with a gruesome side of the GDR regime, depicting the systematic degradation of artists through Stasi spying. Through this movie the post-wall cinema, the German cinema after unification, offers us an interesting field of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (1) through entertainment cinema.
Why did it take so long for a movie as serious Das Leben der Anderen to gain a wide attention and audience? Did German audiences first need a certain distance through the comedic, loose, even ludicrous dealing with the past (best visible in TV-Ostalgie shows) before they were able to turn to the unpleasant side of history? I will come back to this later after first raising a few theoretical points.
After being divided for more than 40 years, two peoples with a common ethnic identity became a single nation again in the course of Germany's reunification in 1990. However, over more than 40 years of political division, opposing understandings of German identity developed deep roots. The exterior wall has fallen, but an interior one - a psychological and a social barrier - still divides Germans into categories of 'Eastern' and 'Western'.
The Wende (''turning point'') in 1989 was a failure to create a viable alternative to the chintzy consumerism of contemporary mass culture in the West. Eastern Germans were not able to erase overnight certain values and habits which they acquired in 40 years of life under the communist regime. They found themselves in a civil state, without enjoying the full benefits of citizenship themselves, or being, at least, second rate citizens. Arnold-de Simine explains this in the following statement:
In the ex-GDR the failure of the state has been followed, after a short period of euphoria by consistent high rates of unemployment, lower wages, and social anomie. The process of unification, the rapid takeover of nearly all East German institutions by the West and the dismantling of much of the structure of the economy and the state system at all levels, was based in large part on predictable binaries where things western were good and bad. The speed of transformation and the decisive discursive and institutional dominance by the West left relatively little public space for the processing (Aufarbeitung) of people's lived experience outside the simplistic binaries of East and West. This was accompanied by a sense of loss of control over one's own lives and future, especially as the promises of transition faded into the seeming reality of second-class citizenship (Arnold-de Simine, 2005:262)
There were spheres of social life in which East Germans were expected to adjust themselves to the new conditions. A confrontation with those new life conditions in the unified Germany led to a sort of defiant nostalgia or "a confused or pathetic longing for an irrecoverable eastern past", usually termed as Ostalgie. What once was a journalistic cliché in German press in the early 1990s, became a catchword in the everyday language of mass media and society.
For many in the East, the GDR – even with its ailing economic system and its repressive Stasi-apparatus and totalitarian dictatorship - is remembered in terms of the lived everyday. From the point of view of a "normal" GDR citizen - a citizen who celebrated with Rotkäppchen champagne and went on holidays to the Baltic sea in his Trabi; for such citizen to remember those times is human because you cannot erase your own past. In other words, "people were capable of creating honest lives for themselves [even] under adverse conditions". (Arnold-de Simine, 2005:275)
In regards to a nostalgia surrounding the East the leading public opinion creators and politicians are divided. Some warn of the danger of making a cult out of the GDR and about relativizing of the past. Others consider the wave of GDR-nostalgia as a phenomenon of the entertainment industry which could even accelarate the revival of business activity in the East (see Esbenshade, 1995:84-85).
The study of memory is particularly relevant for the 20th century Germany. The process of mastering the past has dominated West German's historical culture since 1960's as the result of sublation of personal and political guilt into collective symbolic guilt. However, after unification, the discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung needed to be reshaped to fit new challenges and needs. Since unification in 1989-90, Germany has faced the problem not only of bridging the "divided memory" of the Nazi past, but at the same time of incorporating the memory of the communist totalitarian past in the East of the country into an overriding national narrative. Dealing with both historical phases is formative for the view of Germans upon their history and it presents a special case in the European context.
I had the opportunity to interview Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck during the 2007 International Film Festival in Zagreb, Croatia and here is what he answered to my question of how far East and West Germany are apart from each other when it comes to attitudes towards events in the ex-GDR?
I believe that older generation is certainly more coined by the socialism and I believe that the West does not have a closed opinion in this case. The question is always where does one stand politically and I believe that young people are mostly indifferent - you can see that by various surveys, they do not even know what is Stasi and what was GDR, they do not recognize the name Honecker. A German director made once an inquiry among people younger than 20 and only a small percentage of them knew what Stasi actually was.
The Stasi that von Donnersmarck refers to – more properly the Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service) – was probably the widest network of espionage in the Cold War period. It is estimated that of 16 million GDR citizens, almost half a million collaborated with the Stasi. The Stasi kept files on 6 million citizens, spied on all phone calls to the West, and infiltrated every factory, office or youth club. Moreover, the spying on one's own family members was not an exception (interestingly, the main actor in Das Leben der Anderen, the late Ulrich Mühe, asserted that his former wife spied on him for 6 years of their marriage!). The Stasi influenced professional advancement, systematically used human weaknesses and did not shrink from penetrating into the private sphere in order to get the most intimate information of its victims. In simple words, there was no taboo for the Stasi.
In order to better understand Das Leben der Anderen, let me first briefly recount the plot. East Berlin, 1984, Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler receives an order from minister of culture Hempf to monitor a writer and a dramatist, Georg Dreyman. It is not long, however, before Wiesler discovers that Hempf does not have political, but private reasons to spy on Dreyman: he has a constrained affair with actress Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman's girlfriend, whom he puts under pressure professionally as well.
Dreyman, until now balancing between allegiance to the state and critical consciousness, decides after his friend's suicide to become a dissident and to write an article on high suicide rates in the GDR for the West German weekly magazine Der Spiegel. Because all typewriters are registered, Dreyman uses a separate typewriter with a red ribbon to write the article, which he hides under the floor in his apartment.
Meanwhile, Wisler spies on Dreyman and finds himself in a moral conflict - through espionage he gets insight into a world he has been so unfamiliar with and which - in contrast to his own - is full of social contacts, emotions, and artistic as well as political ambitions. Wisler decides to protect Dreyman and begins to falsify the protocols which will lead all of them into trouble. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall the Stasi's archives are opened to the public, and Dreyman finds out the truth when he reads his own file. Two years later, Dreyman publishes his novel ''Sonata for a Good Man'' and dedicates it to Wisler.
The movie shows that there were no limits between everyday life and the Stasi system in the GDR. On the contrary, an apparatus of repression intervened deeply into the life of people. At the same time, the movie provides a feeling of the GDR, which we have not experienced in cinema so far, a life completely free from any folklore or ornaments.
In earlier movies as well as in the media, the Stasi has always played a certain ''scapegoat role'' in regard to processing the past, which discharged a huge mass of ex-East German citizens from guilt. Wiesler's conversion from a perpetrator to the victim and finally to a hero was criticized as unrealistic from certain historians as well as from different victims organizations. Anna Funder (the author of "Stasiland") claims that it was not possible for a Stasi operative to have hidden much information from superiors because Stasi employees themselves were watched and operated in teams, seldom if ever working alone. Dr. Hubertus Knabe, the director of the memorial Hohenschönhausen prison, refused to give von Donnersmarck permission to film in prison, because he objected to "making the Stasi man into a hero".
Marianne Birthler, director of Stasi archives office in Berlin, argues that regarding the authenticity of the case in which a Stasi captain takes a risk and aligns himself with his victim, would be highly impossible in real life because a betrayal of the Stasi was punishable by death and not with the kind of benign sanctions seen in the movie.
Here is what von Donersmarck told me in regard to this in the interview :
There was a captain, Werner Teske, who was caught by his superior looking into the files he did not have permission for, and he was then put on trial. There is a recorded protocol with these court proceedings where he talks about how much doubt he developed on the system over the years and he was therefore executed, it was in 1981. There was also a Stasi official who spied on [singer-songwriter and dissident] Wolf Biermann and who then began to write poems himself and he even founded his own poem circle within Stasi. There were such cases, but this one is, of course, invented.
Further critics claim that no Stasi official was able to spy on a random GDR citizen, while others argue that sexual morality within the Stasi was rather narrow-minded, and therefore an affair between a minister of culture and an actress would be highly implausible. Von Donnersmarck "defends" himself by saying ''Honestly speaking, it was not only a GDR or a communism specialty... Powerful men and politicians and famous women, it can occur everywhere [laughs].''
In Wiesler's transition from a bad Stasi spy to a good man and to the conciliation at end of the movie, some critics see a ''necessity for relief'' as a possible motif for Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Let us see what von Donnersmarck answered to my question to what extent is this movie appropriate for Vergangenheitsbewältigung?
It certainly helps people to think about it, about this chapter in their history, but Vergangenheitsbewältigung is quite an abstract term. I mean, how can one master the past? One can become aware of it and I believe that the movie does help people to remember everything bad which happened at that time, because the things I describe in the movie happened like this on a daily basis, but Vergangenheitsbewältigung, that was certainly not my intention.
This is probably the most interesting statement - although almost everybody, from experts to laypersons, saw this move as perfectly appropriate for mastering the past, the director himself denies that this was his intention. Perhaps it is understandable that an artist might not want their work to be perceived only as an instrument for coming to terms with a collective past. However, I think time has already shown that people in Germany really needed something like this movie, although many critics argued that it was ''artistically a masterpiece, but historically a fairy-tale''.
In the end I turn once more to Arnold de-Simine who argues that "perhaps in the case of East Germans the succession of separatist, assimilative and re-affirmative phases has already arrived at the third phase. That would mean that a young generation that does not really know the GDR through personal experience is trying to build up an identity as East Germans by using a musealized image of a bygone society and culture". (2005:257)
In this sense I am much happier with the definition of the movie as a sort of ''cultural survival strategy'', meaning an attempt to renarrate the past and to supplement the official image of the gray, listless Stasi state and thereby to regain dignity, even at the risk of glorification.
Bibliography
Arnold-de Simine, Silke. 2005. Memory Traces: 1989 And the Question of German Cultural Identity. Oxford: Peter Lang
Esbenshade, R. 1995. "Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe". In Representations 49 (Winter 1995.):72-96.
Kansteiner, Wulf. 2002. "Finding Meaning In Memory: A methodological critique of collective memory studies". In History and Theory 41: 179-197.
Kansteiner, Wulf. 1999. "Mandarins in the Public Sphere: Vergangenheitsbewältigung and the Paradigm of Social Memory in the Federal Republic of Germany". In German Politics and Society 17(52): 84-117.
Klein, Kerwin Lee. "On The Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse". In Representations 69: 127-150. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, March 19th 2006 Der Tagesspiegel, March 22nd 2006
http://www.mfs-insider.de/Erkl/Zum%20Film.htm
http://www.mfs-insider.de/Presse/Zum%20Film1.htm
http://www.stern.de/unterhaltung/film/558074.html
Footnotes
(1) Typically translated as ‘working through the past’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung is a German term describing public processes within a nation that seek to address a problematic collective history.