The Handmaid’s Tale is a gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution. Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.

If you would like to revise the text and read a comparison to Nineteen-Eighty Four go here and find The calculus of love and nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the dystopian tradition.

I thought it was a good set of papers and so did the students I saw after the exam. What did you think?

Well, not me, but this guy does. Read what he has to say and make your own mind up.

Here’s a taste:

AS WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS once told Edith Wharton, “Americans only want tragedies with happy endings.” And not just Americans, it seems, but also Germans along with everyone else on this punch-drunk planet who is able to afford the price of a movie ticket.

Whenever I tell people that I once lived for sixth months in old East Berlin and even wrote a whole book on ideology and propaganda in that troubled society, they almost always tell me how much they adore Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others. To them, this movie tells the true story of the East German experience and has redeemed their faith in humanity. “After seeing that movie,” they say, “I really get it!” Hmm, I always reply. How can that be? Because to my mind the young West German director’s debut epos is not just manipulative filmmaking but presents a profoundly flawed history lesson. Is my negative take on this Oscar winner – which made number one on The National Review’s “list of the 25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years” – merely a product of my imagined superior taste in movies or did the totalitarian experience sour me on “humanity” in general? Or is the scholar and history instructor in me rearing his head again? Since it is hard to explain my concerns to its devotees during a brief elevator ride, let alone amid the hubbub of a cocktail party, I think I owe an incredulous world a thorough explanation of why this movie is something other than “one of the cinema’s finest depictions of the softening of the human heart” (Conservapedia) and why thoughtful moviegoers should consider giving it a miss the next time it hits their local art house.

Before doing so I feel obliged to point out that my disdain for The Lives of Others does not in any way extend to fans of the film. On the contrary! Anyone who is willing to sit through two hours of gloomy Central European melodrama with colourless sets and pretentious subtitles has earned my respect. I also suspect that if I did not have such an intimate acquaintance with the realities of the East German regime, there is at least an outside chance that I might also think it was “the best movie I ever saw” (William F. Buckley). But I think nothing of the kind – and here’s why…

Keep reading here.

In Germany, “It’s forbidden by law to deny the crimes of the Nazis,” observes historian Hubertus Knabe, “But it’s almost forbidden by custom since reunification to really discuss the crimes of the regime that turned East Germany into a prison.”

The Lives of Others prompted open debate on the Stasi, a previously forbidden topic. Go here to read an interesting discussion about the film and the realities of the communist regime.

I am not a fan of the rat’s tail but this is something else …

Are you ready? Level Three exam tomorrow. Keep sending those last minute essays through and good luck!