Why I hate The Lives of Others

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.

Impact of The Lives of Others

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.

The fall of the wall

Twenty years ago today, one of the most enduring symbols of the Cold War – the Berlin Wall – began to fall, taking with it divisions that had cleaved both the city and the world for decades.

The fall of the wall was also the biggest domino in a tumbling of regimes and barriers right across Europe and into the Soviet Union.

Read Berlin War: 20 years on and Germany:Tug of Wall

He who has ears to hear

I have added a link to an article from Culturewatch on The Lives of Others that you may wish to read. Culturewatch  describes their work as exploring the message behind the media and it has a Christian focus.  Here is an extract:

The Lives of Others is one of the finest new films I’ve seen in a long time. Winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it is all the more amazing as this is German writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmark’s first film. Set in East Berlin in 1984, it is the story of two men. The first is Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright who is thought by the authorities to be alone among his peers in his loyalty to the Socialist Unity Party. The second, State Security (Stasi) Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), is absolutely committed to the Party and highly effective in his work. He has his doubts about Dreyman’s loyalty when he watches him at the premiere of his new play. Wiesler’s former classmate, Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), has become head of the Stasi culture department and laughs off Wiesler’s suspicions. But Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) has his eye on Dreyman’s girlfriend and leading lady Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). It would be useful for him if Dreyman was found to be disloyal, so he suggests to Grubitz that Dreyman should be placed under surveillance. Grubitz, eager to curry favour with the Minister, immediately agrees with the wisdom of this action, and entrusts the case to Wiesler. Wiesler has Dreyman’s apartment bugged, and sets up his listening post in the loft of the building.

 

By focusing attention on this one operation, Donnersmark examines the mechanisms of the entire German Democratic Republic. A title card at the beginning of the film informs us that the Stasi had nearly 100,000 employees at this point in history, and a further 200,000 informers. The goal was ‘to know everything’. The ruthlessness with which this goal is pursued is shown starkly by an opening sequence in which shots of Wiesler teaching a class of Stasi trainees are intercut with shots of one of his interrogation sessions. As he plays the recording of the interrogation to his students, he describes what he is trying to achieve: ‘The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation. An innocent man becomes more angry; a guilty man becomes quiet and calm, or he cries. A liar has prepared statements; a man telling the truth can reformulate the truth.’ Donnersmark intensively researched the Stasi for four years before filming (which lasted just 37 days), including interviewing former employees and those who had been detained, in order to ensure the accuracy of the situation he portrayed. He was insistent on using original locations for such a film: notably the Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse and the Central Detention Centre in Hohenschönhausen.

 

They have also discussed Children of Men – Hinting at Hope and Children of Men Discussion Guide.

Wiesler

In The Lives of Others Wiesler begins the film as a committed Stasi man, even conducting classes for new secret police recruits about interrogation methods but cracks begin to form in his worldview as he immerses himself in the lives of the artists he is spying on. The sterility of his own overly fastidious life is highlighted as he discovers the richness in the world of the Dreyman and Christa Maria.

Donnersmarck has said about the transformation of Wiesler, “It’s not specifically just that relationship. In all these screenplay books I read, they always said you need a specific turning point for the character. I’m always weary when people swing around in their political directions. People change when there’s a continuous crisis. It’s many things that push you in the same direction. On one hand, he realises that his friend, who was always a little less intelligent and a little less loyal, is actually having a more successful career than he is. He also sees that something as sacred as a mission to uncover an enemy of the state is used to satisfy a high party functionary’s testosterone level. This is not what he signed up for.

On the other hand, he realises these enemies of the state are normal people with problems, kindness, pettiness, and everything else. Then there’s the additional factor of him experiencing art, poetry, and music in a way he never has before. It’s all of that together, throughout the entire film, that makes him an almost-accidental hero. He’s not your knight in shining armour who fights for good.”

A conversation with von Donnersmarck

The film is an ode to the power of art and in this interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck he explains what he was trying to achieve with The Lives of Others. Here is an extract:

“What we are and what we display to the world is what we choose to reveal. It is the artist, he states, who would go into those dark parts of the soul where normally you never shine any light, find that part and use it and display it in their art. And I think that holds true for writers. While writing something, I’m kind of acting out these parts in my head, and if I don’t take that from inside then it won’t be true. It just will not be true.”

All this begs the question, what is it about art that makes it so dangerous to those in power? “I think it is related to exactly that thing we were just talking about,” answers von Donnersmarck. “An authoritarian society, a totalitarian regime, will try and tell you which of those facets of your Jungian character you are going to display. They have a certain vision of what mankind should be, and this is what they try and force you to do.”

“Now comes the artist, putting you on a sort of virtual reality ride of the soul for the soul and then has you see that this [forced] reality is not what you are really about. There is no way you can force a [person] into their old way of being after they have recognized that they are not what society wants them to be. And that is very scary to a totalitarian regime, so they try to weed out the [artists] who take people on that virtual reality ride of the soul.”

“And this is what the Stasi always did. They tried to get rid of actors and writers and directors who did not stick to the government’s ideas of how people were going to be. They hated real individualism, because individualism is just far too complicated and dangerous for a [government] to deal with. Even with 300,000 police officers they couldn’t keep individualism in check. They like people, or certain groups of people, to behave in more or less the same way because then they don’t have to deal or cope with them, they can predict their behavior.”

“They hate unpredictability. They hate anything which is in any way different. Since real art encourages you to be different, encourages you to recognize that you are different and special, and that’s in a way the essence of art. I mean, art is the perfect antidote to any sort of collectivism, so it is just the natural enemy [to totalitarianism], which is why I think the art that rose to the top in the GDR for me isn’t art at all. It is something that vaguely resembles art, but it is not at all the deep kind of experience that will help you explore your soul.”

Brecht’s Poem from The Lives of Others

1

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September

Beneath a young plum tree, quietly

I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved

In my arms just like a graceful dream.

And over us in the beautiful summer sky

There was a cloud on which my gaze rested

It was very white and so immensely high

And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2

Since that day many, many months

Have quietly floated down and past.

No doubt the plum trees were chopped down

And you ask me: what’s happened to my love?

So I answer you: I can’t remember.

And still, of course, I know what you mean

But I honestly can’t recollect her face

I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3

And that kiss too I would have long forgotten

Had not the cloud been present there

That I still know and always will remember

It was so white and came from on high.

Perhaps those plum trees still bloom

And that woman now may have had her seventh child

But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes

And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927)

Carl Jung Quotes

We were talking about Jung in class today and I have added some of his words below.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

Carl Jung

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.

Carl Jung

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Carl Jung

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Carl Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

Carl Jung

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.

Carl Jung

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

Carl Jung, “On the Psychology of the Unconciousness”, 1917

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Carl Jung

Interview: ‘The Lives of Others’ Director Florian von Donnersmarck

Go here to read an interview with director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He is interviewed by Cinematical and he chat about his film, his views on filmmaking … and which actor he’d want as his commanding officer in an actual war situation.

Here’s a taste –

The central theme that I got out of The Lives of Others was change and the capacity of people to change, and I wondered if you could talk a bit about that, and how you wove that theme throughout the film.

You’re right that that’s a central theme, because I think it’s one of the big questions in life: can we change, or are we just what our horoscopes tell us that we will be? At Oxford I studied Scholastic Philosophy, which included studying the works of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas always formulates things as a statement, and then he’ll have pros and cons about them and come to his own conclusion.

In one of these he debates the question of astrology. And he actually comes to the conclusion that astrology will tell you something about your future and where you are and where you’re going — maybe even tell you exactly. And he says that is why it’s so hard to change, why change feels like swimming upstream, because you’re fighting against all the stars and all the weight of that, against the current of the universe. I think it’s important to realize that when people change it’s always a legion of things that drive the change, not just one thing.

Interesting links for The Lives of Others

Try the links below to find some interesting reading on The Lives of Others:

German Movie Indicts Altruism by Implication

The Lives of Others – Beyond good and evil

Mystery Man on Film