Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck could have come straight from central
casting: young, tall, good-looking, with a mane of swept-back curly hair and
an aristocratic pedigree as long as his name — and now, to cap it all, an
Oscar for his first full-length film. In his acceptance speech, he paid lip
service to Hollywood by thanking Arnold Schwarzenegger for teaching him to
drop the words “I can’t” from his vocabulary. But his winning movie, The
Lives of Others, is as far removed from the world of The Terminator as
Albert Camus is from Spider-Man 2.
Just 33, Donnersmarck has written and directed not just the best piece of
cinema to come out of Germany since Das Boot, but a film that could realign
his country’s whole perception of itself. Made on a shoestring budget of
little more than £1m, it is uniquely moving and uplifting in a credible,
human way that far too little made for the big screen today manages to be.
This is a film that turns inside out the dark heart of the cold war, so
recently over, so soon forgotten, even — particularly — on the front lines
of its battlefields. It is a spy movie about spies who make Harry Palmer
seem glamorous and James Bond a comic-book aberration. They were the sort
who glorified the skills of the filing clerk, who lived not so much by guns
and bullets as by eavesdropping, inference and innuendo, backed up only when
necessary by dull, brutal repression; spies who made everyone they touched
into spies, sometimes without them knowing. The sort that those of us who
lived in their midst learnt to live with, like a persistent ache that we
refused to acknowledge was cancer.
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) is set in East Berlin in 1984-85,
the bitter dregs of what was to be the cold war’s closing phase, with the
brief hopes of Soviet reform under Andropov smothered by the dead hand of
Chernenko — a period Donnersmarck chose deliberately. Its chief protagonists
are a playwright who leads, he believes, a life that is “politically
correct” — East Germany gave us the phrase — with his actress lover, and the
Stasi secret policeman put on his trail, “just in case”. It is a powerful
story of cynical suspicion, covert surveillance, deceit, betrayal, tragedy
and redemption. That is what won it its Oscar.
Yet its importance goes far beyond its artistic merits, as the first serious
attempt to tackle the dark side of the more recent German dictatorship,
memory of which is in danger of being not so much sanitised as trivialised
by a generation keen to forget and a new one too young to remember. When the
Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Donnersmarck was 16. For him, and for
most other young Germans today, the old East Germany — the DDR (in English,
GDR: German Democratic Republic) — is already history. But it is history
threatened by a feelgood nostalgia ( Ostalgie in German, the word Ost
meaning east), the way an older British generation used to wax lyrical about
the wartime spirit. There appears to be a human need to repress the worst
memories of evil times in favour of the few good ones: a need all too
frequently in need of correction.
Of the tiny number of German (or any other European) films that make it onto
the screens of even a few of our Hollywood-dominated cinema chains, only
Good Bye Lenin! (2003) touched on the topic. It was a bittersweet comedy
about a die-hard communist who falls into a coma just before the wall comes
down. When she wakes up shortly afterwards, her family and friends must
pretendcommunism still exists for fear of causing a shock that would kill
her. It is charming, whimsical and clever. But it is also, Donnersmarck said
when we talked in London last week, perpetuating, if not an actual lie, then
at least a sugar-coated distortion of reality: “Imagine if someone had made
a film in 1960 about a staunch national socialist waking up out of a coma in
1945, and her children desperately trying to reassure her that Berlin is
still ‘Jew-free’.”
Obviously, the communist regime wasn’t a monstrosity on the scale of the Third
Reich, but Donnersmarck objects to presenting the GDR as a “cute, cuddly
sort of little country” where some things didn’t work, but the basic values
were right. “It helped to contribute to the idea that the GDR wasn’t a
dictatorship,” he says, horrified by a recent poll that found most young
Germans would not apply the term to the GDR, “even though it professed to be
‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’.”
The reunited Germany has made a fetish of Ostalgie : T-shirts printed
with the hammer-and-compasses state symbol and the DDR logo, people dressed
in old communist youth-organisation uniform or [the late dictator] Erich
Honecker masks turning up at Berlin discos. Television programmes such as
The DDR Show, co-presented by the Olympic skating gold medallist Katarina
Witt, played up nostalgia for everything from “Trabbies” (fibreglass-bodied
cars) to Rotkäppchen (a barely drinkable sparkling wine). And
Leander Haussmann, a successful theatre director under communism, had a hit
with Sonnenallee (1999), a sort of East German American Graffiti, named for
a teenage East Berlin drag strip that ended in a border crossing to the
West.
Donnersmarck is relatively sympathetic towards that one: “It was really a
‘lost youth’ movie. Everybody sees their youth as a lost country, but there
is a generation out there for which it really is a lost country, a country
that no longer exists.” He has less kind words, however, for 2005’s NVA,
which attempted the brave but unwise task of making a jolly comedy about
communist military conscription, to a soundtrack of Bad Moon Rising. “But
then, if these comedies hadn’t been made, perhaps I wouldn’t have been able
to make my film. Films like those showed up the serious lack of one like
mine. Even so, the first people I approached wanted me to rewrite it with
more jokes.” In the end, what made his film financially possible, he
insists, was the enthusiasm of everyone involved, not least his stars, who
all “took just 20% of what they would normally ask”.
They had good reasons. For Sebastian Koch, who plays the writer, it offers a
gift of a role that will cement his status as the new poster boy of European
film. But several of the actors, including Ulrich Möhe, whose performance as
the clinical but all too human Stasi officer is priceless, had brutal
first-hand experience of the world they were portraying. In 1990, Möhe
divorced his wife, the actress Jenny Gröllmann, amid allegations that she
was a Stasi informer, which were never proven. Donnersmarck’s references to
their relationship had to be deleted from the director’s commentary on the
German-release DVD, “because the production company did not want to hold it
up to fight the legal battles”.
Möhe’s story was pertinent because the climax of the film centres on the
pressure exerted on the dramatist’s lover to make her betray him to the
Stasi as the author of, to them, a treasonous exposé of covered-up GDR
suicide rates. It is not a true story in the sense of an actual case The
Lives of Others opens on April 13 history, but, in Donnersmarck’s words:
“It is true in the way Doctor Zhivago is true about the Russian revolution,
or The Deer Hunter is true about the Vietnam war.”
Scarcely a modest comparison, but this is not a man given to, or in need of,
false modesty. Donnersmarck comes from an old aristocratic family with roots
in Silesia, but he had relatives in EastGermany and recalls visits there,
including the indignityof his mother being subjected to a strip search. His
father worked for Lufthansa, and he lived in New York and Brussels, as well
as Berlin. He studied in Oxford, but also in postSoviet St Petersburg: our
interview at one point slips from German into Russian and back. As the film
suggests, he believes in the importance of individuals rather than political
parties (he has never bothered to vote), though he rates the German
chancellor, Angela Merkel, whom he has met, as “highly intelligent”.
He admits it is now time to take a breather before deciding what to do next.
“Whatever it is, it won’t have anything to do with the Stasi. I want to get
my own life back, rediscover my wife and family.” Which is unsurprising
after four years of researching and writing his screenplay.
Such was the goodwill that accrued to the production, it was granted
unparalleled access to the preserved former Stasi headquarters, using its
cells and offices — it even acquired a genuine steaming machine, capable of
opening 600 letters an hour. As a result, the film has an accuracy that is
almost excruciating for those of us who lived for several years in East
Berlin, where foreign correspondents were guaranteed the attention of the
Stasi. I took it for granted that my flat was bugged, but it was only years
after 1990, when new occupants redecorated, that the 27 by then long unused
microphones in the walls were uncovered. Already, back in 1993, thanks to
reunified Germany’s freedom-of-information system, I had had access to the
214-page file the Stasi kept on me.
There is a grim fascination to reading the dull but detailed reports of the
long hours Major Arnold Blum spent watching my movements, noting that I let
my wife carry the groceries, that my hair was unkempt and that one day,
after swimming at a lake, I pulled my jeans on over my trunks. Then there
were the thankfully less detailed reports of the hours Lieutenant Weichelt
spent with headphones glued to his ears — like Möhe’s Stasi man — in the
empty next-door flat, listening to my wife and me in the kitchen, living
room, bedroom.
To the Stasi ghosts in my walls, I was just code name Streamer, subject of the
Stasi Chief Directorate HA II/13’s OPK (personal control operation) 5209/82.
The Lives of Others is a film about what happens when people become just
numbers, and the risks and rewards of rediscovering their humanity.
