The airtight glass jar looks about right to store summer plum jam ready for a
dark winter. Instead, it conserves the smell of dissidents. The Stasi, the
East German secret police, placed strips of cloth on the chairs used during
interrogations and later, in an act of perverse pseudo-science, kept them in
glass containers. Thousands of these jars were found in the Stasi cellars
after the Berlin Wall crumbled; further proof of communism’s neurotic
obsession with control.
In the opening scenes of the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others , the
chief interrogator tells Stasi cadets that smell-collection will be part of
their jobs, too. Madness rules and it is, in any case, the year 1984.
“Didn’t happen to me,” says Catharina Maege as we watch the film together.
There is a hint of resentment in her voice, as if to say ‘Wasn’t my smell
important enough?’
The film credits have only just started to roll and already my sample audience
of Stasi victims is grumbling. The Stasi men are too well dressed, says
Catharina. The artistic milieu — the setting of this remarkable film — is
not typical for East Germany, says Alex. Too privileged. There would have
been more spelling mistakes in the typed Stasi report, says Hugo Diederich.
Ex-prisoners are sticklers for detail.
The storyline of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, which goes on
general release in the UK on Friday, is fictional. A skilled interrogator,
played by Ulrich Möhe, is ordered to monitor the love affair between an
actress and a theatre director. The East German Culture Minister fancies the
actress and, with the help of the Stasi, is looking for a way to destroy her
relationship. Every moment, every grunt and whisper in their Berlin
apartment is recorded. The actress betrays her lover, is eaten up by remorse
and pays the price.
The interrogator is drawn into this hopeless love, finds a kind of goodness in
himself and also pays the price. To say more about the plot would be a
betrayal worthy of the Stasi.
Suffice to say that the film, for all its melodrama and theatricality, is
compelling. “The good thing about the film,” says Hugo, “is that it reminds
people that there were no limits. The Stasi could go as far as they wanted
to: into the bedroom, into the class-room, everywhere.” There were 90,000
full-time members of the Stasi, and there were 600,000 so-called IMs, a
network of informers embedded in every niche of society.
The odd thing about a police state is that it generates so many strands of
narrative, precisely because so many people are having to deny their own
personalities or are being forced into the wrong mould. The Lives of
Others is fictional but seems somehow less fictional, more connected to
the real world, than the true stories of the Stasi victims sitting next to
me in front of the improvised screen in a Berlin office.
Take Alex Latotzky, born in Bautzen, the most notorious of Stasi prisons, then
brought up in Sachsenhausen (the former Nazi concentration camp used after
the war as an East German detention centre) and the Hoheneck women’s prison.
Alex says: “My mother Ursula had complained, in 1946, about the rape and
murder of her mother by Soviet soldiers.” She was promptly arrested, accused
of being a spy and jailed for 15 years. In one of her labour camps she fell
in love with a Russian guard who made her pregnant with Alex. Now Alex tries
to sort out the pension problems of other Stasi victims.
Or take Catharina. In 1976 she was 19 and in love with a disillusioned East
German border guard. They planned to flee with another couple but had to
scrap the idea when the others were arrested.
Soon afterwards the Stasi took her prisoner. “I was sentenced to one year and
eight months in jail,” she says. “There was no evidence, no concrete attempt
to leave the country. The only crime was my thoughts and my will; what was
going on in my head.”
She shows me a picture of herself before her arrest — a fresh face, an
adventurous manner. Still a striking-looking woman, Catharina has become
more cautious, more sceptical. Her home phone number she keeps secret.
These stories and many, many others are as filmic as The Lives of Others
. Little wonder, then, as we sit in the cramped Berlin office used by the
Association for the Victims of Stalinism, that my companions fall naturally
into the role of film critics. “No popcorn,” Axel moans, but it’s just as
well that we are not in a real cinema. The constant patter of commentary
would certainly have prompted an usher to throw them out (German cinemas
really do expel customers who chatter).
On screen, the film depicts a party at the director’s flat. There is a
confrontation in which a theatre worker accuses another of working for the
Stasi. Was that credible, I ask my team of critics.
Catharina: “You would never have said that to somebody’s face. Later, after the
party, you might say to your trusted friends, he has such-and-such contacts.”
Hugo: “Or you don’t ask them at all. When we were celebrating in a pub we
might see someone sitting in the corner and say to each other, look, it’s
one of them. If you kept your eyes peeled you could spot full-time Stasi
agents carrying shopping bags full of things that weren’t in the shops.”
Hugo’s freedom was bought by the West German Government after he served a
month in a Stasi jail.
Alex chips in: “The big supermarket at Alexanderplatz — there was a floor
reserved for them.”
The Stasi were certainly privileged. They were top of the queue for cars, and
had special holiday guesthouses in Bulgaria and other communist countries.
One scene in the film shows the top Stasi interrogator (Möhe) ordering a Stasi
prostitute, the bill paid by his bosses. Yet the point about the Möhe
character is that he is not cynical or corrupt like his colleagues. At the
start of the story he believes passionately in what he does. “I swore an
oath on the sword and shield,” he says, referring to the symbol of the Stasi.
By 1984 — with five years to go before the far-from-inevitable collapse of the
Berlin Wall — it was rare to find a True Believer. My audience of victims
cannot quite believe it, but as Catharina says: “They were reporting on each
other so, of course, they mouthed politically correct utterances.”
This makes it almost impossible to understand the psychology of a secret
policeman; ordinary murderers are more straightforward. For the former
dissident Werner Schulz — now a Member of Parliament — the closed,
conspiratorial world of the Stasi made it very hard to develop a conscience.
“Only the cold-blooded and unscrupulous were promoted,” he says. “The
director has failed to understand his own film. Traitors to the cause risked
their lives. That’s why there weren’t any. There were no Gestapo men who
saved Jews. And no Stasi men who protected enemies of the state.”
So for Schulz, the film cannot transcend its essential implausibility.
Yet The Lives of Others is about illustrating choices. The central idea
is drawn from an observation by the Russian novelist Maxim Gorki. Lenin told
him that he could not risk listening to Beethoven because the music might
persuade him to stroke peoples’ heads rather than decapitate them. The
film’s Stasi man, we are asked to believe, becomes a better man by listening
secretly to the conversations and personal dilemmas of two talented artists
in love and concerned with doing the right thing.
My captive audience of three is sceptical not just about the possibility of a
Stasi officer seeing the light but also worried that the sympathy of the
audience could be stirred by his plight. The film ends after the Wall has
been tugged down — and the former highflying Stasi officer is seen handing
out advertising leaflets. A humiliating personal setback, we are led to
believe, but at least an honest job.
Most German viewers felt sorry for Möhe’s character: the wrong man in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
Alex: “We don’t need people like this in a democracy; that’s the point.”
Catharina: “I have a problem with this role. Why should I feel sympathy with
this man? Imagine if you portrayed other police-state criminals in this way.
There would be an outcry.”
Hugo: “It’s not as if the Stasi ended up destitute and on the street after
unification.”
Indeed, Stasi veterans have found myriad ways of looking after themselves in
the hostile environment of a democratic, capitalist unified Germany. Despite
the passing of countless death sentences, despite hundreds of fatal
shootings on the East-West border and the jailing of more than 300,000
political protesters during 40 years of communist dictatorship, only 19
people were ever given jail sentences. And the Stasi was never declared a
“criminal organisation”; unlike the Gestapo after the Second World War. As a
result, Stasi employees easily established networks: they resurfaced as
customs officers or policemen and 50 were even employed by the agency that
examines Stasi files. They run private-security companies, they sit in
regional parliaments.
Alex says: “After 1989 some became taxi drivers — and very good, too. You just
had to give your name and they knew the address.” Hugo’s Association for the
Victims of Stalinism (VOS) has tracked down a dozen organisations that take
care of Stasi veterans, an elaborate network. One senior Stasi officer
founded the so-called Association of the Unemployed and promptly hired two
former Stasi colonels and two Stasi majors.
Hugo adds: “Some ex-Stasi live well on big, fat pensions while Stasi victims
have only just won the right to a meagre €250 (£170) a month.” The
association is fighting to convince the political establishment that the
pension should rise according to how much time had been served in jail.
Through roundabout ways I tried to persuade at least one former Stasi officer
to watch the film with me. It was already clear that I would not be able to
get an ex-Stasi agent and a Stasi victim to sit in the same room together.
But we could, couldn’t we, watch a DVD together, just the two of us? With
the photographer snapping just the back of his head? I managed to have a
tense discussion with one former major. As soon as I mentioned The Lives
of Others he stood up wordlessly, did not touch his second beer and
walked out. I had high hopes of Uwe Karlstedt, a Stasi interrogator who had
fallen in love (and later married) one of his prisoners. But I received
nothing more than a crisp e-mailed refusal to talk about “that” film.
There is a battle still raging in Germany, 16 years on, a battle for memory.
It is impossible to go to a public discussion — whether it be about
communist sport or Che Guevara’s East German girlfriend — without a small
knot of embittered Stasi pensioners shouting “Lies! Lies!” And there are
constant attempts to fiddle with Wikipedia entries on East German subjects.
In this contaminated climate you cannot expect too much from a single film,
Oscar or no Oscar. The Lives of Others has failed to produce a
national catharsis. “But,” says Hugo, “it gets the atmosphere very well,”—
and the others agree. It is stimulating interest in the Stasi among young
people, prompting questions. And that, everyone agrees, is a good thing.
Well, perhaps not quite everyone.
–– The Lives of Others opens on Friday
