Totalitarianism On Screen

Totalitarianism on Screen
Totalitarianism
on Screen
The Art and Politics of
The Lives of Others
Edited by
Carl Eric Scott and
F. Flagg Taylor IV
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Totalitarianism on screen : the art and politics of The lives of others / edited by Carl Eric
Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-4498-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4499-3 (pdf) —
ISBN 978-0-8131-4500-6 (epub)
1. Leben der Anderen (Motion picture) 2. Totalitarianism and motion pictures. I. Scott,
Carl Eric, editor of compilation. II. Taylor, F. Flagg, editor of compilation.
PN1997.L383T68 2014
791.43’72—dc23 2014010372
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of

American University Presses
Contents
Introduction 1
Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV
Part 1. Truth and Dissent

1. Post-totalitarianism in The Lives of Others 19
F. Flagg Taylor IV
2. What Is a Dissident? The Travails of the Intellectuals in The Lives
of Others 35
Lauren Weiner
Part 2. Art and Politics

3. Communist Moral Corruption and the Redemptive Power of Art
57
Carl Eric Scott
4. Long Day’s Journey into Brecht: The Ambivalent Politics of The Lives
of Others 83
Paul A. Cantor
5. The Tragic Ambiguity, or Ambiguous Tragedy, of Christa-Maria
Sieland 111
Dirk R. Johnson
Part 3. The Lives of Others and Other Films

6. The Lives of Others, Good Bye Lenin! and the Power of
Everydayness 137
James F. Pontuso
7. On the Impossibility of Withdrawal: Life in the Gray Zone 155
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
Part 4. The Lives of Others and the History of the GDR
8. Fiction or Lived History? On the Question of the Credibility of The
Lives of Others 171
Manfred Wilke
9. The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows 183
Wolf Biermann
10. Against Forgetting: A Conversation with Joachim Gauck 189
Paul Hockenos
11. East German Totalitarianism: A Warning from History 203
Peter Grieder
Part 5. The Stasi in the GDR

12. The Stasi: An Overview 231
Jens Gieseke
Acknowledgments 257
List of Contributors 259
Index 263
Introduction
Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV
“Don’t I need this whole system? What about you? Then you don’t need it
either. Or need it even less. But you get into bed with them too. Why do you
do it? Because they can destroy you too, despite your talent and your faith.
Because they decide what we play, who is to act, who can direct.”
These are the words of Christa-Maria Sieland, actress and girlfriend of
writer Georg Dreyman, East Germany’s most celebrated playwright. She
is being blackmailed by the minister of cultural affairs: sexual favors in
exchange for permission to continue her work on the East German stage.
Christa-Maria is about to attend to her duties with Minister Hempf, when
Dreyman, who has recently discovered the affair, implores her not to go.
“You don’t need him,” he says. Her reply, seen above, brings home an ugly
truth to Dreyman. Their work, their art, their success are not theirs. Drey-
man and Christa-Maria live well. They have a nice apartment with nice
things. They have many friends. Best of all, they have audiences who laud
their artistic endeavors. But all of this merely conceals the putrid core of the
system, the “really existing socialism” of the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), which dominates their lives.1
The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Don-
nersmarck,2 has been widely praised for its overall excellence, especially its
dramatic portrait of dissident activity and pervasive surveillance under the
GDR. Released in 2006 in Germany as Das Leben der Anderen, the film would
go on to win international acclaim and many awards. Lives was victorious
in seven categories at the German Film Awards and in four at the German
Film Critics Association Awards. In the United States, the film won Best
Foreign-Language Film at the Academy Awards and was honored at the
Independent Spirit Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
It was similarly honored in England, Ireland, France, Spain, Poland, Brazil,
Argentina, and Canada.
1
2 Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV
The brilliance of Donnersmarck’s film is that it brings the utter strange-

ness—the peculiar horror—of life in the GDR to audiences who have no
experience of such a phenomenon. His accomplishment is all the more
impressive in its recreation of this world “precisely because,” notes Timothy
Garton Ash, “it was so banal, so unremittingly, mind-numbingly boring.”3 As
the then thirty-three-year-old writer/director explained, “It’s not a Stasi film.
. . . That’s just the setting.”4 Donnersmarck said to John Esther, “I don’t want
to present someone with two hours of communist drabness.”5 After all, who
would pay to see such a film? So Donnersmarck set out to make what John
Podhoretz has termed “a character study in the guise of a stunning suspense
thriller.”6 In the view of Matthew Bernstein, Lives “explores canonical themes
of surveillance and voyeurism, using hierarchies of knowledge and recalling
Hitchcock’s best thrillers and especially Coppola’s The Conversation (1973).”7
Lives tells the story of two men whose lives intersect in dramatically
illuminating ways. Gerd Wiesler, a captain in the Staatssicherheit, or the
Stasi (the East German Ministry for State Security), is tasked with spying
on Georg Dreyman, heretofore the regime’s approved and award-winning
playwright. Dreyman’s life reveals to Wiesler that the ordinary goods of love,
beauty, and friendship are utterly absent from his own life. And in turn,
Wiesler’s actions wind up bringing Dreyman to see the extent to which he
has quietly compromised his own moral and artistic integrity for the sake of
success. Wiesler and Dreyman each attempt to extricate themselves from a
world of appearances and lies. So as the film brings to the fore the iniquity
of communism, it also succeeds as a drama of the human soul.
In Germany, the film attracted 1.7 million viewers during its first year.8
Lives would become the subject of much debate (sometimes quite heated)
for its portrayal of the Stasi in particular and life in the GDR more broadly.9
It has thus attracted a good deal of criticism—some even before the film-
ing started.10 Some critics charge Donnersmarck with distorting the truth
about the Stasi by demonizing it. Others, by contrast, object to the heroic
portrayal of Wiesler, a Stasi officer—there is no record of such an officer
betraying his orders and protecting a subject of surveillance. Many of the
essays in this volume touch on this criticism in particular. For reflections on
the historical accuracy more broadly, see the contributions to this volume
by Peter Grieder and Manfred Wilke.
For three basic reasons, the film merits continued attention and study.
First, a strong case can be made—one we endorse—that it is a masterpiece
of the cinematic art form. Second, it is one of the most insightful works in
Introduction 3
any literary medium about the nature of communism in general. Third, it

is one of the best portrayals of the particular communist regime known as
the German Democratic Republic.
Viewing The Lives of Others leaves most people deeply moved and still
intrigued by the plot’s complex development. It is a film that invites discus-
sion and multiple viewings, and that invitation becomes even clearer upon
listening to the director’s DVD commentary. While much of Donnersmarck’s
commentary rightly focuses on the excellence of the actors, he also reveals
the great care he took with all the details of the script and filming.11 We
learn, for example, that he insisted upon recording with analog sound, that
he obtained authentic Stasi surveillance equipment for the relevant scenes,
that he chose the names of the characters very deliberately, that he took
pains to borrow a particular painting for the apartment set and, astound-
ingly, that he had the entire costume and decorative scheme coordinated to
exclude certain colors, blue and red, that he felt were uncharacteristic of the
look of the GDR.12 Closer viewing and consideration show that these are
not the only details that Donnersmarck attended to—as many of the essays
in this volume demonstrate, plot structure, dialogue, music, composition,
and even props are all deployed to create a fully realized poetic “world” and
drama. Time will tell how this finely wrought artwork holds up when judged
according to the highest standards of cinema, that is, when compared with
the greatest films, and whether it achieves lasting popularity, but obviously,
the initial judgments have been remarkably favorable. It is our hope that the
essays in this volume, which in our estimation are far from exhaustive of the
interpretational discoveries available to students of the film, will demonstrate
the literary depth and landmark stature of Donnersmarck’s achievement.
A truly great work of art typically requires a truly great subject. There
can be no question that the triumph of totalitarian ideology, occurring more
briefly but more catastrophically with Nazism in Germany and at far greater
length with communism in the Soviet Union and a number of other nations,
has a powerful claim to be the signature event of the twentieth century. It is
our contention that The Lives of Others deserves a place as one of the truly
great works of art touching on the phenomenon of communist totalitarian-
ism. Though there are many great literary works on communism—George
Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Czesław Miłosz’s The
Captive Mind, to name a few—the number of good films on the subject is
surprisingly small.13
The Lives of Others is particularly successful in elucidating the nature and
function of ideology in a totalitarian regime. A communist party in power

rests its claim to authority upon its purported knowledge of history and its
claim that the dream of communism has been at least partially realized. Thus,
communist regimes must insist on mass participation in a multifaceted and
constant endeavor to maintain the appearance of the triumph of the ideol-
ogy. They likewise insist that everyone attribute deficiencies to the predicted
resistance of class enemies. This is why such systems, according to Václav
Havel, are “so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government
by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved
in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual
is presented as his ultimate liberation. . . . Because the regime is captive to
its own lies, it must falsify everything. . . . Individuals need not believe all
these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did. . . . For this
reason, they must live within a lie.”14 Donnersmarck’s film communicates
the anguish of living under such circumstances and how and why people
might have become captive to the illusions of such regimes.
The film’s central character, Wiesler, is a Stasi captain. Security organiza-
tions like the Stasi were central to the maintenance of obedience in all of the
countries of the Eastern bloc. Through their monitoring and surveillance of
their captive populations (whether directly, through official employees, or
indirectly, through an informant network), state security services enforced
compliance and ferreted out dissent. Here the Stasi was exceptional in the
extent of its power and reach. In 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall,
there were 91,015 full-time Stasi employees and 173,000 informants. In its
prewar phase, the Gestapo—the Nazi secret police—employed only 7,000
people for a population more than three times that of East Germany. And
the Stasi stands out by comparison with its brethren in the communist bloc:
while the Stasi had one full-time officer for every 180 East German citizens,
the ratio in other countries was not as high: USSR (1:595), Czechoslovakia
(1:867), and Poland (1:1,574).15
The Stasi, then, was a remarkable instrument of totalitarian control. Yet
one must draw important distinctions between the Stasi and the Gestapo or
the Soviet secret police during the 1930s. As Gary Bruce points out, outright
murder was by no means a routine occurrence for the Stasi. “Instead, the
Stasi employed more refined methods of control—extensive behind-the-
scenes monitoring by a vast army of informants, psychological methods to
disrupt individual lives, prisoner neglect, blackmail, coercion—methods,
no matter how distasteful, that do not equate with a shaft to the eye or, in
Introduction 5
real terms, to the brutal torture methods of the Gestapo.”16 Bruce’s point
here is a salutary reminder not to associate totalitarianism with mere ter-
ror and violence. Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century,
critics of the concept of totalitarianism argued that though the term once
seemed to capture the reality of communist oppression, with the decline in
terror and violence after the 1950s the term lacked descriptive power.17 Just
as the term was being abandoned in the West in academic circles, it was
being picked up by many anticommunist dissidents in the East throughout
the 1970s and 1980s. Though the regimes of this period lacked, to a large
extent, mass physical terror, labor camps, and deportations, everyday life
was defined by bureaucratic inertia, an omnipresent secret police, mass fear,
and apathy.18 Thus, Lives is important for its effective portrayal of totalitari-
anism in this later phase and for the way it captures communism’s coercive
and seductive power.
Though we will not rehearse the long debate around the concept of
totalitarianism here, we should point out that a version of this controversy
has played out in East German historiography specifically.19 While histo-
rians sympathetic to totalitarianism as a concept were in the ascendancy
shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by the turn of the century other
scholars stepped in to argue that the totalitarian approach failed primarily
due to sins of omission. By focusing too much on the state, its instruments,
and repression, these scholars argued, the totalitarian approach failed to
capture the full and textured reality of life in the GDR. Mary Fulbrook, for
example, faulted the totalitarian approach for the “near total exclusion from
[its] account of the people themselves, except when engaged in attempted
escape, political resistance, or popular uprising.”20 She has been struck by
how a political and social life that appears “bizarre” and “unintelligible” to
some seems “perfectly normal to many who grew up within the parameters
of the state.”21 Here we think Fulbrook’s critique misses the mark and she
fails to understand the nature of totalitarian rule. As Peter Grieder puts it
in his contribution to this volume, “What [Fulbrook] does not acknowledge
. . . is that totalitarian polities rule through rather than over society.” Scholars
continue to grapple with the question of how “East Germans [led] ‘perfectly
normal lives’ in a country with the Berlin Wall and the largest secret police
per capita in world history.”22 The debate has yielded strikingly different
answers, but Bruce is certainly correct to offer this assessment: “Daily life in
East Germany cannot be reduced to the Stasi, but daily life in East Germany
cannot be understood without taking it into account.”23
An accurate view of the GDR is of course significant not simply for

humanity’s fuller understanding of communist regimes, but also for the Ger-
man people themselves. Nor is this only or primarily a debate for scholars.
The divide between the Ossis and the Wessis remains quite economically, cul-
turally, and politically visible, and there are yet other divides among Germans
from both Eastern and Western backgrounds about how to approach the
legacy of the GDR. As Joachim Gauck has remarked: “We have two political
cultures in Germany: the culture of a society in transformation in the East,
and a halfway stable structure of a civil society in the West. When the two
meet, of course misunderstandings occur. In my opinion, these differences
stem more from the way mentalities are shaped than from participation in
the communist ideology. Only a few people really believed in communism.
But many people still feel that a free society is something very alien.”24 With
sensitivity to these divides and the legitimate differences of opinion they can
reflect, there can be no question that German society has a duty to deal with
the memory and aftermath of its second totalitarian regime.
Confronting this legacy is a varied and difficult task. One element
would be the pursuit of justice for the victims of communist tyranny. But
there has been no process akin to denazification with former communists
or Stasi employees. As Bruce reports, “Of the more than 91,000 full time
Stasi officers in 1989, thirty-three were sentenced by the year 2000. Twenty-
eight of the sentences were suspended, four were settled financially.”25 John
Rodden reports in Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent that many victims of
the Stasi express “rage and anger that Germany—more than six decades
after the close of World War II—widely publicizes and regularly funds new
memorials and conferences devoted to exposing the crimes of the Third
Reich yet pays little attention to their suffering in the quite recent past.”26 The
comparison of Nazism and communism is a vexed question—many recoil
at the suggestion that the two could be morally equivalent or even compa-
rable phenomena. “The Soviet Union,” Flagg Taylor has written, “was wildly
successful in imposing its own ideological vision of the political landscape
on the West.”27 Nazism became the incarnation of the Right and commu-
nism the incarnation of the Left, despite the fact that both movements had
socialist roots. As Jean-François Revel argues, “The left’s vigilant refusal to
acknowledge the equivalence of Nazism and Communism or even to make
comparisons between them, despite their evident affinity, has a practical
rationale: the daily execration of the one serves as a barrier against careful
examination of the other.”28
Introduction 7
Even more problematic from the point of view of these victims of com-
munist oppression is the nostalgia (Ostalgie) expressed by some Eastern
Germans for the GDR. Bruce reports that “the image of an East Germany
where life was simply a connection of happy events was reinforced in the
early 2000s with several major German TV stations running variety shows
about the GDR.”29 The former Olympian ice skater Katarina Witt appeared
on television wearing a Young Pioneers (the Communist Party youth group)
shirt and reminded viewers that “there were also some very nice times” in
the GDR. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, the acclaimed collection of
personal stories about life behind the Wall, notes the increasing aggressive-
ness of ex-Stasi who continue to defend themselves in print and via protests
while “conducting lawsuits against people who speak out against them.”30
Polls taken to gauge attitudes on post-reunification Germany have shown
that large numbers of East Germans report that they “want the Wall back”
or that “socialism is the superior system” to the present government. For
Rodden, such replies indicate both an “appalling ignorance” about the true
nature of the GDR and an “insulting indifference” to the human costs of
communism in Germany.31
Countering such ignorance and attitudes is a task for diverse instrumen-
talities and arenas such as policy, law, scholarship, education, psychology,
ethics, and religion. But surely the fine and popular arts have an important
role to play as well. Indeed, a strong case can be made that filmmakers have
a special responsibility here, since a widely seen film can decisively shape
a nation’s imagistic impression or, we might say, “cinematic consciousness”
of its own history. As Stephen Brockmann points out, “For Germans born
after the early 1980s, films like Good Bye Lenin! and Das Leben der Anderen
necessarily became key ways of understanding the German Democratic
Republic.”32 Though the topic of East Germany first came to post-unification
Germany with a number of films in the early 1990s,33 the subject gained
widespread attention with the success of Leander Haussmann’s Sonnenal-
lee (1999)—a comedic love story that was very attentive to East German
material culture, making it a good example of Ostalgie.34 As Haussmann
candidly noted after its release, “We wanted to create a movie that would
make people envious that they hadn’t lived there [in the GDR]. Since poli-
ticians like to compare the GDR to a concentration camp in order to preen
themselves with their historical mission. And that’s what GDR citizens can’t
stand: they are always supposed to have been either camp commanders or
camp inmates—but what was in between was people’s daily life.”35 Follow-
ing Sonnenallee in 2003 was Wolfgang Becker’s enormously successful Good

Bye Lenin! which gained more than 6 million viewers in its first eighteen
months.36 The film follows the travails of Alex Kerner, whose mother goes
into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. When she wakes up after
the fall, Alex is advised by doctors that any sudden changes could adversely
affect her health. So with the assistance of his sister and friends, Alex, in
effect, reconstructs the GDR for his mother. Though the film is often placed
into this Ostalgie category and described as a comedy, not all critics agree
on this characterization (see the essay by James Pontuso and the interview
with Joachim Gauck in this volume). But The Lives of Others clearly was a
departure in tone from its predecessors. It took a more serious, critical look
at the GDR and its most infamous political institution, the Stasi. This fact,
among others, explains the fairly intense and at times apparently nitpicking
criticism of The Lives of Others for purported historical inaccuracies.
One of the more important of such critiques comes from Funder; she
calls Lives “a beautiful fiction” that sits over an “uglier truth.”37 For Funder,
no Stasi officer could have acted in the manner of Wiesler because the
totalitarian system, with its multiple hierarchies and division of tasks, made
such action impossible. But she makes a second charge that is perhaps more
interesting. Not only did the system not offer the possibility for Wiesler-
like rebellion but, even more frightening, Stasi employees had no desire to
engage in such behavior. “The institutional coercion made these men into
true believers; it shrank their consciences and heightened their tolerance
for injustice and cruelty ‘for the cause.’ ”38
It is useful to compare Funder’s contention here with the portrait pro-
vided by the historian of East Germany and the Stasi Gary Bruce. His book
The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi is the product of extensive archival
research and, more important, of many interviews of ex-Stasi employees in
two districts, Gransee and Perleberg. Bruce captures the distinctive charac-
ters of his interviewees and uses the device adopted by Czesław Miłosz in
The Captive Mind. As Miłosz had given his exemplars of the mind and char-
acter of an ideologue taglines such as “the moralist” and the “disappointed
lover,” so we see in Bruce’s chronicle “the ambivalent one,” “the repentant
one,” “the earnest one,” and “the intellectual” (to name a few). In support
of Funder’s first charge, Bruce points out that none of his interviewees was
“remotely close to treason.” Though some Stasi employees expressed dis-
satisfaction with the party and the state, they remained loyal soldiers and
did what was asked of them. As Bruce puts it, “In spite of their inner con-
Introduction 9
cerns, in spite of their slight moral protest, in spite of their hostility toward
their party bosses, they continued and indeed increased their exhaustive
work of societal repression and, it should be emphasized, at no point did
any of them indicate that they feared reprimand should they not fulfill their
duties.” Save for one interviewee who expressed “profound remorse” for her
actions, all of these ex-Stasi seemed to have clean consciences. On the other
hand, except for one “committed ideologue,” none of these individuals were
“chest-thumping patriots or bloody-minded,” and they were “the furthest
thing from fanatical.”39 We think Bruce’s more nuanced portrait of the ex-
Stasi complicates Funder’s second assertion.
In its presentation of characters like Wiesler, his boss Grubitz, and Min-
ister Hempf, The Lives of Others captures a range of motivations that drive the
state functionaries. Interestingly, Wiesler seems to be more fanatical, more
the pure ideologue, than all but one of Bruce’s interview subjects. Except for
his fateful decision to disobey the orders of his superiors, Wiesler fits Funder’s
portrait quite nicely. We are made to wonder whether his commitment, his
fanaticism, is paradoxically what makes him ripe for dissent. While perhaps
there will be no clear resolution in this dispute between the film’s critics and
defenders on Wiesler’s plausibility, Donnersmarck has certainly succeeded
in placing the problem of moral corruption at the center of his film.
The Contents of This Volume

The first section of the book contains two essays, each touching on the themes
of truth and dissent in communist regimes. Flagg Taylor’s essay argues that
The Lives of Others contains a particularly compelling and accurate portrait
of what Václav Havel termed “post-totalitarianism.” Such regimes were no
longer characterized by the ideological fervor, enthusiasm, violence, and ter-
ror so prevalent in communist states from 1917 through the 1950s, but rather
by bureaucratic inertia, consumerism, and banality—this pattern was seen
in most of the Warsaw Pact regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. Taylor shows
how the film captures this atmosphere and argues that the evolution of the
central character, the Stasi captain Wiesler, is illuminated by this broader
context. His essay underlines how gradual that evolution is, and how it is
prompted not simply by a growing attraction to the lives of the artists but
also by a growing disgust at the lack of sincere belief and the abuses of power
seen in the lives of higher-ups like Grubitz and Hempf.
Lauren Weiner’s essay further develops the place of dissent in such
societies. Weiner holds that the film provides a worthy portrayal of the life
of intellectuals and artists living in communist regimes. She puts characters
like Dreyman, Christa-Maria, Jerska, and Hauser in the broader context of
a range of real-life figures: from Germans like Reiner Kunze, Erich Loest,
Christa Wolf, and Wolf Biermann to Russians such as Osip Mandelstam,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Though an admirer of
the film, Weiner concludes that ultimately Dreyman is portrayed in a more
flattering light than his character and actions warrant. The conclusion of
the film—focusing on the relation between Wiesler and Dreyman—is “a
picture of reconciliation and good feelings that, while highly satisfying as
moviemaking, fails to ring true.”
The next three essays examine The Lives of Others’ understanding of art
in relation to politics, either through its portrayal of its artist characters’
actions or through its own example. Carl Eric Scott casts his gaze across
the central characters of the film to reveal several varieties of moral cor-
ruption, discussing how these corruptions are related to the larger pattern
of “communist moral destruction” analyzed by thinkers such as Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn and Alain Besançon. Scott’s close reading of the film demon-
strates that it sympathetically conveys a range of human responses to a com-
munist regime’s ideology and oppression. He argues that the relationship
between Dreyman and Wiesler deserves particularly close attention and can
be best described as a “reciprocal rescue”—“as Dreyman is unknowingly
saving Wiesler by his art, Wiesler is secretly saving him by his psychologi-
cal and political cunning.” The reciprocal nature of this rescue underlines
the way the entire film tempers its presentation of art’s potency against the
totalitarian spirit, with a recognition that the artistic calling could be held
hostage by a communist regime as a way to bind artists, sometimes quite
subtly, to its authority and lies.
Paul Cantor’s essay grapples with the film’s many allusions to the commu-
nist playwright Bertolt Brecht and to one play in particular, Der gute Mensch
von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan). The essay includes an analysis
of this play’s theme, which concerns the difficulty of being a good person,
and illustrates how the entire play utilizes the principles of Brechtian drama.
Cantor shows that Lives responds to Brecht in two ways. First, it refutes the
understanding of human nature displayed in The Good Person of Szechwan.
Second, it departs from Brecht’s dramaturgical approach to character and
moral choice. Cantor argues that Donnersmarck’s appreciation of and response
to Brecht is crucial to his own exploration of the nature and function of art.
Introduction 11
For his part, Dirk Johnson argues that despite the film’s many allusions
to Brecht, its own plot does not follow his dramatic theory but rather the
classic Aristotelian understanding of tragedy. The heart of the film is not
the tandem transformation of Wiesler and Dreyman; it is the tragedy of
Christa-Maria Sieland. Sieland fits the pattern of Aristotle’s recommended
tragic character: she is an individual of lofty nobility by virtue of being a
“great artist,” and she has a tragic flaw. But while a number of the specifics
of Sieland’s fate could only occur in a communist state like the GDR, John-
son argues that it essentially proceeds out of her and the other characters’
own choices, in accord with Aristotelian precepts. He notes, however, that
a drama in full accord with those precepts would have ended with the scene
of her death; further, he calls attention to the film’s placement of “bookends”
around the main Sieland-centered plot. There thus prove to be aspects of
Donnersmarck’s drama that in a sense combine Aristotelian and Brechtian
principles.
The third section of this volume comprises two essays that compare
The Lives of Others with another recent film. James Pontuso argues that
though Wolfgang Becker’s highly successful 2003 film Good Bye Lenin!
could not seem more different from Lives (the former presenting itself as
an almost lighthearted comedy), both films point to the success achieved
by communist regimes in utilizing “everydayness” as a mechanism of rule.
Pontuso examines the thought of Martin Heidegger and Karl Marx to bring
out the elements and implications of everydayness and also shows that the
East German state sponsored a film genre called Alltag specifically to make
ordinary life “synonymous with Marxist-Leninist principles.” By contrast,
in both Lives and Good Bye Lenin! the actual dreariness and barrenness of
everyday existence of the GDR is highlighted, especially by being posed
against the longings of the central characters, which point to the perennial
need for rich, authentic human experiences.
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz’s essay compares Lives with a highly
regarded Czech film from 2000 called Divided We Fall. Goetz-Stankiewicz
argues that both films examine a quite common and even respectable
response to totalitarian oppression: the attempt to withdraw from public
life altogether—to live a decent life by isolating oneself from the tentacles
of totalitarian power. Divided We Fall puts this impulse on display in the
midst of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in World War II by examin-
ing the trials of the amiable and entirely ordinary Josef. Goetz-Stankiewicz
compares Josef with Dreyman, arguing that “by withdrawing into this gray,
seemingly nonpolitical area and claiming rejection of any political stance,

they act under an illusion.”
The next section of this book contains four chapters that directly address
the debate about the film’s historical accuracy and the legacy of the GDR. The
first of these comes from Manfred Wilke, the primary historical consultant
for the film itself. Wilke addresses a number of the issues of historical plau-
sibility, considering how the various characters’ actions in the film line up
with what we know about Stasi and dissident behavior at the time. He tells
us that Donnersmarck consistently sought his advice on historical accuracy
for “the purpose of self-enlightenment” and not “to confirm a predetermined
verdict.” The second comes from Wolf Biermann, a poet, songwriter, essay-
ist, and critic of the GDR who was expelled from the country in 1976. His
chapter is partly a report about the film’s reception among his fellow dissi-
dents and partly a description of his own reaction to it. Since the decision of
artists to engage in dissent or not is a key subject of the film, it is especially
valuable to consider his impression and evaluation. We are also honored
to be able to provide an interview about the film with Joachim Gauck, the
first federal commissioner for the Stasi Archives and the current president
of Germany. Of particular note is his explanation of why he expected resis-
tance to the film from three different groups: former dissidents, “part of the
old establishment,” and “the broad ranks of the conformists.” The title of this
chapter, “Against Forgetting,” reflects both the content of the interview and
Gauck’s long-fought effort to persuade his fellow Germans never to forget
the crimes of the GDR, including his chairmanship of an association called
Gegen Vergessen—Für Demokratie (Against Forgetting—For Democracy).
The final chapter in this section is by British historian Peter Grieder, author
of The German Democratic Republic (2012). He provides an overview of the
various questions of historical accuracy that have been raised, evaluating
each one in turn; whatever his judgments regarding specific issues, he broadly
endorses the film’s “stylized history,” saying it captures the character of the
regime and “shed[s] light on certain totalitarian practices in the GDR.” He
concludes with a timely warning for liberal democracies, particularly that
of the United Kingdom, against “sleepwalking into a comprehensive surveil-
lance state by a series of small steps.”
We conclude with a chapter from a premier historian of the Stasi, Jens
Gieseke, who has worked as a researcher for the federal commissioner for
the Stasi Archives. His contribution here describes the development, struc-
ture, and typical practices of the Stasi in detail.40 It provides the reader with
Introduction 13
a solid factual background to the issues raised by the film and discussed in
the essays in this volume.
Perhaps the highest compliment to Donnersmarck and his film has come
from Wolf Biermann. It is Biermann—the renowned dissident, tormented
by the Stasi for years—who seems ready and willing to let the current gen-
eration take the lead in grappling with the vexed legacy of totalitarianism.
A lot of people in both the East and West are sick to the teeth of the
discussions about the Stasi and the GDR dictatorship, and between
you and me: I’m just the same. After my Stasi ballads from 1966,
my lampoons of the corrupt old men in the Politburo, and my po-
lemical essays after the fall of the GDR, I don’t need anymore. But
I don’t trust myself on this issue. This debut film makes me suspect
that the truly deep-reaching confrontation with Germany’s second
dictatorship is only just beginning.
And perhaps those who never experienced all the misery should
take over now.
It is our hope that Donnersmarck’s achievement will inspire other artists to

join the “confrontation with Germany’s second dictatorship” and humanity’s
general reckoning with the nature of Marxist socialism as it really existed.
Notes
1. The concept of “really existing socialism” (sometimes “actually existing” or simply
“real”) came to prominence during the Brezhnev era to dismiss the notion that there could
be multiple models of socialism. It was a reaction against the Prague Spring and Eurocom-
munism. For many, the GDR was the emblem of “really existing socialism.” Our volume
generally uses the English acronym for the GDR throughout, but the German acronym is
also quite common (DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik).
2. On Donnersmarck’s life and background, see Jay Nordlinger, “Florian’s World,”
National Review, April 7, 2008, 41–43.
3. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” New York Review of Books,
May 31, 2007, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-
minds/?pagination=false (accessed July 19, 2012).
4. Alan Riding, “Behind the Berlin Wall, Listening to Life,” New York Times,
January 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/movies/awardsseason/07ridi
.html?pagewanted=all (accessed July 19, 2012).
5. John Esther, “Between Principle and Feeling: An Interview with Florian Henckel
von Donnersmarck,” Cineaste 32, no. 2 (2007): 42.
6. John Podhoretz, “Nightmare Come True: Love and Distrust in the East German
Police State,” Weekly Standard, March 12, 2007, http://staging.weeklystandard.com/Content/
Public/Articles/000/000/013/360jfrwt.asp (accessed July 19, 2012).
7. Matthew H. Bernstein, “The Lives of Others,” Film Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2007): 30.
Donnersmarck has himself cited The Conversation as an important visual inspiration, along
with Three Days of the Condor (1975), The French Connection (1971), Harold & Maude
(1971), and M*A*S*H (1970). See also Rachael K. Bosley, “Under Surveillance,” American
Cinematographer 88, no. 3 (2007): 16–20.
8. Cheryl Dueck, “The Humanization of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen,” German
Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2008): 598.
9. See Mary Beth Stein, “Stasi with a Human Face? Ambiguity in Das Leben der
Anderen,” German Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2008): 570.
10. Hubertus Knabe, director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum,
refused to let Donnersmarck film on location. See ibid., 570.
11. This also comes out clearly in an interview with Diane Carson. See “Learning from
History in The Lives of Others: An Interview with Writer/Director Florian Henckel von Don-
nersmarck,” Journal of Film and Video 62, nos. 1–2 (2010): 13–22. See also Bosley, “Under
Surveillance.”
12. Donnersmarck remarked, “The production designer and I spent six months devis-
ing the visual world of this film. We saw there were more greens than blues, more orangey
brown colors than actual red. We decided to completely eliminate red and blue and just go
with all the greens, grays, and browns and not do it in postproduction. We did not want to
do anything digitally. Many people in the East felt the film was a complete resurrection of
the GDR.” See Esther, “Between Principle and Feeling,” 43.
13. Prominent films substantially dealing with communism include (in their En-
glish titles): The Tunnel, Good Bye Lenin! Katýn, I Am David, Sunshine, To Live, The Killing
Fields, and Dr. Zhivago. This list does not include films primarily about spies or agents, and
“prominence” here is being estimated mainly with respect to English-speaking audiences.
Lesser-known films include: 12:08 East of Bucharest, Tales from the Golden Age, Bitter Sugar,
East-West, The Great Water, The Chekist, Burnt by the Sun, China My Sorrow, Man of Iron,
Repentance, Hibiscus Town, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Man on a Tightrope.
Those who know foreign cinema, especially East European and Asian, could surely add
more titles.
14. Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992),
135–36.
15. Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 10, 11, 13.
16. Ibid., 2.
17. For the debate around the concept of totalitarianism, see Flagg Taylor’s introduction
to his anthology, The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism
(ISI Books, 2011).
18. Havel refers to this as “post-totalitarianism.” For more on this concept and its con-
nection to The Lives of Others, see Taylor’s contribution to this volume.
Introduction 15
19. For the debate, see Bruce, The Firm, 4–12; Corey Ross, “The GDR as Dictatorship:
Totalitarian, Stalinist, Modern, Welfarist?” in The East German Dictatorship (London: Arnold,
2002), 19–44; and Peter Grieder, The German Democratic Republic (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2012), 1–18.
20. Mary Fulbrook, “Putting the People Back In: The Contentious State of GDR History,”
German History 24, no. 4 (2006): 618.
21. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), ix.
22. Bruce, The Firm, 11.
23. Ibid., 12. Or as Bruce puts it: “East German citizens constantly made a judgment
about an individual to whom they were speaking and censored their information accord-
ingly” (156; see all of chapter 5, pp. 142–61).
24. Joachim Günter, “Right Life in the Wrong Life: An Interview with Joachim Gauck,”
originally appeared in German in Neue Zürcher Zeitung on May 22, 2010. Translated by Lucy
Powell for signandsignt.com: http://www.signandsight.com/features/2039.html (accessed
July 19, 2012).
26. John Rodden, Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of
Human Rights Abuse (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 3.
27. Flagg Taylor, The Great Lie, x.
28. Jean-François Revel, Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet
Era (New York: Encounter Books, 2009), 109. See also Alain Besançon, A Century of Horrors
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007).
30. Anna Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” Guardian, May 5, 2007, http://www.theguardian
.com/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview12 (accessed July 7, 2012).
31. Rodden, Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent, 4.
32. Stephen Brockmann, A Critical History of German Film (Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2010), 498.
33. For a fine treatment of the films of this era, see Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Post-Wall
German Cinema and National History: Utopianism and Dissent (Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2012).
34. Brockmann, Critical History of German Film, 428.
35. Quoted in ibid., 428–29.
36. Thomas Lindenberger, “Stasiploitation—Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s Historical
Creativity in The Lives of Others,” German Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2008): 557.
37. Funder, “Tyranny of Terror.”
38. Ibid.
40. Gieseke has criticized The Lives of Others for historical inaccuracy and a “Hollywood”
treatment. See his “Stasi Goes to Hollywood: Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others und die
Grenzen der Authentizität,” German Studies Review 33, no. 1 (2008): 580–87.
Part 1
Truth and Dissent
Ulrich Tukur (as Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz).

1
Post-totalitarianism in
The Lives of Others
F. Flagg Taylor IV
In this essay I will argue that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The
Lives of Others provides viewers with a striking and deep portrait of a “post-
totalitarian” regime. Its depiction of totalitarian tyranny succeeds in par-
ticular at revealing the nature and function of ideology and the manner in
which one might escape its snares. Its success in this depiction is important
for our broader reflection on the nature of totalitarian tyranny.
The concept of totalitarianism has come under criticism for many rea-
sons, and there remains much debate about the regimes that might fall into
this category. Hannah Arendt’s depiction in her classic work The Origins of
Totalitarianism and Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski’s model applied
the concept to Stalin’s Soviet Union and to Hitler’s Germany. Many critics
of the term seized primarily on these portraits and made two noteworthy
arguments. First, they argued that totalitarian theorists focused too much
on the state and its various instruments and thus also too much on repres-
sion. Second, they suggested that the concept was too static—that it could
not account for the change that seemed to be occurring, for example, in the
Soviet Union after Stalin’s death.
Václav Havel’s portrait of what he calls “post-totalitarianism” is not sus-
ceptible to either of these criticisms. Havel articulates the striking way in
which ideology draws everyone into its snares, enabling all citizens to become
agents in their own oppression. Havel argues that the simple dichotomies
of state and society and rulers and ruled do not fit the reality of totalitarian
tyranny. These regimes practiced varied means of seducing the masses and
19
20 F. Flagg Taylor IV
integrating them into approved structures. As Peter Grieder puts it, “Totali-
tarian polities deployed ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ means in their relentless quest for
panoptic supervision.”1 Thus, a proper conception of totalitarianism appre-
ciates that terror and violence may wax and wane at various times. “Post-
totalitarian regimes did away with the worst aspects of repression but at the
same time maintained most mechanisms of control. Although less bloody
than under Stalinism, the presence of security services—like the Stasi in the
German Democratic Republic (GDR)—sometimes became more pervasive.”2
Havel agrees with Solzhenitsyn that the “Lie”—the enforced participation in
the daily ideological distortions of the past and present—is more essential
to totalitarian tyranny and more soul crushing than the terror and violence
often perpetrated against innocents.
This conception is also then able to account for the evolution of many
communist regimes in the latter half of the twentieth century. We are not
stuck with an understanding that seems to fit only the Soviet Union under
Stalin or Germany under Hitler. While terror and violence certainly declined
in the 1970s and 1980s, the ideological universe of Marxist-Leninism (or
what Czesław Miłosz called the “New Faith”) was perpetuated and hardened
in the aftermath of 1968. Havel draws a striking contrast between the atmo-
sphere in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s as opposed to the 1970s and 1980s.
The former period was defined by fanaticism, camps, torture, executions,
and suffering. In the latter period of “post,” “advanced,” or “late” totalitari-
anism, “revolutionary ethos and terror have been replaced by dull inertia,
pretext-ridden caution, bureaucratic anonymity, and mindless, stereotypi-
cal behavior.”3
The Lives of Others succeeds in its portrait of this stultifying atmosphere,
but I want to suggest this concept is critical for another reason. This distinc-
tion between totalitarianism simply and its advanced form is essential in
order to make sense of the evolution of the main character, Captain Gerd
Wiesler of the Stasi—the central figure of the film. Several critics of the film,
though otherwise quite generous in their praise, argue that Wiesler’s transfor-
mation is either unconvincing or simply pure fantasy. For Timothy Garton
Ash, the conversion of Captain Wiesler “seems implausibly rapid and not
fully convincing.”4 Garton Ash notes that the historical advisor for the film,
Manfred Wilke, who gives his stamp of approval for its accuracy in many
areas, offers no example of a Stasi officer who behaves like Wiesler and gets
away with it. Even more insistent on this point is Anna Funder, who argues,
“No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible.” The
Post-totalitarianism in The Lives of Others 21
movie must fail in its portrait of totalitarianism, according to Funder, insofar

as it must provide space for its central figure to “act humanely.” For Funder,
The Lives of Others is thus a “beautiful fiction” that overlies an “uglier truth.”5
Thus, a proper understanding of Wiesler’s motives and actions and their very
possibility in a regime like the GDR is directly related to our understanding
of the nature of totalitarian tyranny. Does the film have something to teach
us about such regimes or must it depart from reality in order to provide the
dramatic action necessary to make things interesting?
The “Post-totalitarian” Terrain

Scholars have understood both Czechoslovakia and the GDR to have dem-
onstrated the character of a post-totalitarian regime—distinguishing them
from both totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.6 The GDR under Hon-
ecker in particular has been described as “neo-Stalinist,” “late totalitarian,”
or “post-totalitarian.” Mike Dennis argues that Havel’s description of such
a regime is applicable to the regimes across the Soviet bloc, and Linz sug-
gests that Czechoslovakia and the GDR share a special kinship as examples
of “frozen” post-totalitarian regimes. The mobilization of party members
and the masses is routine, lacking in intensity, and not nearly as frequent
as under the regime’s totalitarian phase. The regime strives to achieve the
bare minimum of compliance from the population, and thus the real revo-
lutionary, totalitarian fervor is largely absent. The leadership is lacking in
charisma and positions are restricted to those rising from within the party
and its technocratic elite. The ideology is still pervasive and dominates the
mind and language of the party, yet real commitment to its goals is drastically
weakened. Last, the existence of a parallel society where some oppositional
activity takes place is fairly common.
Now, let us examine the deepest, most insightful portrait of “post-
totalitarianism,” that of Havel.7 In the Czechoslovakia of the 1970s, Havel
worried that the surface calm pervading society might give the appearance
of broad support for the regime—and thus send precisely the wrong signal
both to the rulers and to potential allies in the West. In his first major public
letter after his blacklisting in 1969, Havel took great care in describing how
below this surface calm, society was plunging into an existential crisis. The
crisis was defined by two fundamental causes: fear and apathy or indiffer-
ence. Havel characterized the fear as a collective anxiety deriving from the
recognition of a looming, pervasive presence—the secret police. This organ
of the state combined with the myriad of societal collaborators exerted

pressure on everyone. Nobody could escape this pressure because everyone
had something to lose. Surviving in such an atmosphere of uncertainty and
suspicion meant learning to externally adapt oneself to approved language
and behaviors. Miłosz famously called this strategy “Ketman,” giving the
outward appearance of complete orthodoxy while concealing one’s true
convictions. Miłosz argued that Ketman demands a special sort of mental
acuity—a special sensitivity to verbal or facial cues that might help one
indicate what might be appropriate in a given situation.8
Such a society also provides many opportunities for those with the
most pernicious of motives to flourish. As Garton Ash put it, “The most
independent, intelligent, and best are at the bottom; the worst, the stupid-
est, and most servile are at the top. The Party is little more than a union for
self-advancement.”9 Those willing to collaborate and inform are guaranteed
material prosperity. Thus, it makes no difference whether one truly believes
the platitudes of really existing socialism. As long as one behaves as if one
does, one will avoid trouble and most likely prosper. Thus does Havel argue
that “the number of people who sincerely believe everything that the official
propaganda says and who selflessly support the government’s authority is
smaller than it has ever been. But the number of hypocrites rises steadily:
up to a point, every citizen is, in fact, forced to become one.”10 Or, as Miłosz
puts it, “If biting dogs can be divided into two main categories, noisy and
brutal, or silent and slyly vicious, then the second variety would seem most
privileged in the countries of the New Faith.”11
If this atmosphere gives ample space for those driven by greed and the
perverse pleasures of causing others harm, the vast majority of people are
moved in another direction. “Work in an office or factory is hard not only
because of the amount of labor required, but even more because of the need
to be on guard against omnipresent and vigilant eyes and ears. After work
one goes to political meetings or special lectures, thus lengthening a day
that is without a moment of relaxation or spontaneity.”12 All of this is no
doubt quite exhausting for everyone, and sickening for some. Perhaps not
surprisingly, especially in the climate of post-totalitarianism, where true
revolutionary fervor is minimal, people will seek a life largely outside of
state organs and the party. The drive to escape, however, will manifest itself
as conformism and routine performance. People will be driven to give the
absolute minimum but nonetheless to do what is required, so as to carve
out a small space wholly for themselves.13 And less and less was required as
long as one behaved according to the approved code. Havel’s example from
his most famous and influential essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” is the
grocer who puts the sign in his window reading, “Workers of the World
Unite!” The grocer cares not a whit about the actual content of the slogan.
He puts the sign in the window to avoid trouble—to do what the regime asks
so that hopefully he will be left alone. By conforming to ideological dictates,
the grocer thinks he can escape the pernicious world of politics and secure
the private pleasure of family and home and indulge his appetite for mate-
rial goods and interests. Havel very acutely laid bare the consumerism at
the core of a post-totalitarian society. This indifference and general retreat
proved quite useful to the regime. Havel concluded, “By fixing a person’s
whole attention on his mere consumer interests, it is hoped to render him
incapable of realizing the increasing extent to which he has been spiritually,
politically, and morally violated.”14
The retreat into the private realm, according to Havel, fails. Because each
individual is prevented from relating to a vision of the good and the true in
an authentic way, there is a general turning away from the idea of the good
and the true. The lifeless and visibly false phantasm of socialism—of universal
brotherhood amid plenty—is the only common or public vision permitted.
Individuals then succumb to what Havel calls “existence-in-the-world.” Here
there is no wonder, no longing for meaning, but only a “world of functions,
purposes and functioning, a world focused on itself, enclosed within itself,
barren in its superficial variety, empty in its illusory richness, ignorant,
though awash in information, cold, alienated and ultimately absurd.”15 A
general atmosphere of dull uniformity results where nothing distinctive
is permitted. Empty, expressionless faces are the outward manifestation of
a vague, pervasive anxiety that issues in an aura of unfriendliness. Havel
argues, “Standardized life creates standardized citizens with no wills of their
own. It begets undifferentiated people with undifferentiated stories. It is a
mass producer of banality.”16
Wiesler in the Post-totalitarian World

Now I want to show why all of this is important for understanding the film
as a whole and Wiesler in particular. The sympathetic critics of the film, like
Garton Ash and Funder, who argue that there was not nor could there be a
Wiesler in real life, focus on Wiesler’s observations of Dreyman. Would a Stasi
officer really come to respect or admire someone like Dreyman?17 Critics as
well as defenders of the plausibility of Wiesler’s transformation, by focusing

on Dreyman, also seem to point to his experience of beauty through art as
its sole basis. Here the key scene is when Wiesler listens to Dreyman as he
plays “Sonata for a Good Man” after Dreyman hears that his friend Albert
Jerska has committed suicide. As one critic put it, “Wiesler experiences the
mysterious when he encounters beauty, and it changes him.”18 Donnersmarck,
to be fair, has given this emphasis some plausibility. The director has said that
the genesis for the film is a remark attributed to Lenin by Maxim Gorky—
that were Lenin to allow himself to listen to Beethoven’s “Appassionata,” he
doubted he could finish the Bolshevik revolution. Donnersmarck then sought
to create a drama where he could, in effect, force a Lenin type to listen to a
thing of true beauty. Now, Wiesler’s experience of beauty is no doubt part of
the story, and a big part at that. Yet I think this interpretation makes Wiesler’s
change too abrupt and simple. Donnersmarck himself has also said that he
wanted the audience to see the change in Wiesler as gradual.19
In what follows I want to take a close look at Wiesler and his evolution
throughout the film. Wiesler is the pivotal figure in the film, but the basis for
the dramatic action lies along two axes—not just his relation to Dreyman.
In particular, I want to look at him and his relation to two sets of characters:
to Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz of the Stasi and the minister of culture
Bruno Hempf (the axis of disgust); and to Dreyman and his girlfriend, the
actress Christa-Maria Sieland (the axis of longing).
The opening scenes of the film all introduce this first axis—we see all
three of the central characters who work for the state. Our introduction
to Wiesler presents him in two contexts: he interrogates a subject who has
information about a neighbor’s escape to the West, and he conducts a class
on interrogation based on that previous success. In Wiesler we see total com-
mitment, self-confidence, and professionalism. His tone and bearing in both
cases leave us no doubt that he thinks enemies of the state are quite real and
present a threat. This is utterly serious business and Wiesler conducts both
the interrogation and the class with scientific precision. He never gets angry
nor shows the least bit of emotion, even when encountering resistance by
his subject or students. He asks rhetorically, “You think we imprison people
on a whim? If you think our humanistic system is capable of such a thing,
that alone would justify your arrest.” When a student in the class suggests
it is inhumane to deprive someone of sleep for such a long time, Wiesler
calmly puts a checkmark next to his name on a sheet.
Grubitz, whom we meet at the end of this classroom scene, presents
quite a contrast with Wiesler. He enters and starts applauding—“Good,

very good”—as if Wiesler was doing some sort of performance. As every-
one exits the classroom, Grubitz not so subtly stares at a female student. He
tells Wiesler that he has been offered a professorship. He recalls himself and
Wiesler sitting in a classroom twenty years earlier and acknowledges that
Wiesler enabled him to get good grades (even though life is not about good
grades). A trace of ironic knowingness, distance, and lack of seriousness
characterizes Grubitz here, and Wiesler looks at him suspiciously, seem-
ingly annoyed that he has to put up with him. Grubitz himself acknowledges
Wiesler’s attitude toward him when he asks his friend, “Why do you always
think I am scheming?” Grubitz has plans to go to the theater to be seen by
Minister Hempf. In short, he is an operator who knows what needs to be
done to rise in the system. He has used his friend to succeed in school and
eventually attain a professorship, and he knows which superiors he must
please to rise further.
The following scene at the play introduces the third part of this trio,
Minister Hempf. Wiesler and Grubitz differ in their on-the-spot assessments
of Dreyman. Grubitz calls him the GDR’s “only nonsubversive writer” who
is read in the West, while Wiesler detects an arrogance that makes Dreyman
worthy of concern. When Wiesler suggests that Dreyman be monitored,
Grubitz reasserts his belief in his innocence. Besides, Grubitz says, Hempf
likes Dreyman, so they would be sabotaging their own careers by having him
monitored. When Grubitz then wanders down from the balcony to speak
with Minister Hempf, his assessment changes quickly. Hempf asks Grubitz
directly what he thinks of Dreyman and Grubitz replies that perhaps he’s not
as clean as he seems. Hempf laughs heartily and is glad that Grubitz didn’t
respond like your average Stasi chump, going on about Dreyman as the GDR’s
only nonsubversive writer. Here we must ask why Grubitz changed his assess-
ment in the span of a few short minutes. First, we know Grubitz has made his
career partly thanks to Wiesler. So he is smart enough to know he is better
off following Wiesler’s instincts and not his own. But there is something else
going on here. Grubitz looks at Hempf carefully and reads him—he figures
out exactly what he wants to hear. Donnersmarck has beautifully captured the
mental acuity developed in a world dominated by ideology, where appear-
ance is everything and everyone must become an actor. Although lacking
in ideological commitment, general intelligence, and knowledge of human
nature compared with Wiesler, Grubitz has a well-developed capacity to
thrive in the ideological-bureaucratic world of the state.
We should also note here that Hempf is much more like Grubitz than
Wiesler. After tasking Grubitz with monitoring Dreyman, Hempf reminds
him that success will bring rewards and make him a powerful friend on the
Central Committee. And we soon learn just why Hempf has taken an inter-
est in Dreyman—he has his eye on Dreyman’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria, and
wants to get Dreyman out of the picture completely. So Donnersmarck has
captured the reality that Havel and others had noted about the post-totalitarian
world: “public and influential positions are occupied, more than ever before,
by notorious careerists, opportunists, charlatans, and men of dubious record.”20
Donnersmarck sets all of this up early in the film to put Wiesler in
motion—his evolution is due in part to a growing disgust with the system
and the characters he knows have come to dominate it. I think we can even
infer that his discontent must have been gnawing at him for some time. He
and Grubitz are longtime friends, so Wiesler has witnessed his slow but sure
ascent in the Stasi bureaucracy. A less intelligent, less committed, less serious
friend has surpassed him—and even done so with his own help! The tension
between Wiesler and Grubitz becomes more obvious in another early pivotal
scene when the two have lunch in a cafeteria. Wiesler sits down with his tray
and when Grubitz objects and suggests they ought to sit with the bosses at
another set of tables, Wiesler replies, “Socialism must start somewhere.” Thus
Wiesler openly acknowledges what is obvious to all but dare not be spoken—
the vast gulf between reality and the professed goals of the system. During
lunch Grubitz tells Wiesler that the car that dropped Christa-Maria at Drey-
man’s apartment belongs to Minister Hempf. Since Hempf is a top party offi-
cial, he cannot be monitored. Grubitz openly admits the operation is in place
solely to help Hempf destroy his rival, and that he and Wiesler have much to
gain by assisting a member of the Central Committee. Wiesler seems totally
unmoved and asks Grubitz if that is why they joined the Stasi. The scene ends
with Grubitz tormenting a young Stasi officer he overheard telling a joke about
Honecker by asking for his name and rank. He leaves the young officer unsure
about whether his indiscretion will actually be catalogued or not. Wiesler looks
on with utter disgust. The following scene confirms the steady trajectory of
ugliness as we witness Hempf ’s rape of Christa-Maria in the back of his car.
Disgust, Loneliness, and Longing

The axis of disgust is what drives the early part of the film. Wiesler’s sincere
attachment to socialism sets him apart from Grubitz and Hempf. Again, I
think the allusion to Wiesler’s longtime friendship with Grubitz allows us

to infer that what Wiesler sees at the beginning of the film of Grubitz and
Hempf cannot be a complete surprise. But these early encounters with Gru-
bitz and his motivations and what he learns about Hempf ’s designs seem to
push him to a new level of disaffection. Wiesler’s first independent act in the
film—that is, an act neither authorized nor dictated by ideology—does not
flow from what he observes of Dreyman but from what he knows of Gru-
bitz and Hempf. He knows that it is Hempf ’s car that drops Christa-Maria
off at Dreyman’s apartment. He wants Dreyman to see the ugliness that he
sees—when he rings the doorbell that brings Dreyman down to the entrance
to the building, he utters, “Time for some bitter truths.” So it is Wiesler who
is the truth teller or the agent of reality. He forces Dreyman to look at the
truth in all its naked ugliness. This is far from a full-fledged political rebel-
lion—Wiesler does not seem to have any particular consequences in mind
beyond the confirmation by somebody else of this ugly reality.
But this is in itself an extremely important act. For it implies something
that will be openly confirmed later—that Dreyman and Christa—the former
especially—have each earned their place by blinding themselves to reality.
They of course are not agents of the state, and they seem to have carved out
a private place for themselves shielded from politics strictly understood.
They have the trappings of a normal, decent life. As the other early scenes
of the film reveal, Dreyman directs, Christa acts, they attend and throw
parties, they have friends, and they are lovers. But as we also see, Drey-
man’s success—he is the winner of something called the Margot Honecker
award—comes at the grace of the state. This “normal” world is infected by
the looming presence of the state, its agents, and its ideology. We learn that
Dreyman’s friend the director Albert Jerska has been blacklisted and so
Dreyman must put up with the subpar direction of a lesser talent, Schwalber.
And while Dreyman’s birthday party is a pleasant gathering of friends, the
tension rises to the surface when his friend Paul Hauser accuses Schwalber
of being an agent of the Stasi. Jerska cannot participate in the social life of
the party. He sits alone on the couch reading Brecht.
The earlier scene where Dreyman makes his weekly visit to Jerska’s flat
provides further insight into this private world. Jerska is clearly miserable
due to his blacklisting. He cannot attend premieres anymore—they fill him
with disgust. And what is a director who cannot direct plays? He says that
in his next life he will come back merely as an author—then he would not
have to depend on the good graces of the state. So Jerska knows two things.
He knows he cannot be who he really is. He is quite literally prevented

from directing. But he also knows that even prior to his blacklisting, inso-
far as his art came with the approval of the state, it was not really his art, an
expression of his own mind and heart. During the conversation in Jerska’s
flat, Dreyman tells him that Minister Hempf has given him “concrete hope”
that his blacklisting will come to an end. Though Jerska says he is pleased
by the prospect, his look suggests he knows this will not happen. Nor does
Dreyman really believe what he is saying. So even in this private world, lies
are pervasive, distorting true understanding.
Dreyman, Christa-Maria, Jerska, Hauser, and the other members of this
circle seem to have achieved varying degrees of success exempting them-
selves from the state and its ideological distortions. But the very idea that
this retreat could ever really be successful—that one could live a decent life
untainted by politics—is itself a lie. And it is a lie that the regime wants its
citizens to believe. It offers them a bargain that is difficult to refuse. “Avoid
politics if you can; leave it to us! Just do what we tell you, don’t try to have
deep thoughts, and don’t poke your nose into things that don’t concern you!
Shut up, do your work, look after yourself—and you’ll be all right!”21 It is
a bargain that Dreyman has largely accepted. Wiesler’s initial act, then, is
meant to show Dreyman just how ugly his bargain really is.
Wiesler stands between two groups. Grubitz and Hempf have embraced
and flourished in the system because they are moved by nothing but self-
interest and appetite. Dreyman and Christa-Maria have remained relatively
unharmed by it because they have accepted what the system has offered:
work and relative peace in exchange for obedience. Both of these groups
have made their peace with the world of appearances for their own pur-
poses. Havel emphasizes how the post-totalitarian system makes everyone
an accomplice. He writes: “Everyone . . . is in fact involved and enslaved,
not only the greengrocers but also the prime ministers. Differing positions
in the hierarchy merely establish differing degrees of involvement: the
greengrocer is involved only to a minor extent, but he also has very little
power. The prime minister, naturally, has greater power, but in return he
is far more deeply involved. Both, however, are unfree, each merely in a
somewhat different way. . . . For everyone in his own way is both a victim
and a supporter of the system.”22
This is brought out beautifully in the film when Dreyman tells Christa
that he knows about her meetings with Minister Hempf and pleads with her
not to go. You don’t need him, he tells her. She replies that Dreyman needs
the system less than she does, but he gets into bed with the powers that be
too. They decide what plays are produced, who acts, and who directs. Here
we see what Havel calls the “longing for humanity’s rightful dignity, for
moral integrity” coupled with the recognition that humanity is also capable
“of coming to terms with living within the lie.”23
Wiesler and Jerska can no longer abide the world of appearances. They
are filled with disgust by the yawning gap between ideological pretense and
reality. But they are pushed to act for an additional reason. It has long been
observed that tyrannies depend for their perpetuation on isolating people
from one another. Hannah Arendt has described how totalitarian regimes
take this a step further. They do not stop at isolation but attack the integrity
of private life as well. “Totalitarian domination . . . bases itself on loneliness,
on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the
most radical and desperate experiences of man.” Later in this essay she elabo-
rates her conception of loneliness. “What makes loneliness so unbearable is
the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed
in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals.
In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts
and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make
experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are
lost at the same time.”24
Wiesler and Jerska each experience this loneliness. For Jerska, it
encroaches upon him from the inside out. He no longer has any sense of
who he is or that he might find himself by entering a common world. Jerska’s
response is total despair and eventually suicide. For Wiesler, the self is con-
stituted wholly by his ideological commitments. So once this outside world
is revealed to be hollow, he is completely at sea. Wiesler’s initial response is
to force someone else to see what he sees. Why should he be forced to bear
the burden of the false alone?
So it is this world of hypocrisy, pretense, and falsity that sets Wiesler in
motion. But it is another world that sets him on a path toward more active
rebellion—what I have called the axis of longing. This is the completely
foreign world that he discovers as he sits in the attic of Dreyman’s flat—the
world of love and friendship. Both axes act as catalysts for Wiesler’s trans-
formation. Initially he acts to prevent Dreyman from exempting himself
from all the ugliness that surrounds him. But he also becomes increasingly
fascinated by the beauty that is a part of Dreyman’s world. The first thing that
really moves Wiesler in this positive way is the love between Dreyman and
Christa-Maria. The strangeness of real human feeling for Wiesler is made

perfectly plain in his attempt to mimic what he sees and hears by ordering
a prostitute. His intrigue only grows as he listens in on Dreyman’s birthday
party. Wiesler’s second independent act is when he breaks into Dreyman’s
flat for no other reason than to get a sense of what it might be like to feel
what Dreyman feels. He touches and carefully observes his birthday gifts,
wondering about the giving and receiving of gifts. He also ends up stealing
a Brecht book and we see him in his own apartment reading a poem about
a lost love. Wiesler of course does not immediately feel these passions. The
episode with the prostitute demonstrates his desire for them, a desire that he
does not yet know how to satisfy. What he does feel is the absence of these
passions. He falls in love not with Dreyman or Christa-Maria but with their
love for one another. He also loves their friendships and their dedication to
and love of their respective arts.
It is the emergence of this second axis, the axis of longing, that moves
Wiesler to a more active rebellion. The content of Christa-Maria’s response
to Dreyman also seems to move him. It is right after overhearing this con-
versation that he lies to his coworker, Sergeant Lye, about Christa-Maria’s
destination. Wiesler then stumbles upon her in a bar and attempts to buttress
Dreyman’s attempt to restore her faith in herself as an artist. This trajectory
continues after he learns of Dreyman’s plan to write an essay on suicide in the
GDR for publication in the West. He decides not to alert the border guards
of what he thinks is an attempt by Hauser to get into West Germany, and he
continues not to include anything damning in his written reports. Wiesler
also tells his coworker that Dreyman and his friends are writing a play for
the GDR’s fortieth anniversary (thus repeating the story that Dreyman and
his friends had agreed upon).
Yet we ought not to make the mistake of seeing Wiesler’s trajectory as
easy and steady. This is an error of some critics, who suggest no real Stasi
officer could become the “good man” (transformed by beauty) they think
Donnersmarck has him become. Another important scene complicates
matters and brings the axis of disgust back into play. Wiesler overhears the
triumphal meeting between Dreyman, Hauser, and the Spiegel editor who
plans on publishing Dreyman’s suicide essay. Dreyman seems genuinely
surprised at how easy his dissident activity is and how incompetent the state
security services appear to be. All of this does not sit well with Wiesler—he
appears to decide to alert his superiors to Dreyman’s essay and the plan for
publication. He marches confidently into Grubitz’s office with an envelope
under his arm. However, Grubitz immediately shows Wiesler a dissertation,

“Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists,” that he has advised. Grubitz tells
him he has given the author a B, so as not to appear too easy. The work puts
artists into five categories and suggests the appropriate manner of punish-
ment to ensure the stifling of their artistic impulses. Dreyman is a type 4, the
“hysterical anthropocentrist,” who hates being alone, loves talking and being
around friends. With type 4s, an actual trial should be avoided—temporary
detention and complete isolation will provide no material for their writing.
As Wiesler listens to Grubitz recount the analysis, we see him glance down
at the envelope in his hand. Disgust with Grubitz has made him reconsider
his decision to reveal Dreyman’s dissident activities. He tells Grubitz he wants
to scale back the operation to be more “flexible.” From this point forward,
Wiesler continues to protect Dreyman by falsifying his reports. And later
we learn that Wiesler has even added details about the content of the play
that Dreyman is supposedly writing for the anniversary.
Conclusion
It is two axes, not one, that are behind Wiesler’s transformation. Some crit-
ics who find this character movement unrealistic focus on beauty and the
axis of longing but say nothing of the plot elements dealing with what I have
termed the axis of disgust. Funder goes even further, arguing that believing
a Wiesler to be a real possibility is to misunderstand the “ ‘total’ nature of
totalitarianism.” The system created multiple and minute duties to occupy a
variety of individuals in the perpetuation of “real existing socialism.” Thus,
Funder argues, people could rationalize their involvement by seeing their
role as quite small. The individual cogs in the bureaucratic statist machine
could just mind their own business and shrink their gaze to their assigned
task—and thus not have to face the massive evils being inflicted on much
of the population at the hands of the state and its instruments. But later
Funder also claims that “most ex-Stasi are still true believers.” She argues,
“The terrible truth is that the Stasi provide no material for a ‘basic expres-
sion of belief in humanity.’ For expressions of conscience and courage, one
would need to look to the resisters. It is this choice, to make the film about
the change of heart of a Stasi man, that turns the film, for some, into an
inappropriate—if unconscious—plea for absolution of the perpetrators.”25
There is an interesting tension here between Funder’s two points. Her
first, regarding the bureaucratized world of state-sponsored mendacity,
would seem to enable the system to move largely without “true believers.”
Her second claim, that even most ex-Stasi remain devoted communists,
would have required them to have taken a more global view of their role
and its relation to the whole. From the perspective of most scholars and dis-
sidents such as Havel, individuals fervently, sincerely attached to socialism
were relatively rare in the 1970s and 1980s. The Grubitzes and Hempfs were
the character types who flourished in the system. Somewhat paradoxically,
it seems it is Wiesler’s sincere attachment to socialism that prods him to
reevaluate the state and his role in it.
Yet even my suspicion here about Wiesler’s belief is merely an infer-
ence—we cannot know this for certain. Yet questions about the level of one’s
attachment to these ideals are somewhat beside the point. And this I think
is where Funder’s real mistake lies. She wants to defend the honor of the
real dissidents—those who risked their lives to resist the state. She thinks
the film does them a disservice in making a Stasi officer the hero and, even
further, could lead to a kind of absolution of the evils perpetrated by the
Stasi. Her defense of the dissidents is laudable, but I find this second worry
unfounded. After all, there is nothing attractive about Grubitz.
But the deeper point brings us back to Havel. Again and again in his
writings, Havel emphasizes the need to resist seeing the political landscape
in terms of dissidents on the one side and the state and its accomplices
on the other. This division would be to misunderstand the nature of the
oppression and the possible manner of its ultimate defeat. And the nature
of oppression in the post-totalitarian system is defined by ideology—and
ideology leaves nobody untouched. Havel argues that one of the main func-
tions of ideology is excusatory. Its purpose “is to provide people, both as
victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the
system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.”26
This is true from those people in positions of great power and influence
down to Havel’s greengrocer who merely puts the sign in his window. To
paraphrase Alain Besançon, the question is not who really believes in the
ideology but who is willing to conform to its demands.27 “For this reason,”
argues Havel, “they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It
is enough for them to have accepted their life within it and in it. For by
this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the
system, are the system.”28
The great genius of Donnersmarck’s film is to illustrate this distinguish-
ing characteristic of ideological tyranny. The fundamental line of conflict is
not between social groups or between the oppressive rulers and everyone
else. “In the post-totalitarian system, this line runs de facto through each
person, for everyone in his own way is both a victim and a supporter of the
system.”29 This does not mean that Havel or Donnersmarck are in any way
excusing those who did exercise real power and used that power for evil
ends. They both show the peculiar manner in which ideological tyranny
engulfs everyone. This is more troubling than a system put in place by a cadre
of greedy souls to oppress the many. Post-totalitarianism “can happen and
did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain
tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system.”30
This is the perverse evil of communism—that a system which seems deeply
inhuman in so many ways could have survived for so long.
Notes
An earlier version of this essay was published in Perspectives on Political Science, April–June
2011, Vol. 40, No. 2. Used by permission.
1. Peter Grieder, “In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory as a Tool of Historical Schol-
arship,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, September–December 2007, 578.
2. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 50.
3. Václav Havel, “Stories and Totalitarianism,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings,
1965–1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992), 331.
4. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” New York Review, May 31,
2007, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/may/31/the-stasi-on-our-
minds/?pagination=false (accessed July 19, 2012).
5. Anna Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” Guardian, May 5, 2007, http://www.theguardian
.com/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview12 (accessed July 7, 2012).
6. See Corey Ross, “The GDR as Dictatorship: Totalitarian, Stalinist, Modern, Wel-
farist?” in The East German Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 2002), 24–25; Mike Dennis, The
Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1990 (London: Longman, 2000),
185–88; and Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 42–51.
7. In what follows, I am indebted to James Pontuso, Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility
in a Postmodern Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
8. See Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Random
House, 1990), chap. 3.
9. Timothy Garton Ash, “Czechoslovakia under Ice,” in The Uses of Adversity (New
York: Random House, 1989), 63.
10. Václav Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” in Open Letters, 56.
11. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 77.
12. Ibid., 76.
13. Garton Ash noted, “I have never been in a country where politics, and indeed the
whole of public life, is a matter of such supreme indifference.” See his “Czechoslovakia under
Ice,” 63.
14. Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” 59. The second play in Havel’s Vaněk trilogy, “Unveiling,”
is a biting portrait of a couple who is perfectly emblematic of this naked consumerist retreat.
See Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, The Vaněk Plays: Four Authors, One Character (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1987); and Pontuso, Václav Havel, 85–87.
15. Václav Havel, Letters to Olga (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 341.
16. Havel, “Stories and Totalitarianism,” 340.
17. Funder also questions whether a Wiesler could really have kept his activities hid-
den from his superiors.
18. Santiago Ramos, “Why Dictators Fear Artists,” First Things, On the Square Blog,
July 23, 2007, http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2007/07/why-dictators-fear-artists
(accessed January 23, 2014.)
19. See the interview with Donnersmarck included on the DVD.
20. Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” 55.
21. Ibid., 61–62.
22. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters, 143–44.
23. Ibid., 145.
24. Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” Review of
Politics 15, no. 3 (1953): 323, 325.
26. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 134.
27. See “Language and Power in Soviet Society (Part I): A Conversation between Alain
Besançon and George Urban,” Encounter, May 1987, 11.
28. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 136.
29. Ibid., 144.
30. Ibid.
2
What Is a Dissident?
The Travails of the Intellectuals in The Lives of Others
Lauren Weiner
During the Soviet era, intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain walked a fine
line. We in the West admired those who, like Anna Akhmatova and Vasily
Grossman, snatched a measure of liberty by writing “for the desk drawer”
(not for publication)1 or by seeing their work passed from hand to hand in
samizdat (underground copies) or those who, like Boris Pasternak and Alek-
sandr Solzhenitsyn, smuggled manuscripts abroad for publication. Viewing
the situation from the outside, we tended to consider it a simple matter of
rebelling or not rebelling. Often it was not simple. The cultural commissars
of the Eastern bloc meted out punishments that differed in severity and
kind, and many intellectuals ended up accommodating the commissars to
varying degrees.
To Western eyes, the artists and intellectuals portrayed in Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others offer a puzzling picture.
Wending our way through the moral and political subtleties of the East
Berlin of this film will show how amply it demonstrates the insidious effects
of totalitarianism on those attempting to preserve freedom of thought and
expression.
Resisting Soviet power was difficult, and even the proudest resisters
bowed at times. The poet Osip Mandelstam, who dared lambaste Josef Sta-
lin in verse, also tried to placate the dictator with a poem of praise. It did
not save him from the Gulag. Akhmatova, desperate for her son’s release
from detention, wrote a few halfhearted odes to Stalin, to no avail.2 Varlam
Shalamov, another great Russian poet, was forced in 1972 to renounce his
35
36 Lauren Weiner
exposé of the Soviet labor camps, Kolyma Tales, in exchange for permission
to publish other works.3 Under official pressure, Pasternak altered his writing
style to be more in line with socialist realism. Pasternak felt it prudent to send
a condolence telegram to Stalin upon the death of Stalin’s wife. With similar
prudence, if with greater treachery toward the proletariat, the playwright
Bertolt Brecht wrote a supportive letter to Walter Ulbricht, the founder of
the German Democratic Republic (GDR), after Ulbricht and the Russians
crushed a massive uprising of East German workers in 1953.
As for Brecht’s country, East Germany had the least docile population of
any of the captive nations if we measure by how many people voted with their
feet. Between the GDR’s establishment in 1949 and Ulbricht’s 1961 closing
of the borders lest emigration cause the regime’s collapse, one of every six
East Germans fled.4 Yet from those who remained, not much was heard by
the outside world. Only rarely did reports surface of an East German writer
or artist running afoul of the authorities. One case that stands out, because
it received international publicity at the time, was that of the poet-songster
Wolf Biermann. Biermann’s outspokenness lost him his East German citi-
zenship in 1976. In the 1980s, even as a group of Czechs organized around
Charter 77, and Polish workers, intellectuals, and church members nurtured
the Solidarity movement, little unrest was visible in the GDR except during
a 1987 rock concert on the Western side of the Berlin Wall when youths
listening in on the Eastern side clashed with police.5
Most of the action of The Lives of Others takes place in 1984 in the midst
of this political deep freeze. What Donnersmarck has brought to general
notice, all these years later, is that there indeed were freethinkers in East
Germany, locked in quiet conflict with the largest per capita secret police
force in the Soviet empire—the Ministry for State Security, known as the
Stasi. How many resisters there were is not easy to say; the subject has thus
far received insufficient study. They at least include the lyric poet Reiner
Kunze (who was allowed to leave in 1977 and settled in West Germany) and
the novelist Erich Loest (resident in West Germany from 1981, many years
after he had served a seven-year sentence as a political prisoner). There were
also ostensible freethinkers who secretly gave information to the Stasi. The
Germanist Julia Hell identified some of “the former GDR’s most unsavory
authors,” meaning paid Stasi collaborators or unpaid Stasi contacts: Fritz
Rudolf Fries, Herman Kant, who headed the writers’ union, and Sascha
Anderson, who led a “strange life as avant-garde artist in the service of the
Stasi.”6 No such list would be complete without the prominent dramatist
What Is a Dissident? 37
Heiner Müller. When his assistance to the Stasi came out in the newspapers,
the pompous Müller defended it, saying he got valuable literary fodder that
way, and also that the secret policemen’s contacts with him were “a way of
bringing his influence to bear on the Stasi’s thinking.”7 Worst of all for the
reputation of GDR writers, even the internationally acclaimed novelist
Christa Wolf, a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who enjoyed the reputation of a
“loyal dissident,” had been a secret police informant briefly in the early 1960s.
If The Lives of Others has among its characters any who bears compari-
son with the émigrés Biermann, Kunze, and Loest, it is Paul Hauser. Hauser
(played by Hans-Uwe Bauer) is by far the most truculent of the movie’s intel-
lectuals and therefore the most admirable. The first line of dialogue we hear
from Hauser is an insolent remark he makes to East Germany’s minister
of culture, Bruno Hempf (played by Thomas Thieme). The rest of Hauser’s
time on screen is taken up with further mischief, be it publicly unmasking
a theater director who works with the Stasi; plotting to outwit the govern-
ment so he and his friends can expose the bleakness of East Germans’ lives;
making fun of the state security man who dogs his steps around town; or,
most important, encouraging one of the main characters to stand up and
oppose the regime.
East bloc writers who forged contacts with the free world and were
permitted occasional visits to the West were a privileged group. Hauser is
presented as one of these. He is a journalist with a government-granted per-
mit for attendance at conferences abroad. This means he has been trusted
not to defect, and indeed the question of this rebel’s stance vis-à-vis state
socialism as an ideology is an open one. We don’t hear him expressing his
philosophical or political convictions. The only thing remotely indicative
in this regard is his stray comment making fun of his West German uncle
“with his big gold Mercedes.” We are left to assume that Paul Hauser, like
the man he coaches toward subversive action (the illustrious playwright
Georg Dreyman, played by Sebastian Koch), holds to Marxism in some
fashion—rejecting the corrupt and brutal practices of the regime, not its
radically egalitarian aspiration.
That assumption is backed up somewhat by the filmmaker’s commen-
tary on the DVD of the film. During the scene where Hauser and Dreyman
are in the latter’s apartment conspiring with the editor of the West German
newspaper Der Spiegel (Gregor Hessenstein, played by Herbert Knaup),
Donnersmarck notes that the two Easterners react to the visiting Westerner
with distrust. They appreciate that he has come to help them publicize the
38 Lauren Weiner
despair that is rampant in their country, but they sense that this outsider does
not understand them. Hessenstein brashly pulls out a bottle of champagne
and proclaims it “the real stuff,” better than the plonk they are used to, and
he generally “doesn’t stroke them the right way,” says Donnersmarck.8 He
meant to show here the estrangement between Germans of the communist
East and the capitalist West, though the point is subtle—so subtle that he
admits that non-German viewers may have trouble getting it.
It takes a while for the repercussions to arrive, but Hauser’s outburst
among the theater folk partying in Dreyman’s apartment—the occasion
where he unmasked the Stasi-assisting theater director —has created quite
a stir. And a headache for the secret police, who need discretion. It was
fundamental to the workings of the Ministry for State Security to conceal
the identities of the legions of ordinary citizens it enlisted to monitor their
friends, coworkers, even family members. The targets of the monitoring were
suspected of counterrevolution, usually defined as an inclination to emigrate.
Discretion, too, entailed a diabolical twist. While the government’s helpers
were protected with anonymity, anyone it deemed hostile might be falsely
tagged as a helper. The Stasi was not above planting slanderous rumors that
an individual was one of the inoffiziellen Mitarbeitern (informants or “unof-
ficial coworkers”)—an accusation, among East Germans, more shameful
than being branded an alcoholic or adulterer. This was but one tool used to
ruin the reputations of those considered enemies of the people.9
The breach by Hauser prompts Hempf, the minister of culture, to can-
cel the journalist’s travel permit. He is being clamped down upon by the
authorities—a situation that, in real life, often propelled East Germans
toward escape.10 Hauser, however, only feigns leaving the country. He fakes
an escape to test who is and who is not under surveillance, the better to
evade state security and help Dreyman compose and transmit his manu-
script indicting the GDR as a failed experiment in socialism. In a turn that is
funny but also chilling, Hauser’s test only seems to work. He and his friends
are indeed being tracked by the head of a Stasi operation against Dreyman.
This man, Captain Gerd Wiesler (played by Ulrich Mühe), is up in the attic
of Dreyman’s building listening to the goings-on in the busy director’s apart-
ment. (Wiesler’s surprise and confusion upon picking up Hauser’s voice in
his headphones when he understood the journalist to have fled to the West
is used for dramatic purposes having to do with the Stasi man’s change of
heart about the people on whom he is spying.)
Nor is taking away his foreign-travel privilege the worst thing the regime
has done to Hauser. The movie had opened with a scene inside Hohenschön-
hausen, the Stasi prison and interrogation center, where we saw a hapless
citizen being grilled. Hauser is the only recurring character who, we learn,
is a Hohenschönhausen veteran. When sympathetic mention is made of
this, Hauser blinks and looks down without saying anything. He looks as if
it saddens him to pull out those distasteful memories, so he would rather
not—indulging in emotion might weaken him. Though hot-tempered and
tenacious, Hauser is no he-man; rather, he seems to need to husband his
strength for the taking of risks.
The Lives of Others has a martyr to artistic integrity, the stage director
Albert Jerska (played by Volkmar Kleinert). Jerska has been sidelined as a
director by order of Comrade Minister Hempf for airing at least one criticism
of the government. Even though he enjoys a following in the West and could
likely get permission to emigrate, he chooses to stay. His plight troubles the
movie’s main intellectual, the politically reliable, glamorous, and successful
Dreyman. Dreyman tries to make Hempf see that this talented man, who
“believes in socialism and in this country,” never should have been ostra-
cized. The average moviegoer may wonder how someone ends up persona
non grata when he “believes in socialism and in this country.” There is no
better place to turn for an explanation than to the Polish émigré poet and
former communist Czesław Miłosz, who described “the New Faith” holding
sway in the Sovietized part of Europe. For those in power, “the only friend
will be the man who accepts the doctrine 100 percent,” wrote Miłosz. “If he
accepts only 99 percent, he will necessarily have to be considered a foe, for
from that remaining one percent a new church can arise.”11
Jerska is a tragic example of the “captive mind” evoked so well by Miłosz
in his classic book of that name. That said, we at the same time can admire
this lonely man for not truckling to get back in the government’s good graces.
As it happens, the East German actor playing Jerska was a prospective inof-
fizieller Mitarbeiter (IM) in real life. He proved himself a person of extraor-
dinary rectitude. According to Donnersmarck (the director’s commentary
again), a young Volkmar Kleinert was approached repeatedly by the Stasi
over the telephone. He summoned the will to shout “No!” into the receiver
and hang up. The Stasi never bothered him again, nor did this rebuff hurt
his acting career. The experience taught Kleinert that “maybe being upright
and honest and courageous, maybe even heroic, didn’t always come at a
huge price. We always assume that it’s going to. . . . Maybe it doesn’t.” Don-
nersmarck’s words raise an inevitable and disturbing point: East Germans’
40 Lauren Weiner
acquiescence in—really, complicity with—their own oppression. After all,

the Stasi overmastered the people of the GDR without the mass violence
committed by Hitler’s Gestapo. The Stasi tightened the screws with a velvet
hand. Most acquiesced.
The truly excruciating acquiescence in the film is that of its female
lead, Dreyman’s girlfriend. The action mounts to a height of suspense when
Christa-Maria Sieland (played by Martina Gedeck) is brought in for inter-
rogation and threatened with being barred from the acting profession unless
she agrees to inform on her lover. Her pliancy in the hands of the Stasi is
immediate. The sad common denominator between the man who does not
truckle and the woman who does is their desperation. Jerska ends up tak-
ing his own life. Sieland dies before our eyes—by suicide or accidentally, it
is hard to tell which. This powerful, Anna Karenina–like ending—and the
filmmaker confirms that he had Tolstoy’s protagonist in mind—arouses
more pity than contempt for this weak woman. Who among us is certain
that, in her place, we would have been stronger? Moreover, she did nothing
political to get in this bind. A star actress of the East German theater, she is
apolitical. Her beauty has drawn the attention of a powerful man, Comrade
Minister Hempf. He forces her into a sexual relationship behind Dreyman’s
back. Likewise the playwright, whose work up to the time we meet him is
enthusiastically approved by the regime, attracts surveillance not for a politi-
cal reason but for a personal one. Hempf is fishing for something incrimi-
nating that will get his rival arrested and out of the way.
Yes, The Lives of Others is a bit of a soap opera. But let no one think
that such things did not go on. Ulrich Mühe, the movie’s Captain Wiesler,
found out years after the fact that his then-wife had been one of several IMs
reporting on him to the secret police. Other prominent East Germans who
discovered they had spousal spies include Vera Lengsfeld, the Christian
Democratic deputy and aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Drawing civilians
into the security apparatus enhanced the longevity of all the governments
behind the Iron Curtain, as we know. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out
(drawing upon Nadezhda Mandelstam’s insight) that the more individuals
who got roped in, the better: “Beyond the purpose of weakening ties between
people, there was another purpose as well. Any person who had let himself
be recruited would, out of fear of public exposure, be very much interested
in the continuing stability of the regime.”12
The struggles of conscience and expediency are many-layered in the
human heart—and in this movie. Therein lies its brilliance. Yet when it
comes to the character of Dreyman, the layering proves rather maddening.

As others have observed, he strangely combines Marxist adherence, humane-
ness, and careerism.13 Supposedly this is the story of an apple-polisher who
turns from “slactivist” to activist.14 Dreyman goes from scolding Hauser
for calling out the Stasi informant—sympathizing, even, with the authori-
ties when they cancel his feisty friend’s travel visa—to standing up for his
departed mentor, Jerska, by getting word to the outside about the prevalence
of suicide in East Germany.
Should we look from another angle, we might not see much of an evo-
lution. After all, Dreyman’s is a charmed life from the movie’s beginning to
its end. He never has to contend with an ultimatum from the state, as oth-
ers must. His apartment is bugged but he has no awareness of it until those
who were listening in are gone from power. When he secretly puts himself
at odds with the regime, his deed stays a secret—until he wants the world
to know about it after the collapse of the GDR. The wonderful, if not very
plausible, transformation of Captain Wiesler into Dreyman’s guardian angel
saves the latter from being discovered as the one who wrote in Der Spiegel
about East Germany’s scandalously high suicide rates.
His lover died a sudden and horrible death, and years later when he reads
his Stasi file, he finds out that she betrayed him. Because of her, Stasi goons
tore up his apartment in search of incriminating evidence. These are bitter
realities. Then again, his poring over the Stasi file inspires a roman á clef
from his pen, and this book, marking the end of a period of writer’s block,
is the latest feather in Georg Dreyman’s cap and delivers the film’s capstone
message: that there do exist men of feeling (he means Wiesler) able to rise
above terrible times. Donnersmarck asserts that relatively few of the Stasi’s
millions of victims had the stomach to go to the former East German secu-
rity directorate and ask to see the file that the Stasi kept on them. Two who
did, and who made literary use of their files, were the above-mentioned East
German writers Erich Loest and Reiner Kunze.15 The borrowing of Loest’s
and Kunze’s experience for this fictional character is clever but it is also
slightly galling. They triumphed over persecution; Dreyman hardly faces any.
In pondering this matter of the kind and degree of a dissident’s dissent,
it may help to notice that the spiritual faith of a Solzhenitsyn—also of an
Akhmatova, a Miłosz, or a Kunze—was a basis on which to reject communist
ideology. Donnersmarck does not deal with God or religion. They are not
really present in the East Berlin he gives us, except insofar as a Stasi agent
alludes to being ordered to spy on priests. This seems true to the milieu
42 Lauren Weiner
the film is trying to depict. The oppositional artists seem part of a coterie
of modern, atheistic bohemians whose politics, if any, are communist or
at least Euro-socialist.16 Paul Hauser’s sidekick, the burly and bearded Karl
Wallner (played by Matthew Brenner), is the one who most looks the part
of the 1960s-style, scruffy academic leftist.
Communism was invented by atheist intellectuals; few intellectuals in
East bloc societies were not pulled into its magnetic field. Moreover, there
was something else at work that increased this effect. Despite fascism’s being
as scarce as the Almighty is in The Lives of Others, the real versions of Hauser
and the rest lived and worked in a place where Nazis were said to be lurk-
ing around every corner. The self-presentation of communists everywhere
was that they were the people’s guardians against fascism (a hardy peren-
nial born in 1935 with the Comintern’s “popular front” policy). This had a
special meaning and impact in the land of Nazism’s birth.
In 1947, Bertolt Brecht wrote in his journal about National Socialism
and “the annihilating effects of failure.”17 As these words indicate, in the
aftermath of the 1939–1945 conflagration and of the Nuremberg trials, what
weighed upon Germans was not only the horror of mass murder committed
by the Third Reich but the shame of Germany’s losing the war. The German
Democratic Republic’s leaders deployed both the horror and the shame to
put over the idea that their ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) was, in the
words of Julia Hell, “the sole heir of the resistance movement” against Hit-
ler.18 The country’s very raison d’être lay in its “realization of the heritage of
the German labor movement and the antifascist struggle.”19 This “founding
discourse retained its power until the State imploded in 1989,” writes Hell
in her book on the centrality of antifascism to the literary imagination of
the GDR’s writers. In this society, to go against the grain at all was to court
association with Adolf Hitler. Hell speaks of “the displaced character of East
German politics,” in which there was no legitimate political center, let alone
a legitimate conservative position.20
Another of Bertolt Brecht’s journal entries shows this clearly. After the
revolt of June 17, 1953, over the state’s ratcheting-up of productivity quotas,
he had an encounter with a humble workingman—a plumber. Dismay that
the “workers’ and peasants’ state” should be spurned by so many workers
and peasants had led Brecht to sound out one of them. He records in his
journal that the plumber told him the country needed free elections. And
that he, Brecht, rejected the idea. “I said, ‘then the Nazis would be elected.’ ”21
The hostility to democratic norms was no doubt sincere on his part. But it
is not at all clear that he believed the party line—that Nazism was poised
for a comeback—that he parroted to this man.22
Commentators have noted the incongruity of Bertolt Brecht being the
patron saint, so to speak, of an anticommunist film. Paul Cantor, in his con-
tribution to this volume, points out that at any rate, the sentiment in Brecht’s
lyric poetry is featured more than is the agitprop of his plays—and that even
the plays can be good in spite of the dogmatism of their creator. The theatri-
cal performance that the movie shows (from a distance) is unquestionably
Brechtian, but it is by the fictional Georg Dreyman, not Bertolt Brecht. The
performance occurs early on, and while we don’t get to hear much of the
dialogue, we see stage décor that conjures up a sleekly stylized version of a
factory, the kind of thing Brecht favored. The actors are clad in Brechtian
gray, blue-gray, and black—from their heavy work boots to their smocks
to the babushka on the head of leading lady Christa-Maria Sieland, who
cavorts among her fellow troupers like some Stalinist version of Bizet’s Car-
men. She plays an assembly-line laborer who has premonitions, and she has
a vision of a man who is “crushed by the mighty wheel.” The mighty wheel
of bourgeois-industrial exploitation, we may be permitted to assume. Her
character is named Marta, and this has a subtle and very somber payoff later
on. In Dreyman’s Stasi file it says that his lover Sieland, upon signing up as
an informant, chose “Marta” as her IM cover name.
Since the character of Georg Dreyman is somewhat modeled on Brecht,23
the latter’s life and literary production merit discussion. What Donnersmarck
says is that Brecht was “torn between fascination for that ideology [commu-
nism] and a full realization of the wrongness that automatically came with
it, of the violence of the dictatorship.” During the time that the peripatetic
Brecht lived in the GDR, some sort of realization did apparently sink in.
The fascination was certainly more marked than the realization, though. It
shows up often in his poetry and dramas. His 1929 play The Measure Taken,
about agents secretly dispatched by Moscow to spread revolution in China,
justified violence against the innocent if it served the cause. “Sink into dirt,
embrace the butcher, but change the world, the world needs change,” as the
chorus sings in that play.24 In this same vein is the Brecht poem “Cover Your
Tracks,” which the critic Walter Benjamin, a friend of the poet’s, character-
ized as “an instruction for the illegal agent.”25
If a Stasi man ever needed literary inspiration for his conspiratorial
work, The Measure Taken or “Cover Your Tracks” would have done nicely.
But Donnersmarck has other plans for his Captain Gerd Wiesler, placing
44 Lauren Weiner
into his hands a Brecht poem about a cloud, a plum tree, and a kiss. The
filmmaker hints that he knows this was self-indulgent. After all, the soft-
ening influence on his film character could have been some other canoni-
cal German poet—say, Goethe (as Cantor suggests). He describes feeling
an irresistible urge to put Brecht in at that point as a tribute to a man
who, whatever else he was, was also a fine lyric poet. That most moviego-
ers would be unaware of the literary/biographical background probably
made it seem safe to follow this urge. Really, the unity of it all must have
been just too tempting: imitating Brecht’s dramaturgy; a dreamy Wiesler
on the couch, being swept away by Brecht’s words evoking the fleeting
joys of nature; Wiesler listening in on the playing of a piano piece whose
title is an allusion to Brecht (“A Sonata for a Good Man” after the play The
Good Person of Szechwan); having this also be the title of Dreyman’s novel,
which conveys the movie’s culminating message; Jerska telling Dreyman
his troubles while reciting apt Brecht verses. (The last one was cut from the
final version of the film.)
This itemization makes the Brecht obsession seem cruder than it comes
across on screen. Furthermore, in all fairness, this film is about the German
Democratic Republic, and the figure of Brecht looms large over the arts and
culture of that now-defunct nation. Still, it cannot but be seen as a violation
of the movie’s integrity to have used Brecht in this pervasive way. The movie’s
very conception bears out this judgment. Donnersmarck’s oft-mentioned
inspiration in writing his screenplay was an anecdote told by Maxim Gorky,
the founder of socialist realism, about Lenin. According to Gorky, Lenin
wistfully said that experiencing aesthetic beauty was rewarding but too much
of a distraction to the revolutionist, who needed to concentrate on tough
tasks—such as certain people needing “to be beaten on the head, beaten
mercilessly.”26 The filmmaker created Wiesler as a stand-in for Lenin, and
this time around, the exposure to art and culture conquers the ideologue’s
soul and disabuses him of his rigid ideology.
My point is that Donnersmarck knows Bertolt Brecht would be the last
artist to favor a Bolshevik’s taking some time off to broaden himself—the
last to favor Lenin’s tarrying a while with Beethoven (or even with Brecht)
when he could be at the office sending more counterrevolutionaries to the
firing squad. Brecht would have argued, of course, that his stance was not
bloodthirsty. Or at least not simply bloodthirsty. Compassion, which for
Donnersmarck flows from works of high art, for Brecht flows from Marx,
Engels, and Lenin. These three “were the most compassionate of all men,”
in Brecht’s words.27 Their dictatorship of the proletariat, however messy in

the construction, would bring an end to injustice.
Granted, the poet had his sensitive side—was known to be too sensi-
tive, in fact, to want to live under the system he advocated with such fervor.
“The element of playfulness, so important in his work, could not possibly
survive in proximity with the very horrors he used to play with,” said Han-
nah Arendt. He knew himself well enough not to spend too much time in
the Soviet Union, she pointed out in her 1968 essay on Brecht.28 Nor did
he choose, as many have mistakenly said, to live in the communist half of
his native Germany. Brecht’s residence in the GDR came about by default.
The military administrators in control of West Berlin, where he went after
leaving the United States in 1947, did not let him settle in Munich as he
wanted.29 (Anyone that fond of the skullduggery of the communist under-
ground would likely have amassed a security profile that did not smell right
to Allied authorities.)
His interwar exile from Germany had begun back when Hitler first took
power in 1933. He had criticized the Third Reich from afar, but these anti-
fascist writings were notably flat, according to Arendt, and often inaccurate.
The reason: his perceptions were boxed in by the communist equation of
capitalism and fascism. For example, in the poem “Burial of the Agitator
in the Zinc Coffin,” the Nazis’ mistreatment of their political adversaries is
presented as similar to what other governments did to their political adver-
saries. Arendt excoriates Brecht for suggesting in this poem that “there was
a difference only in degree between countries under capitalist rule. And this
was a double lie, for in capitalist countries opponents were not beaten to
death and shipped home in sealed coffins, and Germany was not a capitalist
country any longer.”30
The final seven years of Brecht’s life (he died in 1956 of a heart attack,
aged fifty-eight) were fruitful in terms of mounting plays but not in terms
of writing new ones. As a Staatsdichter (state poet), he had the use of the
grand Schiffbauerdamm theater for productions by his Berliner Ensem-
ble, which became the most distinguished institution in East Germany.
Ever mindful that the Schiffbauerdamm could be taken away from his
ensemble if he stepped out of line, he paid lip service to the theories of
the Russian dramatist Stanislavsky and the socialist realism demanded
by Stalin’s cultural enforcer, Andrei Zhdanov.31 Any grumblings against
the powerful—such as Brecht’s sarcastic (and unpublished) suggestion
that if the GDR government was so bent on pushing productivity quotas
46 Lauren Weiner
through the roof, maybe it should dissolve the people and elect a new
one—were sotto voce.32
The very name of Zhdanov, by the way, was an affliction to the poets
and writers mentioned at the outset of this essay. He patrolled all of the
arts in the Soviet sphere, music included, scouring everything for signs
of imperialist influence that had to be expunged. A famous 1948 decree
by this commissar of commissars thrashed Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram
Khachaturian, and Sergei Prokofiev, among others, for committing the sin
of “formalism.” Citing Zhdanov’s authority, East German academicians
condemned the most ambitious project of Hanns Eisler, an opera based on
Goethe’s Faust. Eisler—Bertolt Brecht’s collaborator on The Measure Taken
and many other works—was denied authorization for his interpretation of
Goethe, gave up writing the opera, and retreated in defeat to Austria, where
he had been reared. As for Shostakovich, his troubles were so constant that
a recent biography of the Russian composer could describe him as “both
a celebrated hero and a shivering wreck.”33 Important for our purposes is
that an aide to and memorializer of Shostakovich, defending the composer’s
posthumous reputation, compared him to a traditional Russian figure, that
of the yurodivy. Apparently it means “bitter jester”—one who entertains
the court as is expected of him but finds under-the-radar ways to express
his true self. One Shostakovich anecdote has it that, when he wanted to tell
visitors a joke, he would take them into the bathroom first so he could turn
on the spigot and drown out the surveillance. A scene in The Lives of Others
has Paul Hauser using the same tactic, only with loud music from his stereo.
The old figure of the yurodivy reminds us that it isn’t as if artists and
intellectuals were free of intimidation by the powerful before the Bolshe-
vik Revolution of 1917. History is full of willful patrons, from Lorenzo de
Medici to England’s Charles I to the Duke of Weimar—who, to teach J. S.
Bach exactly who was in charge, had him imprisoned in a castle keep for
a month. Communism, however, innovated. It did so by being systematic:
Zhdanov didn’t simply push creative types around; he elevated his whims
into the doctrine of “Zhdanovism,” the better to impose those whims on all
who dared venture into culture and the arts in the Soviet Union or the other
“people’s democracies.” The same was true of scientific socialism’s treatment
of science—Andrei Zhdanov’s counterpart in that field being the famous
Trofim Lysenko. The doctrine of “Lysenkoism” held that Mendelian genet-
ics were a capitalist hoax; agronomists and horticulturalists in Russia and
the satellite nations were to reject Mendel and build upon Soviet theories
exclusively. Bertolt Brecht may be one of the few who, while being subjected
to Zhdanovism, also dabbled in Lysenkoism. A ballad for children he com-
posed in 1950 about how to grow millet highlights the wonders emanating
from “Lysenko’s greenhouse in distant Moscow”; it has Stalin, “the Soviet
peoples’ great harvest leader,” in a cameo role.34
The author of “The Rearing of Millet” also wrote many valued works of
literature, and for this reason he has defenders (Donnersmarck included)
who strain to emphasize whatever qualms about revolutionary coercion
Brecht expressed. Hannah Arendt, a fellow German exile and acquaintance
of Brecht’s, who wishes also to defend him as a great artist, takes a slightly
different tack. She shows that he at least paid a price—the highest price—
for his in fact nearly uninterrupted Stalinism. When he had to give up his
revolutionary cheerleading from a safe distance, Arendt writes, it put him
“in infinitely closer contact with a totalitarian state than he had ever been in
his life before.” And it pricked his conscience to have to “see the sufferings
of his own people with his own eyes.” The result was that “not a single play
and not a single great poem” came from his pen in those seven years. She
adds that he “knew that he could not write in East Berlin” and the proof,
in her mind, was that at the time of his death he was trying to emigrate to
Western Europe.35 An interesting point of comparison and contrast, then,
between Donnersmarck’s playwright and Brecht is this: to the degree that
Brecht’s conscience was awakened, this hurt his muse. The better-late-than-
never dissident Dreyman makes out much better—as is his wont!—in that
his awakened conscience, rather than stymieing his creative powers, reju-
venates them. We can conclude that just as Wiesler is Donnersmarck’s way
of using the filmic art to improve the outcome for Lenin, Dreyman is his
way of improving the outcome for Brecht.
Here we are led to consider how far the improvement is intended to
reach into the realms of political belief and political action. Carl Eric Scott
argues persuasively in this volume that the ambivalence displayed by Drey-
man implies a political stance—held by the fictional character and his creator
alike—of gradualism, expressed as “reform communism” or, most plausibly
of all, that ever-elusive “Third Way” between capitalism and communism.
This could explain why Donnersmarck—who says he takes the utmost care in
naming his characters—made the playwright “Dreyman.” Three-Man could
be searching for the Third Way. In any case, the ambivalence is frustrating
to watch. Dreyman’s niceness and lack of guile (which are not Brechtian
by any stretch) help drive the drama of The Lives of Others forward, to be
48 Lauren Weiner
sure. But when, with furrowed brow, he cautions the Der Spiegel editor that
the exposé he will write and smuggle out to the newspaper “should remain
literature, not political agitation,” it seems as though he is stepping on his
own heroism. Is it an exposé he is cooking up or a meekly entered demurrer?
Irksomely subtle in much the same way is his behavior when he faces
the wrath of the secret police. Stasi agents, acting on Sieland’s information,
show up at his apartment. As they enter to search it, he gently addresses
them as “comrades” to remind them that he would never do anything to
harm the state. They ransack the place anyway and find a book by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. Again he moves to assure the intruders whose side he is on.
Not gently this time, but haughtily, he tells the Stasi goon holding up the
copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle that this was a gift to him from none
other than the wife of East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker. What usually
is seditious and suspicious isn’t in his case, he is saying.
Stepping on his own heroism and name-dropping as he tries to forestall
imprisonment—this, then, is the complicated life of the yurodivy. He is apt to
keep onlookers guessing, especially those seeking to judge him in the moral
sense. If we don’t know quite what to think of Dreyman, his creator has a
definite view. He tends to overadmire. He wants us to find the playwright
slyly insubordinate rather than compliant, especially in the scene just referred
to. One more detail from it will suffice. The goons, before going away, serve
notice that Dreyman has the right to file a claim against the government if
any property has been damaged in the search. Though his upholstery has
been slashed to pieces, he responds, no thanks, he is sure that everything is
in perfect order. Anyone who thought—as this viewer did—that he looked
and sounded cowed here is corrected by Donnersmarck in his commen-
tary. This is irony from a self-possessed Dreyman, he says. The moment
is intended as “a little bow” to Sigmund Freud, who showed a coolly for-
mal sarcasm toward the Gestapo agents who let him leave Nazi-occupied
Vienna in 1938. Overadmiration of Dreyman has a serious consequence
for The Lives of Others. It leads the filmmaker to his ending with Dreyman
and Wiesler, a picture of reconciliation and good feelings that, while highly
satisfying as moviemaking, fails to ring true. In today’s Germany, the former
hound dogs of the secret police and their former quarry maintain at best
an uneasy coexistence.36
Notice, by the way, how Donnersmarck’s intended allusion to Freud con-
flates the GDR’s secret police and the secret police of the GDR’s oft-invoked
nemesis, the Nazis. This is natural enough, and common enough. Yet one
of the achievements of this film is that it helps us recognize the difficulty

of weighing one form of totalitarianism against the other—the sanguinary
nature of the one against the deeper insidiousness of the other. The German
Democratic Republic was backed by the quiet presence of Soviet tanks on
German soil. The secret police force seldom bashed in heads but its project
of achieving flächendeckend—blanket coverage—was successful.37 In East
Germany, doctors informed on patients.38 Secret police went into the high
schools and made teachers give students writing assignments that would
later be collected as handwriting samples so that anticommunist graffiti
artists could be nabbed.39 And East Germans who had to participate in this
degradation of one another were invited to, and did, pick their own cover
names.40 The Stasi did not split open a society blatantly but made in it innu-
merable hairline cracks.
Christa-Maria Sieland took the very best of herself—“Marta,” her role
on stage—and made it a sordid secret police pseudonym. It is possible that
this character’s name—for, again, Donnersmarck wants us to attend to
names—alludes to the novelist Christa Wolf, who died at age eighty-two
at the time this essay was written. The likelihood of this wanes, however,
in light of the significant differences between them. Wolf informed for the
Stasi out of commitment to the antifascist cause, for one thing. For another,
and to her credit, she made a poor informant. She was taken off the IM
roster after some three years, spending far longer as a target of the Stasi’s
monitoring. A stalwart of the ruling SED Party but a sometime critic of the
regime, Wolf did write about the oppressiveness of being watched by state
security in an autobiographical novel. It was denigrated as the cri de coeur
that came too late, for she waited until it was safe to publish this work, when
the Stasi and the entire Honecker regime were on the way out. Most of her
fiction explored the legacy of shame left by the German tyranny that ended
in 1945. Ultimately she was a captive mind of the German tyranny that
ended in 1989. With the GDR in midcollapse, she pleaded with her fellow
East Germans not to let it die, to keep persevering in the construction of “a
truly democratic society.” People ought not flee, she wrote—it was “more
difficult but also more honorable to stay in the socialist Fatherland.”41
A consolation for Wolf and the other SED Party faithful was that the
SED was allowed to continue on in the new Germany (though under another
name, the Party of Democratic Socialism or PDS). We can assume this leni-
ency would have met with the hearty approval of Bertolt Brecht. In fact it
appalled Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Just as the Nazi Party was
50 Lauren Weiner
banned in 1945, so should the SED have been banned when the Berlin Wall
came down. He offers this opinion in his commentary near the end of the
movie in support of a larger point: that ruthless careerists who prospered
under communism, like the then–culture minister Hempf, have not been
driven from the scene but remain active and successful in the new order.
In one of the epilogue-like sequences that close the film, we catch up
with Hempf in the post–cold war period. The former minister is at the
theater, and we see him waylay Dreyman in the lobby after the latter has
bolted from his seat in the middle of the performance. Seeing and hear-
ing another actress play Marta, the role he created, has overwhelmed the
playwright with tragic memories of Sieland. While this distraught reaction
is a sign of Dreyman’s decency, it is hard not to view him and Hempf as at
least somewhat similar—a pair of survivors. For life goes on. One’s career
does, too, as does one’s love life. (The woman next to Dreyman in the audi-
ence looks to be his girlfriend.) Of course, Hempf and the playwright still
have much that divides them. Hempf dares to challenge Dreyman one last
time over “our dear Christa.” He also flaunts his lack of repentance for his
misdeeds as a GDR official. Dreyman rather wanly pits his indignation at
“people like you” against Hempf ’s brutal thrusts. Only now does Dreyman
find out that his home was mined with secret listening devices. And as he
takes this in, he does it again—he complicates our notion of the dissident
with his dainty shock upon learning that he was not the pet of the regime
that he assumed he was.
The mystery of Dreyman is unraveled. To wit, it was possible to have
been on both sides in a “participatory dictatorship,” as the GDR has been
called. And yes, this fictional character does represent an improved version
of Bertolt Brecht, because Dreyman sticks more than a baby toe on the side
of humanity, truth, and freedom. The “loyal dissident”—that opaque label
that some applied to Christa Wolf—is now embodied in an example from
which we can learn. We won’t necessarily be inspired or uplifted by what
we see. Nor should we flinch from drawing conclusions from what we see,
as Wolf Biermann reminds us. Biermann, though he was and may still be a
Marxist, was no “loyal dissident.” His poems and songs mocking East Ger-
many’s leaders for failing to live up to his socialist ideals got him kicked out
of the GDR in 1976—and in fact one of the leading writers who publicly
protested his ejection was Christa Wolf.
Upon seeing The Lives of Others, Biermann embraced it. As he says in
his contribution to this volume, “The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows,”
he did so despite its having “put a soft pedal on the totalitarian reality.” He
had initially doubted that a young, upper-class West German like Donners-
marck would be up to tackling this subject. The movie, however, told him
something important: that those who have not lived and suffered under a
tyranny are nonetheless “obviously quite adequately equipped to judge and
even condemn.” We for our part must judge that the writer Erich Loest, the
poets Reiner Kunze and Wolf Biermann, the actor Volkmar Kleinert,42 and
the politician Vera Lengsfeld are nobler than those who put themselves on
both sides. As Biermann says in this volume, the film “shows us what a crazy
and complicated mix of good and evil is contained within the human breast,
and in what dreadful disarray,” yet “despite all the complicated complica-
tions in human affairs, what Father God said in the Bible to all his earthly
children still holds: ‘Let your yes be yes and your no be no.’ ”
Notes
1. See John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of
Vasily Grossman (New York: Free Press, 1996), 108, 132.
2. See György Dalos, The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin,
trans. Antony Wood (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 88.
3. This account is from the translator’s preface. Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans.
John Glad (London: Penguin Books, 1994).
4. Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place
on Earth (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011), xxi.
5. James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War
(New York: Viking, 2009), 190.
6. Julia Hell, “Loyal Dissidents and Stasi Poets: Sascha Anderson, Christa Wolf, and
the Incomplete Project of GDR Research,” German Politics and Society 20, no. 4 (2002): 82.
7. Ian Wallace, “Writers and the Stasi,” in Reassessing the GDR: Papers from a Notting-
ham Conference, ed. James Henderson Reid, German Monitor Series (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1994), 121.
8. These and all subsequent quotations and paraphrases of Florian Henckel von Don-
nersmarck are from the director’s commentary on the Sony Pictures Classics 2007 DVD of
The Lives of Others.
9. Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 131.
10. Ibid., 120.
11. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 205.
12. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “Our Muzzled Freedom (1975),” in The Great Lie: Classic
and Recent Appraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism, ed. F. Flagg Taylor IV (Wilmington,
DE: ISI Books, 2011), 151.
13. Paul Cantor, in his contribution to this volume (“Long Day’s Journey into Brecht”),
52 Lauren Weiner
quotes the critic Slavoj Žižek to this effect. Also Carl Eric Scott, in his contribution to this
volume (“Communist Moral Corruption and the Redemptive Power of Art”), lays out the
clashing elements within Dreyman but argues that these can in some ways be harmonized.
14. Mona Eltahawy, describing mounting political dissent against Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt, referred to “the myth of youth ‘slactivists’ who some alleged were content with orga-
nizing on the Internet and speaking out only on social networking sites.” Washington Post,
January 25, 2011.
15. Reiner Kunze produced a memoir, Codename: Poetry (1990), as did Erich Loest,
The Stasi Was My Eckermann; or, My Life with the Bedbug (1991).
16. Scott in this volume delves into “reform communism,” speculating that this is
where Dreyman sits politically. I am suggesting that the others’ politics can be assumed to
be roughly similar.
17. Bertolt Brecht Journals, trans. Hugh Rorrison, ed. John Willett (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993), 379.
18. Julia Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East
Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 2.
19. Statement by the GDR government, quoted by Konrad Hugo Jarausch, “Care and
Coercion: The GDR as Welfare Dictatorship,” in Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-
cultural History of the GDR (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 50.
20. Hell, Post-fascist Fantasies, 2, 5, 30.
21. Bertolt Brecht Journals, 455.
22. Interestingly, it was the political center that the people of East Germany chose when
they got the chance, some thirty-five years after Brecht’s death. The 1990 vote just after the
Berlin Wall fell was a surprise victory for the Christian Democrats, a result that showed
unequivocally that the majority of East Germans favored immediate merger with the West.
23. Cantor in this volume shows that those involved in The Lives of Others, including
the actor playing Dreyman, were encouraged to view him as being in the mold of Brecht.
Cantor cites a German-language essay by Sebastian Koch in which Koch says that Drey-
man’s East Berlin apartment (which figures very prominently in the film) was based on the
apartment of Bertolt Brecht.
24. Quoted by Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968), 240. She translates Die Massnahme as “The Measure Taken”; it is sometimes
rendered “The Measures Taken” or “The Decision.”
25. Quoted by Eva Horn, “Actors/Agents: Bertolt Brecht and the Politics of Secrecy,”
Grey Room 24 (Summer 2006): 38–55.
26. This part of Maxim Gorky’s writings appears on a Web site of the Lenin and Moth-
erland Society, Moscow, http://www.aha.ru/˜mausoleu/a_lenin/gorky_e.htm (accessed
December 14, 2011).
27. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 236. She got (and apparently translated) this phrase
from Brecht’s posthumously published work entitled Me-ti, Buch der Wendungen.
28. Ibid., 216.
29. Ibid., 208, 216.
30. Ibid., 243.
31. Bertolt Brecht Journals, 530.
32. After the Russian playwright Sergei Tretiakov was arrested by the Soviet secret
police in 1937 and executed as a spy, Brecht protested his friend’s innocence in a poem of
commemoration entitled “Are the People Infallible?” This tribute to his friend was, however,
written “for an audience consisting of himself alone,” said Robert Conquest. Quoted in Sidney
Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Carrol and Graf, 1987),
494. Not only that, the poem initially had Tretiakov’s name in its first line but Brecht later
crossed it out. See Joyce Crick, “The Fourth Door: Difficulties with the Truth in the Svend-
borg Poems,” in Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile, ed. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), 133.
33. The words of Wendy Lesser, as quoted by Edward Rothstein in his review of Lesser’s
Music for Silent Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, New York Times Book Review,
May 8, 2011, 16.
34. Bertolt Brecht, “The Rearing of Millet,” trans. Robert C. Conard and Ralph Ley, New
German Critique 9 (Autumn 1976): 146.
35. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 217.
36. Bruce, The Firm, 63, 64; Arne Lichtenberg, “Germans Remember 20 Years’ Access
to Stasi Files,” article found on the German public broadcasting Web site Deutsche Welle,
February 1, 2012, http:/mobile.dw.de/english/ua.24/mobile.A-15640053–1432.html (accessed
February 4, 2012); Biermann, “The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows.”
38. Ibid., 48, 145, 160.
39. Ibid., 67, 72.
40. Ibid., 81.
41. The two quotations are from an obituary of Christa Wolf in the London Daily Tele-
graph, December 2, 2011.
42. And also his colleague portraying Comrade Minister Hempf, Thomas Thieme, who
emigrated from East Germany in 1984 after having been jailed by the regime.
Part 2
Art and Politics
Sebastian Koch (as Georg Dreyman) and Martina Gedeck (as Christa-Maria Sieland).
3
Communist Moral Corruption and

the Redemptive Power of Art
Carl Eric Scott
The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donners-
marck, is a masterpiece of filmmaking that shows how pervasively the Ger-
man Democratic Republic, through its secret police the Stasi, spied upon
its own citizens. The film tells the story of the partial moral redemption of
a dedicated Stasi captain, Gerd Wiesler, through his unexpected encounter
of artistic beauty in the lives of two artists he has been assigned to monitor,
the playwright Georg Dreyman and his lover, the actress Christa-Maria
Sieland. Through his audio surveillance of Dreyman’s apartment, Wiesler
becomes intrigued by the friendship, love, and artistry he finds therein. He
eventually tries to save these artists from the surveillance operation he is in
charge of managing, and he does so even after Dreyman really does engage
in antiregime activity.
Why does Wiesler thus risk his life and turn against the East German
regime? In a key scene, he is deeply affected when Dreyman plays a beauti-
ful piano composition upon learning of the suicide of his dear friend and
artistic collaborator, the director Albert Jerska. Donnersmarck has indicated
that this scene was the germ of the entire film: his idea for the story came
in reaction to Vladimir Lenin’s explanation of why he deliberately avoided
listening to music, and especially his favorite Beethoven piano sonata, the
“Appassionata,” on the grounds that it would make him too soft for his revo-
lutionary duties.1 What would happen, Donnersmarck wondered, if the situ-
ation were in a sense reversed, if a man dedicated to Lenin’s ideology were
forced by circumstances to truly listen to a powerful piece of music, and
57
58 Carl Eric Scott
more generally to truly encounter art and the artistic way of life? Could art
break through the ideological hardening? Donnersmarck obviously believed
that, in certain circumstances, it might have been able to do so. And so he
began work upon a screenplay exploring this possibility.
It would appear, given only this synopsis and these observations, that
the film is basically a testament to the redemptive power of art. However,
the story concerns not merely Wiesler’s transformation but also the possible
moral corruption of the artists he is spying upon. While this theme of moral
corruption is most vividly portrayed in the character of Christa-Maria, this
essay particularly explores how the film considers the theme in Dreyman.
I argue that Wiesler and Dreyman come to enact a reciprocal rescue of one
another from the communist moral corruption peculiar to their particular
stations.
Communist Moral Corruption

No serious investigation of communism can neglect considering what Alain
Besançon, the author of a book-length essay comparing Nazism and com-
munism, calls communism’s “moral destruction.” He says the following
about how this destruction developed in the Soviet Union:
At first, a significant portion of the population welcomes the teach-

ing of the lie in good faith. It enters into the new morality, taking
along its old moral heritage. . . . Hating the enemies of socialism,
they denounce them and approve of having them robbed and
killed. . . . Inadvertently, they take part in the crime. Along the
way, ignorance, misinformation, and faulty reasoning numb their
faculties and they lose their intellectual and moral bearings. . . .
Life . . . became grimmer, more dismal. Fear was everywhere and
people had to fight to survive. The moral degradation that had
been subconscious to that point now crept into consciousness.
The socialist people, who had committed evil believing they were
doing good, now knew what they were doing. They denounced,
stole, and degraded themselves; they became evil and cowardly
and they were ashamed.
In comparing Nazism with communism, Besançon concludes that the latter

brought about a “more widespread and deeper moral destruction,” even if
Communist Moral Corruption and the Redemptive Power of Art 59
the former probably brought crime to a greater “level of intensity.” What is

this moral destruction that both ideologies unleashed?
By moral destruction, I do not mean the breakdown of mores in

the sense of the age-old grumbling of the elderly as they examine
the mores of youth. Nor do I wish to pass judgment on this century
compared to others. There is no philosophical reason to believe
that man was either more or less virtuous during this period.
Still, communism and Nazism set out to change something more
fundamental than mores—that is, the very rule of morality, of our
sense of good and evil. And in this, they committed acts unknown
in prior human experience.2
Among these acts would be convincing a significant portion of a country’s

population to act as informants against their neighbors, coworkers, friends,
and families, such as occurred in East Germany.3 An image that conveys the
vast number of spirits communism corrupted is provided by the film, in
its footage of the seemingly endless stacks of the actual Stasi case files. All
the despair, fear, and twisted compromise conveyed by the one particular
work of fiction that is The Lives of Others must, the film visually insists, be
multiplied by all those real files it shows accumulated in the former Stasi
headquarters. Only such an imaginative multiplication can begin to convey
what Besançon is pointing to when he speaks of the depth and the breadth
of communism’s moral destruction.
This essay considers how communist moral destruction or corruption
is presented within the poetic world that is The Lives of Others by examin-
ing how the three main characters, Gerd Wiesler, Christa-Maria Sieland,
and Georg Dreyman, are immersed in or threatened with it, and how they
might be rescued from it.
The film also portrays the rather advanced moral corruption of the Ger-
man equivalents of the apparatchiki, the higher-ups like Grubitz and Hempf
who do not really believe in the ideology but use it to secure privileged posi-
tions. Dreyman appears for much of his life to have hoped that the core of
socialism is its humanity. Wiesler affirms this hope in his manner, that is,
insofar as it can be expressed in Marxist phraseology.4 In contrast, the moral
corruption of the apparatchiki consists in concluding that the core lesson
of the communist system is that “people don’t change,” as Minister Hempf
puts it, but rather are reducible to a fairly limited number of urges, motives,
60 Carl Eric Scott
and socio-psychological types. Those who control the organizations that

allow one to more scientifically calculate such reduction and act upon it are
better able to manipulate people. “Change” does not occur from the inside
through persons connecting with one another and their common humanity;
it is implemented from the outside by those in power, those enabled to play
upon the basic elements of the “person.” Men like Hempf secretly conclude
that Lenin was wrong about the ultimate end obtainable but correct about
the means used to secure power. The film, however, does not dwell upon
this far-gone corruption of the apparatchiki, and so this essay will say little
more about it.
Wiesler’s Partial Redemption from Communism’s Moral

Degradation
Until Wiesler begins to change, he is a willing agent of an evil regime. He
fits a widespread judgment of the Stasi voiced in one scene by a child: he is
one of “the bad men who take people off to prison.” We see that in interroga-
tion he will employ physical cruelty (sleep deprivation) and will persecute
a subject’s relatives and loved ones innocent of any official crime. With a
quiet intensity that bears witness to his conviction, Wiesler trains students
in these and other Stasi arts and exhorts them to remember they will be
employing these against “the enemies of socialism.” All in all, he is morally
corrupt due to his ideology.
Unlike Lenin, he did not come to this ideology as an adult but grew up
under it as the official order and morality. This is not to say that as a young
man deciding to join the Stasi, he did not have to especially dedicate him-
self to defending that ideology. In the “Bluecaps” chapter of The GULAG
Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn recalls how when he and his classmates
were encouraged to join the Russian equivalent of the Stasi, something in
them balked despite their acceptance of communist doctrine: “It would be
hard to identify the exact source of that intuition, not founded on rational
argument, which prompted our refusal to enter the NKVD schools. It cer-
tainly didn’t derive from the lectures on historical materialism we listened
to. It was clear from them that the struggle against the internal enemy was
a crucial battlefront, and to share in it was an honorable task. . . . It was not
our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts.”5
Philosopher and student of Eastern bloc dissidence Chantal Delsol has
called this something “scruples,” which in an ideocratic regime are “doubts
about the rightness of an action” that by the ideology’s lights must merely
be irrational.6 When it becomes plain to Wiesler that the surveillance of
Dreyman has been ordered for the sake of removing the minister of culture’s
romantic rival, he recalls to Grubitz the oath they took to become the party’s
“shield and sword,” thereby suggesting that this mission is not worthy of that
charge. We thus see that Wiesler’s young trust in the ideals of Marxism was
not left at the typical level but became precisely articulated according to its
supposedly scientific precepts, and positively sworn to. The Stasi oath was
a promise to accept all the necessarily scruple-deaf methods logically justi-
fied by those precepts. And like a monastic, the unmarried and unattached
Wiesler seems to have denied himself a normal human life just as he seems
to have suppressed normal human feelings.7
In the earlier portions of the film Wiesler has the cleaned conscience
of the true-believing Leninist. For him, a moral reality exists. As he begins
to see a moral integrity in the lives of the artists directly posed against the
corruption of the socialist ideal he is also witnessing, he becomes prepared
to reject the Marxist-Leninist articulation of the moral life and his part in
upholding it. The film’s heart shows us that Wiesler’s moral regeneration
would not be possible, however, were it simply a matter of his having to admit
the apparatchiki corruption of the socialist ideal. Rather, what is crucial is
his coming to care for the lives of the artists Dreyman and Sieland. This care
to some extent begins with erotic motives, as his professional suspicion of
Dreyman seems initially motivated by an attraction to Christa-Maria. But
his jealousy becomes overshadowed by his appreciation of the value of their
artistic lives, so that eventually, what comes to particularly entangle him
with them is his desire to protect their love for one another. In a series of
scenes following the early stages of his surveillance, we are shown his newly
aroused interest in eros, evidenced by his haplessly yearning employment
of a prostitute, as well as his newly aroused interest in art, reflected in his
gazing upon the gifts in Dreyman’s apartment and in his pilfering the book
of Brecht poetry. The most telling scene, of course, is the one in which he is
powerfully moved by the sonata he hears Dreyman playing. By that point he
knows enough to know what a tragedy Jerska’s suicide is for Dreyman, and
that the GDR’s censorship is implicated in it. He can thus feel the personal
import of the art. And unlike Lenin, Wiesler is encountering something
he never really has before, something that he had never had to deliberately
steel himself against. Dreyman plays a rather stormy composition entitled
“Sonata for a Good Man,” and after playing it he shares the Lenin quote and
62 Carl Eric Scott
asks aloud whether anyone who has “heard this music, I mean really heard
it, could be a bad man.” Wiesler, evidenced by his shedding a tear, really has
heard it. His moral regeneration begins at this scene, as it is immediately
followed by his first merciful relaxing of his Stasi code when he decides to
avoid pursuing the incriminating information about some parents in his
building that their child innocently reveals to him.
What would have happened had Wiesler not been assigned to spy
on Dreyman? He would have remained a Stasi captain, interrogator, and
teacher. By the time the GDR fell in 1989, he likely would have learned of
more apparatchiki abuses of power, but he would have remained dedicated
to the ideology. As a former Stasi officer, in 1990 he would have suffered a
dramatic demotion of career, a degree of public shunning, and perhaps some
measures of official punishment, and he would not have been prepared to
understand why this was justified. If a man like Hempf could adjust and
make out reasonably well in the new Germany, a man like Wiesler (without
the moral regeneration) could only have felt bitter about the whole situation.
Similarly, it is necessary to note that Wiesler’s moral redemption can
only be partial. The fact that he saved Dreyman and tried to save Sieland
cannot alter what his entire career had consisted of up to that point. It is
true that in his fake reports about Dreyman’s writing of a play about Lenin,
he writes that “Lenin, though facing increasing pressure, continues with
his revolutionary plans,” which actually reveals a certain awareness that it
is he who is preparing a little “revolution.” These “plans” involve working to
rescue Dreyman and Sieland, but as they are “revolutionary,” the wording
likely conveys Wiesler’s determination to change his own ways. But here we
must ask: where would he have been had his plans succeeded? It is only due
to the vengeful action of Minister Hempf that Christa-Maria is interrogated.
If Wiesler’s maneuvers had worked, and so had left Georg and Christa-Maria
in their place, he would have remained in place as well, a place that requires
him to continue doing Stasi deeds. Would he have then resigned? But doing
so would arouse fierce suspicion from his superiors. That is, Wiesler would
not have had any easy way to disentangle himself from the regime’s ongoing
moral destruction. In fact, even the easier way of disentanglement the plot
provides him, with his prisonlike demotion to the letter-opening basement,
is not totally disentangled. He continues to help the Stasi pry into the lives of
others. He does not refuse to do any work for the organization. To survive,
he must remain engaged in some morally degrading compromise, as most
subjects of this regime were forced to at some level. And this does not even
begin to delve into the question of how he deals with the guilt he must now
feel. The film ends with him as a pitiable figure, now delivering mail in the
free but depressingly graffiti-covered East Berlin in his machinelike man-
ner, apparently alone and stunted by his long Stasi training but, as we get
a glimmer of in the final and incredibly moving scene, living a life open to
art and literature, and perhaps also to love and friendship. In the very last
shot, something like a smile, something like contentment, is seen on his
face. Here is a man who, damaged as he may be, now has his own life to live.
The Moral Corruption of Christa-Maria Sieland

Christa-Maria is killed when she steps in front of a speeding truck after flee-
ing Georg’s apartment. Although the film makes us uncertain about whether
she spontaneously decides to commit suicide or is killed by accident while
in a suicidal state of mind, for our purposes it is best to regard her death
as a suicide. For in this way we can see that she succumbs to the very fate
Georg protests against in his Spiegel article, that the regime kills off hope
and thus drives its subjects to kill themselves. In her case, however, it is not
a lack of hope that kills but a presence of guilt. She flees from the apartment
when, as she thinks, Georg’s incriminating typewriter is about to be found
by the Stasi agents due to her treacherous revelation of its location in inter-
rogation. She had expected to be able to feign innocence at this moment,
but she proves unable to withstand a furious look from Georg. Wiesler has
removed the evidence, but Georg and Christa-Maria do not know this. She
flees out into the street and is killed by a truck. Her dying words are, “I can
never put right what I’ve done wrong.” Donnersmarck says that in a sense
her soul had already died when earlier that day in interrogation she had
revealed where the typewriter could be found. There is a level of moral cor-
ruption that brings about living death.
The interrogator who convinced her to betray Dreyman was Wiesler,
who knew he was being observed by a now-suspicious Grubitz. The film
leaves it tantalizingly unclear whether Wiesler meant to signal to her that
she should not betray Dreyman by his reprising the “selling oneself for art”
theme he had discussed with her in the bar scene or whether he was doing
his utmost to get her to reveal the spot, having calculated that only in this
way could he buy the time to remove the evidence and thus at least gain
Dreyman’s safety. In any case, the terms of her betrayal as she understood
them were that she would get to remain on the stage. She thus proves willing
64 Carl Eric Scott
to facilitate Dreyman’s ruin in exchange for being able to live out her life of
acclaim on the stage. This is why the resurgent flash of her conscience that
led to her suicide/accident may have spared her from an even worse fate,
that of total moral corruption.
If suicide or living death are two of the morally degraded possibilities
open to Christa-Maria, there were two other possibilities, both having to do
with “being in bed with” the regime, that she was deflected from earlier in
the film. First, had Wiesler not intervened by manipulating the door buzzer,
Dreyman might never have learned about her sexual liaisons with Minister
Hempf. She likely would have chosen to keep them a secret, as she tries to do
with her drug habit. We have no reason to think Georg would have learned
of them anytime soon. Second, had Wiesler not convinced Christa-Maria
in the bar scene to stay loyal to Georg, it appears that she was prepared to
resign herself to deeply debasing, if not destroying, their love by continu-
ing to service Hempf on the side, in this case with Georg’s full knowledge.
There is perhaps no moral degradation so tangible as sexual degrada-
tion; the film displays the horrifying preliminaries of Hempf ’s copulation
with Christa-Maria and afterward, we see, she immediately seeks a shower.
But the degradation physically manifested in voluntary subservient sex is
evoked in a key line by Christa-Maria as the best symbol for what is occur-
ring on a much wider scale: artists like Dreyman and herself “get in bed
with them.” She gets no denial from Dreyman that the metaphor applies
to him. Christa-Maria and he, and many other artists in the film, cooper-
ate with the regime’s control over their careers and refrain from presenting
anything critical of it.
The price of not cooperating is plain enough: no sanctioned opportu-
nity to develop or share one’s art. If the film points out that certain artistic
activities, such as writing, are less dependent upon these opportunities than
are directing and acting, the basic dependence of all of them remains. After
seven years on the blacklist, Jerska decides he cannot go on living without
these opportunities, and Christa-Maria decides immediately upon her arrest
by the Stasi that not only can she not live without them, but that she is will-
ing to sign up as an informant or to grant sexual favors to Grubitz to keep
them. Not only is being an artist integral to the very personality of Jerska,
Sieland, and Dreyman but, ironically enough, that artistic life provides the
very sanctuary needed to escape from the regime’s mechanical, cynical, and
crude atmosphere. The artist thus depends upon the regime to allow him
or her to rise above its all-around ugliness.
Earlier, at the bar scene, Wiesler could for a time reverse her moral
corruption by appealing to the link between her personal integrity and
her artistic greatness. Speaking in the name of her audience and echoing
Dreyman, he says she is a “great artist” and reasons that since she “already
has art” she need not sell herself for it. But this line of reasoning cannot
convincingly separate her art from her having an audience, as we see in the
later interrogation scenes. Faced with Grubitz’s question, “What do actors
do when they can no longer act?” Christa-Maria assumes the answer is too
terrible to contemplate. She cannot see how she could “have art” on her
own. Could she have it as an element of her personality simply shared with
her lover? The film does not allow us to confidently feel that such a retreat
of her artistic self into private resources would be possible for her or for
any serious actor. Wiesler may speak of Christa-Maria “having” art, but he
does not necessarily understand what is involved. He has not considered
the problem the way Jerska has. Again, this issue is a live one for Dreyman
as well, although as an author, and one capable of shifting genres, he can be
less directly dependent upon the regime’s approval. Of course, regardless
of their vulnerabilities, we cannot imagine Dreyman or Jerska winding up
actually betraying a friend to the Stasi.
In sum, in Christa-Maria’s story we see the full picture of communist
moral corruption outside of its ideological (Wiesler-esque) aspect; from
metaphorical “getting in bed with them” to the real thing, and from noble
efforts at resistance to total capitulation, it is all there. We see narcotics sup-
plied, offers to be an informant given, and a breakdown of the person under
interrogation. By the film’s vocabulary she was a “good person” pushed by
the system into becoming entangled in and accepting of evil deeds. Her
story thus fits the classic idea of moral corruption.
Georg Dreyman’s Creed and Situation Prior to Writing the

Spiegel Article
When Hempf speaks with Dreyman in 1991, he says that unlike the new
united Germany, the GDR gave one something “to believe in” and some-
thing “to rebel against.” Had he said this to Wiesler, Wiesler could perhaps
have related to a longing for “something to believe in.” Had he said this to
Dreyman’s dissident friend Hauser, Hauser could perhaps have related to a
longing for “something to rebel against.” But when he says it to Dreyman,
both parts of the statement hit their mark. Dreyman was both a believer
66 Carl Eric Scott
in and a rebel against the socialist regime. His belief in it is reflected by

his plays, his public stance, and his own self-understanding. His political
rebellion against the GDR comes to fruition only when he writes the Spiegel
article, but it was grounded in two ongoing rebellions of his: a humanistic
understanding of socialism opposed to the GDR’s way of implementing
Marxism, and a related yet potentially apolitical emphasis upon the human-
izing virtues of art.
Before Dreyman wrote the article, his published work supported the
regime—Grubitz’s statements about his loyalty indicate that his plays have
not included any criticism of the regime evident to the likes of him. Like-
wise, there is nothing from his plays that Minister of Culture Hempf can use
against him, since otherwise he would not need to order the surveillance
measures. The film also suggests that Dreyman really regards himself as a
socialist playwright, a role particularly resonant in East Germany, given
the famous example of Bertolt Brecht. Hauser and Christa-Maria speak of
Dreyman’s “idealism” and his “faith,” and Hempf characterizes his plays as
conveying a “love of mankind” and a belief that “people can change.” How
might this humanistic faith be connected with his socialism? Or, what do
we know of the “socialist” aspect of his art? The action of the one Dreyman
play we do see snippets of, Faces of Love, does not itself provide evidence of
a socialist message, although the main characters are workers. If we consider
the example of Brecht and his collaborators,8 particularly in some of their
later plays such as The Good Person of Szechwan and The Caucasian Chalk
Circle, we can see that while classic humanistic questions are presented, they
become connected to the impact of a particular socioeconomic system, so
that characters are presented as standing for various “types” that make up
such a system. The socioeconomic system is very determinative: it is the
poverty-causing capitalism of Szechwan and the hardened noble classes of
the Caucasian kingdoms that primarily serve to hinder people from doing
good or finding justice.9 Perhaps Dreyman’s plays are like these ones, albeit
more optimistic about the ability of humans to overcome their circumstances.
We don’t know, but they must contain some material friendly to socialist
ideas, given his reputation. We can see that Faces of Love ends with celebra-
tory dancing and earlier shows a villain being defeated, but it begins with
Christa-Maria’s character Marta having a vision of the imminent death of
another character’s loved one. Thus, the play teaches that people can change
and the good can win but also that some people are doomed to their fate.
Interestingly, this fate is not obviously bound up in socioeconomic factors,
and it is predicted by a vision, a dramatic device perhaps out of place in a

drama that ought to be in harmony with historical materialism. Marta says
she sees Arthur fall to his death, “crushed by the great wheel,” with the wheel
evoking a traditional symbol of fate (but also a Marxist symbol for fated
history),10 and then asks, “Why am I not spared these visions?” The darker
side of Dreyman’s work and character shows up here; indeed, it seems that
in writing this play he drew on hazy premonitions of disaster looming over
his own life.
In sum, Dreyman’s work is identifiably socialist (even if it may con-
tain cloaked criticisms of the regime), is characterized by a Brecht-like
acknowledgement of human tragedy, and yet ultimately conveys a hopeful
message. This message, I argue, would be in harmony with a conviction
that genuine socialism is possible, and that its true form must provide a
good deal of personal freedom. Also, this message likely recommends the
potentially bridge-building method of imaginatively “putting yourself in the
other’s place,” since on two separate occasions Dreyman uses variants of this
phrase, first to defend Jerska to Hempf and second to defend the Stasi’s ban
of Hauser’s travel to Christa. He also prefers to assume the best about others:
when Hauser asserts (correctly, as it turns out) that the director Dreyman
is currently working with is an informant, Dreyman responds that he does
not “know” that he is.
Let us consider more closely Dreyman’s faith in the possibility of what
can be broadly called “reform communism”11 or, as it was called in the Prague
Spring of 1968, “socialism with a human face.” Since “people can change,”
perhaps human society can also change and really achieve socialism. As for
the Leninist regimes established in the name of socialism that lamentably
developed in such authoritarian ways, it is incorrect to see them as funda-
mentally tyrannical, so that they would collapse if they granted a real measure
of political liberty; rather, what is most fundamental about them is their goal
of socialism. If they attempt to moderately reform, we have no reason to
think (and we certainly cannot know) they will become regimes with mar-
ket economies and wherein Marxist socialism will be an electoral loser. To
assume this would be to assume that the enactment of Marxism absolutely
depends on oppression. Such an assumption is heretical by the standards of
Marxism and, far worse, it suggests the impossibility of any desirable form
of socialism. We are obligated, then, to give reform communism a chance.
Something like this, I hold, is the political creed of Dreyman. While
we will see that certain aspects of his stance are “apolitical,” I argue that
68 Carl Eric Scott
he does have a political view. He does not think the GDR is an adequate
attempt at socialism. By 1984, he has read dissident literature like the copy
of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle we see on his desk, he has heard the cri-
tiques of the regime that persons like Hauser and Wallner can make of
it and, like them, he “tremendously admires” Jerska for a “statement” he
made ten years earlier that got him blacklisted. He obviously wants a GDR
with much greater artistic freedom; he is probably aware that granting this
would logically require it to also grant greater freedom of political speech.
The suicide article represents a decisive turn in which he says, in effect,
We cannot go on living like this, but he probably knew for some time about
the problem reported therein. He knows that addressing such a problem
demands searching criticism of the entire GDR way of life. Such criticism
would be impossible unless the GDR promoted what Gorbachev eventu-
ally did: glasnost (publicity). For these reasons, Dreyman’s political view,
half-baked as it may be, is best described as that of reform communism.12
Why does he support the regime in his plays and public persona? And
why does he at times object to dissidents like Hauser pushing the authorities
too far? Regarding such questions, his appeal to Hempf as a “man of honor”
to understand why Jerska cannot “remove his name from that statement”
is quite revealing. It reveals how Dreyman thinks the GDR elite must be
approached. If the only realistic political hope is to get them to adopt reform
communism, this goal can be harmed by insulting them—one must instead
understand the position they are in and the honorific need he assumes they
have to stand by what they have said. Arrogant insult and going too far too
quickly can bring about a reaction that only makes things worse. Dreyman
perhaps wonders if those were the fatal flaws of the Prague Spring of 1968
and the East German artistic dissidence of the 1970s that was apparently
a good deal bolder than it is by 1984.13 One way things could substantially
get worse, and not just for the artists, is if the public were cut off from real
art altogether.
Dreyman’s faith in art we must examine more closely, but it is first
necessary to see that the political vision Dreyman clings to is a mistaken
one. The bottom line, which Donnersmarck may or may not accept, is that
the Czechoslovakian reformers and Gorbachev were both wrong to think
that a communist system could be reformed and yet remain communist by
means of offering some political freedoms. Had the Prague Spring reforms
gone forward, all indications suggest the Communist Party would have been
ousted from power, and the example of the resultant regime would have
gravely threatened the authority of all communist states, just as occurred

when Gorbachev allowed Poland and Hungary to liberalize in 1989. The
truth about the European communist regimes is that they would fall were
they not shored up by the party’s political monopoly, by the prohibition of
market activity, by the closing of borders, by the wide censorship, by the
constant activity of security organs like the Stasi, and by the fear of Soviet
military intervention. Dreyman, as was the case with many noble dissidents,
does not understand this. Wiesler does: the instant the Wall falls, he knows
he need no longer obey his Stasi masters. Erich Honecker understood it,
going so far as to ban circulation of Soviet pro-glasnost publications. Gor-
bachev, thank God, did not.
At the shot of Gorbachev in the newspaper, Donnersmarck remarks
that “people can change.” I submit that Dreyman hoped his humanistic mes-
sage of change might influence up-and-coming party figures potentially like
Gorbachev; and for Donnersmarck, Dreyman was right to never abandon
this hope. That particular political hope, of course connected to a broader
set of ambitions for art, was not impossible. But reform communism itself
was impossible; it was a recipe for communism’s self-destruction.14 Thus, the
reformist artist might do his part to pull a ruler or an up-and-comer into
greater openness toward art and reform, but perhaps he would be able to do
so only by himself errantly believing in the viability of reform communism.15
Like the tucked-away farm home of Varykino in Boris Pasternak’s Doc-
tor Zhivago, where in the first deep winters of communism an artist might
for a time live apart from political concerns, occupied with his poems, his
family, and his lover, Dreyman’s apartment and his circle of artistic friends
serve as a shelter in the still pretty chilly and seemingly permanent commu-
nist society of the GDR. The healing powers of his refuge are undeniable, as
the transformation of Wiesler shows. And as it is less obviously threatened
by the regime than was Zhivago’s hideaway, it provides a sense of stability.
Indeed, were it not for the attraction of Minister Hempf to Christa-Maria,
one can imagine that Dreyman’s life there could continue in its tolerably
happy mode: loving Christa, writing plays, seeing them performed, holding
parties, exchanging beautiful gifts, reading poetry, and perhaps having, as
Pasternak wrote of the family circle at Varykino, “endless discussions about
art.” True, this life would be buffeted by unwelcome news about artists like
Jerska not being able to manage and by accusations from those like Hauser.
For those moments, one could turn to dark compositions like “Sonata for
a Good Man,” thereby supplementing the cheery stride-piano music Drey-
70 Carl Eric Scott
man plays in the extended (that is, cut) version of the party scene. At times
art would bring about dancing, and at others art would help heal wounds.
Is it not so that “every work of art, including tragedy, witnesses to the joy
of existence?”16 One must not let the regime rob you of the sense that liv-
ing life is itself good; otherwise, one might “wind up like Jerska.” Art would
let one maintain this sense, and what is more, it would continually remind
one of the need to try to be a “good person.” In so many ways, it would
serve as a refuge from and rebellion against the GDR way of life. One could
“champion life itself ” as did Pasternak’s Zhivago,17 and one could enter the
dissident’s “quiet moral transformation [that] involved living life as if the
oppressive cope of Marxist-Leninism did not exist, or was moribund.”18 In
isolation this quotation might make this sort of dissident stance seem too
easily apolitical. For our purposes, however, it brings Dreyman’s stance
into sharper relief. He wants to live his private life as if the regime did not
exist, aided by art, but while also depending upon the regime for many of
the accoutrements of this private life and for his very opportunities to try
to influence that regime in his public life. That is, he does not engage in the
enigmatic opposition implicit in publicly acting, most especially in one’s
art, as if Marxist-Leninism is irrelevant. In a sense, he wants to live like
playwright Václav Havel, whose dissidence was obvious but whose dramatic
work became confined to samizdat publication, and to live like playwright
Bertolt Brecht, who was granted a state-funded theater and company in
exchange for his support of the regime.
While The Lives of Others ultimately tends to confirm Solzhenitsyn’s
belief in the concordance of truth, goodness, and beauty,19 it shows the dif-
ficulties in applying this creed: one can come to rely too much upon beauty,
and that reliance might be used to corrupt one. Moreover, the film implies,
perhaps contrary to Solzhenitsyn’s stance, that beauty might not reliably line
up with truth in the final analysis. For example, the film suggests that artistic
beauty pervades (1) Brecht’s communism-supporting work; (2) Dreyman’s
evidently loyal but perhaps subtly pro-reformist humanistic plays; and (3)
Dreyman’s politically devastating work of literary journalism. All are beauti-
ful, but only the last really conveys the political truth. There are other clues.
Consider the two gifts besides the “Sonata” opened after the party. One is
mistaken by Dreyman as a “backscratcher,” but Christa tells him it really
is a “salad fork.” “Still,” he says, “it’s beautiful.” An artwork’s beauty seems
to operate free from its function or intention, and what is more, it survives
the misinterpretation of intention. The other gift is a beautiful pen, which
he implies will help him in writing his next play. But its beauty cannot help
him in this. Morally charged actions must occur to break his writer’s block,
namely, Christa-Maria’s abandonment of Hempf and Hauser’s kindness to
Dreyman at the funeral. It may be good to surround oneself with beautiful
objects, but it cannot always suffice. And indeed, Dreyman’s surrounding
himself with artistic beauty seems to have become blinding. Wiesler says he
needs to see some “bitter truths,” and upon saying this uses the door buzzer
to get him to witness Christa-Maria with Hempf, an action that draws Drey-
man outside of his art-filled apartment.
Christa-Maria and Georg seem to compound art’s power with their love
for one another, which obviously involves the love of the artistic qualities
of each. And their love is potentially stronger than art itself. After Christa-
Maria decides to spurn Hempf, she tells Georg she “will never leave,” and
shortly before this she tells Wiesler that Georg loves her “above all else.”
That would include art. Indeed, Georg had just told her that though he
was losing his care for his writing and for other people, “now all I fear is
losing you.” It seems possible that through their love, they could survive
losing all else. Alas, Christa-Maria abandons this hope. As Donnersmarck
says, she has been deeply wounded by the regime and also suffers from
an uncertainty about her personal identity and artistic worth that actors
are particularly susceptible to. We must also say that she turns out to love
“being herself ” in the beauty and lucidity of art more than she loves Drey-
man and being with him. Artistic beauty can be posed against the love of
persons, the burdens of ordinary life, and the sacrifices of goodness; it can
become its own “truth.”
We must of course keep in mind that Dreyman’s art can potentially
influence his society. Again, if he does not experience success in this in
any political manner, such success is not impossible, nor is this his art’s
only way to impact society. His plays can convey to audiences something
of the morally regenerating refuge they too might find in art; indeed, in
the theater they can together enjoy this private regeneration publicly. A
dramatic performance in East Germany, at which such mysterious and
rare connections might occur, thus retains something of the ancient aura
of a potentially sacred and regime-altering event. Dreyman accordingly
feels a great responsibility for his part in such events. In sum, for Drey-
man, art nourishes his private life but also grants and burdens him with
an important public life.
72 Carl Eric Scott
Dreyman’s Path into Moral Corruption

Wiesler saves Dreyman from punishment by the Stasi for the Spiegel article.
But also, just as Dreyman saves Wiesler from continuing in the morally
corrupt Stasi life, Wiesler saves Dreyman from continuing down a path
that slowly but surely is morally corrupting him. Additionally, saving him
from being caught by the Stasi saves him from another type of moral cor-
ruption, the enervating sort in store for any “type 4” artist convicted of
political crimes.
Hempf ’s intrusion into Dreyman’s life is necessary for Donnersmarck
to illustrate that it is not simply the ideologically determined security needs
of the GDR that oppress but the sheer power of its corrupt rulers. Wher-
ever real beauty is created, and especially where this involves displaying the
beauty of body and personality, tyrannically empowered rulers like Hempf,
of whom there are many lesser versions, will predictably use their power
to seize beauty and satisfy their lusts. They might even use their power for
merely vindictive whims—sheer jealousy of Dreyman’s apparent happiness
or hatred of his “arrogance” could bring about actions against him. Thus,
the intrusion of the Hempf character is central to the world of The Lives
of Others and it is pointless to consider Dreyman’s situation apart from it.
But the additional intrusion of Wiesler is another matter. A Stasi guard-
ian angel secretly protecting a person is not a normal part of a realistic East
German “world.” Thus, the employment of this plot device pushes us to ask
how Dreyman would have developed without Wiesler’s actions. As we saw
in considering Christa-Maria’s corruption, two of these are particularly key:
first, his use of the door buzzer trick to get Dreyman to see that Christa is
being dropped off by Hempf, and second, his convincing Christa to stick
with Dreyman and abandon Hempf. Again, without the first action, Drey-
man probably would not have learned of her seeing Hempf for a very long
time. And without the second, he would have been faced with the choice of
going along with it or breaking it off with her. Even more important, since it
is her refusal to continue seeing Hempf that he says gives him “the strength
to do something,” he would not have written the Spiegel article that serves
as his political, and really spiritual, break from the regime.
Hauser is right to say to Dreyman that “unless you do something, you’re
not human!” Certain political situations demand actions of the persons
capable of them. Dreyman’s position in the GDR has become, by 1984 if
not earlier, morally untenable. As there are virtually no signs of reform on
the horizon, what justification for his continued support of the GDR can
he have? Indeed, Dreyman tells Christa in the conversation about “being in
bed with them” that he “so much want[s] to change,” even if this statement
also indicates he apparently cannot. This felt need for drastic change coexists
with a certain contentment with his setup. Dreyman enjoys being “strong”
the way Christa needs him to be—his artistic activity allows him to avoid the
Jerska-like brooding that is this strength’s opposite. He enjoys himself and
Christa being a model couple for the artistic community, which can admir-
ingly watch them dance or enjoy their party. Similarly, it is morally important
to him to be forgivingly “idealistic,” even if someone like Hauser sees this
idealism as making him in some way like a “bigwig.” In sum, while Jerska
puts things too starkly when he speculates that he owed his own once-warm
personality entirely to his artistic success, which was made possible only by
the “grace of the bigwigs,” without question this applies to some degree to
Dreyman. As with Christa-Maria, the danger is that he might feel he can
“be himself ” only within the setup provided by the regime.
If he had continued on his path of partly wanting to change but never
acting on it, by the 1989 revolution he might have been without close friends
and far more closely associated with the now openly hated GDR. Even if
he had been a participant in the 1989 revolts, his reputation as the last sig-
nificant playwright who still supported the regime would be poor, and it
would not be redeemed by any acts of dissidence back when such acts were
still quite risky. Moreover, the quality and truthfulness of his art would have
diminished—Jerska’s death made him unable to write, and were he to simply
force himself to overcome that, to essentially take Jerska’s death without the
response of the suicide article, he likely would have harmed the spiritual
wellsprings of his art.20 In sum, without these two interventions of Wiesler,
the likelihood of at least several years of compromised decline for Dreyman
seems quite high. And at worst, it seems such a post-1989 Dreyman might
wind up believing what Jerska did, that his life-affirming and generous per-
sonality was all a function of social privilege. That is, the darkest conclusions
about his own life derivable from a post-utopian but still determinist read-
ing of Marx and Brecht might come to dominate his self-understanding.
Whatever we think of that possibility, the key fact is that Dreyman would
have remained “in bed” with the regime even when its full degradations of
his loved ones (at the least, of Jerska) had been revealed. Hauser’s words
accusing him of suppressing his humanity would prove true.
The other possible scenario of Dreyman’s moral corruption that Wiesler
74 Carl Eric Scott
rescues him from is his being cowed by the “type 4 treatment” had he been
proven the author of the Spiegel article. This treatment is discussed in the
scene when Wiesler goes to Grubitz’s office intending to turn Dreyman in.
Before he can, Grubitz gleefully shares the contents of a dissertation on
Stasi techniques that he has been given credit for supervising. It classifies
artists into five types, and Grubitz pegs Dreyman as a type 4, the “hys-
terical anthropocentric.” Stasi experience has shown that punishment for
this sort is best administered in what might seem a comparatively cushy
manner: good treatment, no trial, total isolation, mysterious release after
ten months—in short, “nothing they could write about.” But actually, such
treatment is calculated to crush the spirit of the type 4 artist, who thrives
on social contact. Type 4s subjected to it have almost always refrained
from further dissidence upon release, and what is more, they have usually
ceased producing any art. It is no accident that the two great fears Dreyman
confessed to Christa were “being alone” and “not being able to write.” So
as repellently reductive as this “five types of artists” schema is, we can see
that its suggested treatment probably would work against Dreyman. At least
to Wiesler, that prospect seems likely enough, and horrifying enough, to
spontaneously sway him against his initial resolution to report Dreyman’s
authorship of the suicide article.
Succumbing to the treatment is a species of moral corruption. It is not
simply a passive victimhood. The artist gives up on his morally necessary
protest against the regime and worse, he gives up on being his artistic self.
Why does he do the latter, when all he has to do to keep from again suffering
solitary confinement is to refrain from politically charged activity? This is
related to the reason why we are certain that Dreyman’s art would weaken
if he did not write the Spiegel article after Jerska’s suicide: there is an inner
connection between the inspiration to create beauty and one’s trying to do
good and portray the truth through this creation. Another aspect of the type
4 treatment is the regime’s feigned indifference to artistic dissidence. The
regime seems to say to artists like Dreyman, “So you’ve read Solzhenitsyn
. . . and so what? Some of us have read him too, and it didn’t shake us. The
system remains in place. So you’ve written your ‘devastating article.’ We
don’t like it, sure, and we must punish you for it, but it doesn’t really mat-
ter to us, or to anybody, really. Your ten uncertainty-filled months we gave
you in solitary confinement show you just how alone you are and just how
pointless your activity is.” The corruption of the type 4 involves wordlessly
getting him to believe this. It is a demoralization in terms of morale but thus
necessarily also in terms of morals. Immorality does not consist simply of

committing unjust actions like betrayals for gain; it also includes succumb-
ing to certain states of character, such as the type 4’s becoming discouraged
about his artistic gift.
The key similarity between the moral corruption Dreyman was slipping
into on his own and that fostered by the type 4 treatment is just this loss
of faith in the worth of one’s art and a corresponding inability to produce.
While we cannot here explore the film’s suggestions about the unexpected
problem liberal democratic freedom poses to artists, we must note that both
times Dreyman appears to lose confidence in his art correspond to a period
in which either by his own timidity or by the deception of others he is living
out of kilter with the deepest facts of his life. This occurs first when, despite
Jerska’s suicide and despite learning of Christa’s affair, he attempts to go on
writing his pro-socialist dramas. It is a very brief period consisting of the
week or so between Jerska’s death and funeral. The second occurrence, as we
learn from the 1991 theater lobby scene with Hempf, was from late 1989 to
late 1991. Until he looks at his file, Dreyman remembers Christa-Maria as
a kind of savior. It was she, he thinks, who removed the typewriter. She also
symbolizes for him the artistic life, having embodied his quest for beauty
and drama. But his actual savior was the representative not of art but of
coldly calculating rationality, Wiesler. At least since 1989, art has been fail-
ing Dreyman, and his old way of inspiration is not working. His liberating
turn to delving into his own private life by way of writing a novel instead
of a play is not possible until he is given the means to understand the truth
about his private life. He must see beyond the statuesque image of Christa-
Maria, a certain “face of love” that his love had created, and realize just how
damaged she had been.
So both of Dreyman’s cases of writer’s block occur during periods in
which he is knowingly or unknowingly working against the grain of basic
truths about his life. In the second occurrence, the problem of not under-
standing where one stands, of what one’s place in the story is, seems to be
the element, in addition to the specter of indifference, that links his artistic
infertility with that of the “treated” type 4. The type 4 suddenly released
after ten months is harrowed by the solitude and fears he is still monitored,
but what is more, he doesn’t know, nor do his fellow East Germans, why his
punishment has been comparatively light. He might not even know what
he’s being punished for, and being unable to find a solid role for himself in
any clear-cut dissident versus regime drama, his powers wane. He is thus a
76 Carl Eric Scott
bit like Dreyman having to ask Hempf why he was the only one not under
surveillance.
A Typology of Communist Moral Corruption

The types of moral corruption by communism we have found presented by
The Lives of Others turn out to be basically five. First, there is communism’s
ideological moral corruption, exemplified by Wiesler. It is the success of this
Leninist corruption that is the necessary condition of all the others. Second,
there is what I have dubbed the apparatchiki moral corruption. Third, there is
the moral corruption in the traditional sense of a good person being seduced
or cajoled into doing bad acts that he or she also regards as bad for the sake
of personal gain or security, exemplified by Christa-Maria. Obviously, this
corruption occurs in all times and everywhere, but communist societies have
the unique trait of establishing security services that are driven by a certain
ideocratic logic to systematically cultivate it in the widest scope possible.
Fourth, there is the sort of moral corruption that Dreyman takes some
steps down the path of but ultimately rejects. What should it be called? It
might be called the corruption of the reform communist or of the humanist
artist. But there is no reason to think that Christa-Maria is less representa-
tive of art than Dreyman is, or that she is somehow opposed to his “love of
humanity.” Rather, the difference is that her commitment to being a good
person, while still integral to who she is, has its weak points, whereas his
commitment is “strong.” He is a person who cannot be enticed into the acts
she is. This difference between them is due to a whole host of reasons but
seems to most especially depend upon what she calls his “faith,” which we
have seen is a faith in humankind, socialism, and the humanizing powers
of art. Why isn’t such a principled type by his very nature a threat to the
regime? The answer is found in what Besançon calls the communist “falsi-
fication of the good.”21 Dreyman was brought up under an order that linked
the pursuit of goodness with the socialist goal. He strongly identified with
that goal. And once he had begun to more fully see the evils of the regime,
the question of how to undo those evils without rejecting socialism could
only yield the answer of a gradualist reform from within; at least, it could
only yield this answer if he were to maintain his idealism. More important,
because his idealism was actually fairly vague in political terms and given
more manifest expression in the world of art, he would naturally, without
the regime doing anything, be drawn into a life centered on expressing such
idealism. If push came to shove, the regime’s rulers would know better than
to try to pressure Dreyman into committing deeds whereby he would directly
harm others or sell himself for his gain. But they knew they could reasonably
expect that his high hopes for the theater’s humanistic impact would tend to
keep him from speaking out against the regime—and, indeed, could keep
him appearing to still be its full supporter. In essence, the regime held the
ongoing cultivation and expression of his moral excellence hostage, requir-
ing in exchange that he continually lend the GDR the artistic aura of this
high-mindedness. We are thus led to a surprising formulation: this moral
corruption is the corruption of the inadequately political moralist!
If this corruption is in some senses as old as the world, being the sort
of thing we might peg, say, the Harry Truman of the 1920s and 1930s with,
vis-à-vis his squeaky-clean image being sponsored by the rotten Prendergast
machine (although this would be a gross moral equivalence), the communist
version directly and intimately tempts every idealistic moralist with it, even
those trying to evade politics. If one is not willing to tame one’s idealism or
channel it into the approved path articulated by the ideology but insists on
another, necessarily “nonpolitical,” path, one will eventually find oneself facing
a Dreyman-like situation. In a free society, a person may be at least honorably
ignorant about political affairs; in a communist one, everyone, the idealists
especially, is pressured into making dishonorable political commitments.
Fifth, there is another way to morally corrupt stoutly principled idealists,
and that is to attack their morale so as to deprive them of all hope. This seems
to be what the GDR has done to Jerska, and it is scientifically perfected in
the other possible path of Dreyman’s corruption, the type 4 treatment that
snuffs out the desire to make art.
Conclusion
Christa-Maria knows it when she enters the key acts of her moral corrup-
tion. Dreyman’s slide into corruption, by contrast, happens without his full
awareness. He needs to be prodded by others’ actions—Jerska’s, Christa-
Maria’s, Hauser’s and, most especially, Wiesler’s—to get him to resist it. And
as has been shown, it is Wiesler’s two actions here that are the really decisive
ones plot-wise. Moreover, it is Wiesler alone whose actions keep Dreyman
from being subjected to the type 4 treatment. Why has Donnersmarck set
things up in this manner?
My conclusion is that while Donnersmarck is absolutely serious about
78 Carl Eric Scott
the power of art to ultimately overcome communist oppression and to par-

tially heal its corruption, he wanted to balance this primary theme of his
film with the cautionary theme of the ultimate insufficiency and corrupt-
ibility of purely artistic resources. The major insufficiency of art concerns
politics. Art’s very humanistic potency to both inspire the highest idealisms
and to provide healing refuge attracts persons like Dreyman. In a communist
society especially, it can thus enable certain forms of denial and escapism.
Donnersmarck and Solzhenitsyn stand with Dreyman when he insists that
people can change, especially through encountering the power of great
and truthful art. But they are not naïve about politics and human failings
in the many ways he is. In a particularly shocking instance, Dreyman looks
surprised when Hauser tells him in the park scene that he can’t publish the
suicide article under his own name! More understandably and yet none-
theless tellingly, Christa’s possible weakness and Hempf ’s possible ferocity
simply do not figure into his thinking. These and similar facts point to a
real lack in Dreyman and to a real point of weakness found in many artists.
For the key parallel Donnersmarck’s film is pointing to, which I call the
reciprocal rescue from communist moral corruption, is this: as Dreyman is
unknowingly saving Wiesler by his art, Wiesler is secretly saving him by his
psychological and political cunning. It is a cunning that is systematic and
reductive in its calculation of human motives but also able to swiftly move
with the interrogator’s actorlike instincts. As important, it is a cunning that
has inside knowledge about the political regime and an intuitive grasp of
its basic realities. It really is, in its stunted, regime-specific way, a form of
political prudence. Through a variety of moves and deceptions, including
his cowing of Udo, Wiesler shields the Spiegel article from surveillance,
thereby rescuing Dreyman. His most impressive feat, of course, is removing
the typewriter, but we should be as impressed by his placing the red finger-
print clue of this removal into his final Stasi report, since this indicates his
own calculation that the regime would likely not last, contrary to what most
Western political scientists would have guessed in 1985.22
Dreyman is a very admirable character and the one closest to Donners-
marck himself. The film highlights his strengths and blames him less for his
various failings and weaknesses than it does the regime. If tragedy inheres
in his “trying to be good” in writing the Spiegel article, which is both an act
necessary to halt his creeping moral corruption and, plot-wise, one that
dooms Christa-Maria to hers, this is the GDR’s fault, not his. Nonetheless,
the reciprocal nature of the rescue of Wiesler and Dreyman from commu-
nism’s moral corruption points to an unavoidable conclusion: Dreyman

would have been a better man, a better dissident, and perhaps even a better
artist if he had had more of Wiesler’s cunning in him.
Humanistic art and political acumen need one another. The person
best able to do what is good in a quite corrupt society, and probably also in
a more typical one of lesser corruptions, is the one taught the fundamental
importance of weighing and attending to truth, goodness, and beauty but
also taught to acquire knowledge of the regime and of typical human fail-
ings and to employ cunning (and often necessarily reductive) calculation
whenever necessary to act defensively or offensively against the regime. And
this person must also apply all this knowledge to considering his or her own
place in that society and what it reveals about his or her own motives. It is a
very tall order, and even if obtained, it does not guarantee political success
or the avoidance of tragedies.
But it is essentially a quest for moral and political truth to guide one’s life,
and in undertaking it the artist, or any person, can take solace in the words
of the great and at one time greatly damaged man Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
whose life really exemplified just what these words promised: Lies can prevail
against much in this world, but never against art.23 True art will be truthful.
It will be truthful about the political lies, even the most powerful ones, and
even the ones politics-shunning artists are most drawn to. A wise political
thinker is not necessarily very artful; but in certain circumstances the artist
may well need to sit at his or her feet or read his or her treatise to produce
true art. True art will be truthful even about the lie that art can stand on its
own, and even about the lie that one finds truth wherever one finds beauty.
For beauty divorced from truth may live for a long time and call itself art,
but Solzhenitsyn does not say that lies cannot prevail against beauty. Nor
does Donnersmarck. Rather, they are agreed that it is true art over which
lies cannot prevail. The Lives of Others, through the story it tells and its own
hard-earned excellence, demonstrates how daunting the task of true art can
be but also how rewarding and absolutely necessary it is.
Notes
1. Unless otherwise indicated, references to Donnersmarck’s statements refer to the
“director’s commentary” available on the English-language DVD of the film.
80 Carl Eric Scott
2. Alain Besançon, A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness

of the Shoah (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 31–36.
3. John Koehler estimates that 1 out of every 6.5 persons in the population were acting
as informants, either as unofficial informers (IMs) or as Stasi personnel. Koehler, Stasi: The
Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 9. Estimation
of this is a difficult task, however, requiring one to choose (1) a particular point in time for
determining the ratio; (2) how to count those employed by the Stasi in more mundane tasks;
and (3) how to count informants seldom utilized, on one hand, and part-time informants
(whose numbers we are far from certain about) on the other. Compare Koehler’s data with the
less sweeping estimates from Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 10–11, and from the Jens Gieseke chapter in this volume.
4. Wiesler notably resists sitting in the section of the Stasi lunchroom reserved for
“bosses” on the principle that “socialism has to start somewhere.”
5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago: 1918–1956, abr. ed. (New York:
HarperCollins, 2002), 74.
6. Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late
Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 54. On “ideocracy,” a term essentially equiva-
lent with “ideological totalitarian regime,” see Daniel J. Mahoney, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
The Ascent from Ideology (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).
7. See Bruce, The Firm, 36, for evidence that Wiesler’s single status was atypical. The
Stasi encouraged marriage, and while its employees’ divorce rate mirrored that of the popu-
lation, “most of the officers who joined the Stasi were already married upon recruitment.”
8. John Fuegi’s Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama
(New York: Grove, 1994) shows that large portions of many of the plays we attribute to Brecht
were written by unacknowledged, usually female, collaborators (and lovers).
9. A less Marxism-bound reading of Caucasian Chalk Circle, one attuned to com-
munism’s own crimes and insufficiencies, may be possible. In any case, the allusions the
film makes to Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (Mensch can be translated as “person” and is
represented in the play by a female character) are several and central: it is evoked by the
title to the key sonata, Christa-Maria tells Wiesler he is a “good man,” and the song used in
the montage sequence sings (in a fatalistic tone) of the necessity to “try to be good.” The key
connection between the film and the play is their shared question of whether humans can
be good in a corrupt society. While it would take another essay to explore, my hypothesis
is that Donnersmarck alludes to the play to suggest that the path he threads in The Lives of
Others is between the Scylla of the too-humanist stance of Dreyman and the Charybdis of
the too-determinist stance of “Brecht.”
10. Marx and Engels refer to the “wheel of history” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The Communist Manifesto (New York: Signet Classic, 1998), 63.
11. My understanding of the term comes from Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A His-
tory of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994) chaps. 9, 11.
12. These reasons are further supported by an allusion. The leader of the Prague Spring
reforms was Alexander Dubček, whose autobiography is titled Hope Dies Last (New York:
Kodansha International, 1993), a phrase Hempf uses when he says, in reference to Drey-
man’s plea for Jerska’s rehabilitation, “Because as you know, Dreyman, hope always dies last.”
13. Jerska felt emboldened to make his “statement” around 1974, but 1984 represents
a low point for East German artistic dissidence, as Donnersmarck suggests in his commen-
tary and also shows in his film. For example, Grubitz says that Dreyman is the last of the
playwrights “still read in the West” to remain loyal, and that Hempf led a “cleaning up” of
the “theater scene” several years back.
14. For the full demonstration of this and the above argument, see Malia, The Soviet
Tragedy, 390–95 esp., and 405–91.
15. What Malia describes as the Prague Spring reformers’ “tragic dilemma” to some
extent applies to all Dreyman-like dissidents: “Had they been more lucid, either they would
have been unable to act at all, in which case they would have given up in despair, or they
would have had to attempt a revolution, in which case they would have gone down to defeat.
Therefore, they had to take it on faith that the third way did exist, half-fooling themselves
into believing they were not destroying the system and hoping they could fool Moscow into
believing the same thing” (ibid., 392–93).
16. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, trans. Manya Harari and Max Hayward (New York:
Everyman’s Library, 1991), 479.
17. Ibid., from the introduction by John Bayley, xiii.
18. Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great
War to the War on Terror (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 424–25.
19. From his “Nobel Lecture”: “Works which have drawn on the truth and which have
presented it to us in a concentrated and vibrant form seize us, attract us to themselves power-
fully. . . . So perhaps the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the decorous
and antiquated formula it seemed to us at the time of our self-confident materialistic youth. If
the tops of these three trees do converge, as thinkers used to claim, and if the all too obvious
shoots of Truth and Goodness have been crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow, then
perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, and ever surprising shoots of Beauty will force their
way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three.” Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, The Solzhenitsyn Reader, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), 515.
20. This proved to be a problem for him anyhow once the Wall fell, but Hempf ’s indi-
cation that Dreyman had written no new plays since then indicates that he had some pro-
ductivity from 1985 to 1989.
21. Besançon, A Century of Horrors, 29.
22. He thought there was a decent chance that Dreyman would someday read his report.
Such a chance depends on the regime falling. Were there no or little possibility of this, he
would not have taken the (small but high-stakes) risk that his fingerprint clue might be
noticed and understood by someone in the Stasi.
23. Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Lecture,” 526.
4
Long Day’s Journey into Brecht

The Ambivalent Politics of The Lives of Others
Paul A. Cantor
Once is enough. Didn’t we say that everything could be made right again
if only one person were found who could stand up against the world,
only one?
—Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen (The
Lives of Others) was widely, and justifiably, praised as a cinematic master-
piece almost from its first release. The movie was especially celebrated as
a political statement, as a scathing indictment of communist tyranny, spe-
cifically a long overdue exposé of the horrors of the East German regime,
the so-called Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the DDR, the German
Democratic Republic). Surprisingly, until The Lives of Others, no German
film had attempted to portray the brutal nature of the communist regime
in East Germany. If anything, by the early twenty-first century, a sort of
nostalgia had been developing in German popular culture for the days of
the DDR, a tendency epitomized by the success of the film Good Bye Lenin!
(2003). The cultural acceptance of tyrannies of the Left but not of the Right
is always puzzling—one might legitimately wonder whether an equivalent
film with the title Good Bye Goebbels! would have been tolerated in Germany,
or any other country for that matter.
Thus The Lives of Others was hailed for its willingness to confront what
many Germans seemed content to let slip down the memory hole of his-
83
84 Paul A. Cantor
tory. Using all the power and resources of cinema, above all a remarkable
set of performances from his first-rate cast, Donnersmarck told a tale that
deeply needed telling. With surgical precision, he anatomizes everything
that was wrong with the DDR—the corruption of the regime, the bleakness,
sterility, and regimentation of daily existence it brought about, its suppres-
sion of political dissent and artistic creativity, and ultimately the spiritual
emptiness of life under communism. With the story opening in 1984, the
movie inevitably calls to mind George Orwell’s great novel, and, indeed, The
Lives of Others already seems destined to stand with 1984 as one of the most
chilling evocations of the nightmare of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
As such, many conservative critics welcomed the film and hoped that it
might herald the beginning of a new trend of anti-communism in popular
culture. Reviewing the film in the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz wrote:
“Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck found a great story to tell with a great
setting and he told it with peerless skill. . . . Maybe he will be followed by
other young filmmakers and writers who can bring fresh eyes and a new
perspective to the great struggle of the second half of the 20th century.”1
But as is usually the case in cultural criticism, praise for The Lives of
Others was not universal. A number of commentators raised serious doubts
about the film. They questioned the historical accuracy of many of its details,
and even of its basic take on the East German regime.2 Given the left-wing
political orientation of most cultural critics, it is surprising that the film has
frequently been attacked for not being anticommunist enough. Given the
enthusiasm of so many conservatives for the film, it comes as a bit of a shock
to see The Lives of Others condemned for painting too rosy a picture of the
DDR. Donnersmarck has been accused of glossing over the true horrors
of communist tyranny and in fact creating a sentimental story out of what
should have been a more systematic condemnation of East Germany. Accord-
ing to some critics of The Lives of Others, Donnersmarck fundamentally erred
in supplying a happy ending to what should have been an unrelievedly bleak
story. He is criticized for having given a Hollywood treatment—complete
with a love story and a tale of personal redemption—to what should have
been a chronicle of pure inhumanity and utter despair.
This kind of criticism of The Lives of Others focuses on the central figure
of Gerd Wiesler (played so perfectly by Ulrich Mühe). Critics charge Don-
nersmarck with creating too sympathetic a portrait of this captain in the
infamous Stasi, the East German secret police. At the beginning of the film,
Wiesler seems to stand for everything that was wrong with the East German
Long Day’s Journey into Brecht 85
regime. He is a staunch and committed supporter of the DDR and a cold-

blooded, implacable enforcer of its tyranny. Leading a soulless existence in
his private life, devoid of love or any human connection, in his public role
he is a ruthless interrogator of the enemies of the regime and an expert at
surveillance into any subversive activities. His superiors in the Communist
Party assign him to spy on a prominent East German playwright, Georg
Dreyman, and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. At first
pursuing his task with heartless efficiency, Wiesler is gradually seduced by
what amounts to his voyeuristic glimpse into the emotionally rich “lives of
others.” A whole new world of aesthetic experience opens up to him, as his
spying involves him—perhaps for the first time in his life—in watching a
play, reading lyric poetry, listening to classical music and, more generally,
sharing in the emotional experience of artistic people. Learning to sympa-
thize with the couple he is spying upon, and perhaps falling in love with
the actress himself, Wiesler becomes their protector. He does not report
Dreyman’s subversive activity when he writes an article for a West German
magazine on the high rate of suicide in East Germany and, in a very com-
plicated plot, he becomes involved in covering up the playwright’s act of
dissent. In a remarkable reversal, the initially villainous Wiesler becomes
the quiet hero of The Lives of Others, and in the end, he wins a tribute from
Dreyman as “ein guter Mensch” (a good man).
Critics of the film condemn Donnersmarck for making a hero out of
a Stasi agent and reject his portrait of Wiesler as unrealistic and untrue to
history. Anna Funder, for example, writes: “No Stasi agent ever tried to save
his victim, because it was impossible. (We’d know if one had, because the
files are so comprehensive.) Unlike Wiesler, who runs a nearly solo surveil-
lance operation and can withhold the results from his superior, totalitarian
systems rely on thoroughgoing internal surveillance (terror) and division of
tasks. The film doesn’t accurately portray the way totalitarian systems work,
because it needs to leave room for its hero to act humanely (something such
systems are designed to prevent).”3 In a more thoroughgoing indictment of
the film, the well-known intellectual Slavoj Žižek argues that “The Lives of
Others fails to capture the true horror of the GDR.” Žižek notes that the film
seems to blame the evils of the East German regime on the self-interested
actions of a few corrupt officials in the communist hierarchy. “What’s lost is
that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal
corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and ‘honest’ bureaucrats.”
Žižek extends his critique to Donnersmarck’s portrayal of the East Ger-
86 Paul A. Cantor
man playwright who is a sincere supporter of the communist regime and

yet is treated very sympathetically in the movie: “One cannot but recall here
a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three fea-
tures—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it
was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and
supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one
was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The
problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.”4 Žižek
raises a serious question: if The Lives of Others is such an anticommunist
film, why is one of its heroes a pro-communist playwright and the other a
reformed agent of the Communist Party? One could try to develop a read-
ing of the movie that would claim that it criticizes not communist ideals
but the failure of the East German regime to live up to its communist ide-
als. Dreyman and Wiesler are shown to be believers in communism, and
yet they are also shown to be basically good men, and the problem with the
DDR seems to be a few rotten apples in the Marxist barrel. Is the answer a
reformed communism, some kind of socialism with a human face?
Despite the cogency of Žižek’s observations about The Lives of Others, I think
that such a reading of the film would be wrong. One should not lose sight
completely of surface impressions, and there can be no doubt that the overall
impression of Donnersmarck’s movie remains strongly anticommunist. The
critics of The Lives of Others have to a large extent judged it by the wrong
standards. They are looking for a documentary, not a feature film.5 They
want a work that would chronicle in great historical detail all the horrors of
communist tyranny in East Germany. Such a film would be very valuable,
but it is not the kind of work Donnersmarck set out to make. Critics object
to the way Donnersmarck has personalized the story and chosen to focus
on a few sympathetic and even attractive characters. But this is simply the
logic of good drama. Setting his film in what is recognizably the historical
East Germany, Donnersmarck created a personal story designed to bring out
certain larger truths about human nature. As he succinctly puts it in his DVD
commentary: “It’s a truthful story, not a true story.”6 One could defend him
in terms of Aristotle’s distinction in chapter 9 of his Poetics between history
and poetry (or fiction). History tells us what actually happened; fiction tells
us what might have happened in accord with our understanding of human
nature. Thus history shows us what human beings are; fiction shows us what
they could be in some ideal sense. From that perspective, it does not matter
if no actual Stasi agent did what Gerd Wiesler does in The Lives of Others.7
The way Donnersmarck shows him behaving is certainly not impossible and
arguably not even implausible. If one believes in the basic decency of human
nature, then one would certainly like to think that someone in Wiesler’s
circumstances might for once do the decent thing and work to save a fellow
human being. Anna Funder quotes Donnersmarck as saying: “I didn’t want
to tell a true story as much as explore how someone might have behaved.
The film is more a basic expression of belief in humanity than an account
of what actually happened.”8 That seems to be the basic point of The Lives
of Others, a claim that transcends the details of economic and political his-
tory and says something about the permanent ethical potential of humanity.
Nevertheless, the critics of the film have raised some valid points about
its meaning and usefully complicated our understanding of its message. They
have shown that the film’s political sympathies may be more complex than
at first appears, and its politics may in fact be ambivalent. In particular, they
have reminded us of an important point: just because The Lives of Others
is anticommunist does not mean that the film is necessarily pro-capitalist.
Paying careful attention to its texture reveals that Donnersmarck does not
choose to participate in the triumphalism that generally greeted the demise
of the East German regime in 1989 and the reunification of Germany under
the aegis of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (the BRD, the Federal Republic
of Germany). To be sure, only a brief part of The Lives of Others deals with
what happened in 1989 and after. Donnersmarck offers a series of codas or
epilogues to show the aftermath of Wiesler’s decision to come to the aid of
Dreyman. But Donnersmarck is a very efficient storyteller and he manages
to convey a great deal in the last fifteen minutes of the film.
Consider how Donnersmarck chose to portray what is arguably the most
important historical event in his story and one of the greatest moments in
German history—the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even on his tight budget, Don-
nersmarck could easily have used stock newsreel footage to convey a sense
of the monumental character of this event—scenes of crowds rejoicing at
the Brandenburg Gate or of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony being played to
celebrate the return to freedom in the East. But instead of monumentalizing
the event in cinematic terms, Donnersmarck chose to mute and minimize
it. All we see is Wiesler and some other disgraced Stasi agents working away
in the bowels of some building; one of them, listening through a miniature
earphone, hears the news of the Wall coming down; they calmly stop work-
ing and walk out the door. Although we hear about the momentous event
88 Paul A. Cantor
over the radio, we do not see it, and in movies, seeing is everything. Don-
nersmarck turns what ought to be a climactic moment in his story into a
visual anticlimax.9
This emblematic moment reflects what appears to be Donnersmarck’s
conscious decision to downplay the degree to which the “new” Germany
has been genuinely transformed. Before the fall of the Wall, Wiesler is
shown mechanically steaming open mail for the communists. After the
fall, we see him mechanically delivering junk mail for the capitalists. The
stage directions in the screenplay stress the parallel by noting that he now
delivers commercial flyers with the same care with which he used to do his
work as a Stasi officer.10 Donnersmarck does remarkably little to suggest that
things have improved in the new Germany. The most sinister character in
the film, Minister Hempf—the man who originally ordered the surveillance
of Dreyman—has evidently survived the regime change, unpunished and
unharmed. He has become a successful businessman in the reunified Ger-
many and is still part of the in-crowd, attending theatrical premieres, just
as we saw him doing in the DDR at the beginning of the film. The original
screenplay elaborates upon this point and makes it stronger. Hempf says
that he is now doing “richtiges, kapitalistisches Business” (proper capitalist
business) and jokes that he is still dealing with the Russians. Although he
himself is barred from politics, he has passed the baton to his son, who is
already a member of Parliament for the PDS, the Partei des Demokratischen
Sozialismus (the Party of Democratic Socialism), the legal successor to the
Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (the German Socialist Unity Party)
that had governed East Germany (149).11
As for Dreyman, he is still living in the same apartment, and at the
prompting of Hempf, he discovers that Wiesler’s bugs are still in place, even if
they are no longer being used. In the last sequence in the film, we learn that
Dreyman has managed to write a new book, Die Sonate vom guten Mensch
(Sonata for a Good Man), but it is evidently a work of prose, presumably a
memoir about the very events we have seen chronicled in the film. What
Dreyman has failed to do in the new Germany is to write a new play. When
we see him going to a theatrical premiere, it is of a new production of one of
his works, but definitely not of a new work. In fact, in what appears to be a
pointed gesture, Donnersmarck shows Dreyman attending a staging of the
same scene of the same work we saw him watching toward the beginning of
the film (the stage directions in the screenplay make it clear that this is taking
place in the very same theater, the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Bühne). Back in the
DDR, Dreyman’s play was given a heavy-handed socialist realist staging that
apparently displeased him. But now, in the new Germany, the play is given a
pretentious postmodernist staging that seems to displease Dreyman just as
much—he walks out of the production.12 Whatever else the new Germany
may have achieved, it has not restored Dreyman’s creativity as a playwright
and it has not allowed him to realize his artistic goals—he is still subject to
the whims of directors who distort his intentions.
When Dreyman runs into Hempf outside the auditorium, the ex-minister
teases him with the fact that the playwright has not written anything since the
end of the DDR. But Hempf says that he can understand Dreyman’s writer’s
block: “What should one write in this BRD? There’s nothing more to believe
in, nothing more to rebel against.” In a semi-sinister way, Hempf points to a
genuine truth: Dreyman had more motivation to write while living under a
tyranny—it turned writing into a heroic act. Donnersmarck allows Hempf
to sound the note of nostalgia for the old East Germany: “It was nice in our
small republic. Many are beginning to understand that only now” (149).
The fact that the villainous Hempf expresses these sentiments suggests that
Donnersmarck does not himself share them. Still, he has called attention to a
problematic aspect of the change of regime for writers. Dreyman was a hero
in the DDR and, although the communist government spied upon him and
manipulated his life, at the same time, it took him seriously, honored him
and, indeed, in the very act of harassing him, showed that it understood his
importance as a writer; in the BRD, Dreyman has become a mere celebrity,
dressed, as the stage directions point out, in an Armani suit “for which he
is actually too heavy, and perhaps also a bit too old” (147).
We are so used to thinking of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a triumphal
moment that we naturally assume that the coda of The Lives of Others must
be presenting the new Germany in a positive light. Surely, Donnersmarck
must prefer the new Germany to the old, but it is nevertheless remarkable
how little he does to embody that preference in cinematic terms. He in fact
maintains the deliberately drab color scheme of the film in the final scenes—
no bright neon lights on Berlin’s chic shopping street, the Kurfürstendamm,
to illuminate the triumph of capitalism, but instead still the same dull brown,
gray, green, and beige we saw characterizing the DDR.13 As a director, Don-
nersmarck seems to be doing as much as he can to minimize our sense that
conditions have genuinely improved for his central characters with the fall
of the Wall. Neither Dreyman nor Wiesler is dancing in the streets of the
reunified Berlin.14
90 Paul A. Cantor
In sum, although The Lives of Others does satisfy the appetite of conser-
vatives for an anticommunist film, it by no means offers them a parable of
triumphant capitalism. Every cinematic choice Donnersmarck makes in the
coda to his film suggests that he is somehow interested in the continuities
between the communist and the capitalist regimes in Germany, not, as his
conservative admirers might wish, the discontinuities.
While exploring the factors that complicate any reading of Donners-
marck’s film, it is high time that we confront the key figure in any attempt to
interpret the politics of The Lives of Others—Bertolt Brecht. Anyone offering
a straightforward anticommunist reading of the film, especially someone
trying to present a pro-capitalist reading, must puzzle over its celebration
of Brecht. Brecht is arguably the most famous and successful communist
author of the twentieth century. He was about as Marxist and anti-capitalist
as an author could be, and moreover was an active partisan of the East Ger-
man communist regime. He chose to work in East Berlin theater when he
returned to Europe after his self-imposed exile from Germany during the
Nazi era. His presence in East Germany contributed hugely to the cultural
and by extension the political legitimacy of the communist regime. Although
Brecht expressed doubts about the DDR in private (in unpublished works),15
in all his time in East Berlin, he never once publicly defied the communist
regime and in fact, in what was far from his finest hour, he openly endorsed
the use of Soviet troops to put down the workers’ uprising in 1953.16
And this is the man Donnersmarck apparently offers as a model of a
genuinely great artist in The Lives of Others. Dreyman is loosely based on
Brecht,17 who fit the criteria that make Dreyman valuable to his communist
masters—a playwright who is loyal to the regime but is nevertheless read
and admired in the West. More to the point, Brecht himself functions as a
positive figure in the plot of The Lives of Others. Wiesler’s conversion begins
when he sneaks into Dreyman’s apartment and steals a volume of Brecht’s
poetry. Soon we see Wiesler reading the book intently, while we hear Sebas-
tian Koch, the actor who plays Dreyman, giving a moving voice-over read-
ing of Brecht’s lyric poem, “Erinnerung an die Marie A.,” a poem about the
kind of memorable love for a woman that is totally absent from Wiesler’s
own life. In The Lives of Others, Brecht seems to stand for everything that is
good and genuine about art. Donnersmarck could easily have substituted any
number of German poets for Brecht in the plot. Goethe comes immediately
to mind; it would have been just as easy for Wiesler to pick up a volume of
Germany’s greatest lyric poet, who was still honored in the DDR. Why then
did Donnersmarck deliberately choose a communist poet when he wanted

to suggest the redemptive power of literature?
As a few commentators have noted, Brecht’s presence in The Lives of Oth-
ers actually extends beyond the single lyric poem that is quoted in its script.
The film repeatedly echoes the title of one of Brecht’s most famous plays,
Der gute Mensch von Sezuan.18 This title has been variously translated into
English as The Good Person of Szechwan and The Good Woman of Szechwan,
reflecting the ambiguity of the German word Mensch—just like the English
word “man,” Mensch can refer either to a “male” or to a “human being” of
either sex (the fact that the play involves a woman masquerading as a man
explains the different translations of the title). English speakers may eas-
ily miss the references to Brecht’s title in The Lives of Others, but they are
unmistakable to Germans (for which reason I will continue to refer to the
play by its German title). At a key point in the plot, Dreyman is given the
sheet music for a piano work called Sonate vom guten Menschen and that
later becomes the title of the book he writes after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Early in the film, Minister Hempf says to Dreyman that what “we all love
about your plays” is “die Liebe zum Menschen, die guten Menschen”—“your
love of humanity, of good human beings” (34). After Wiesler sits down with
Christa-Maria Sieland in the bar scene, she calls him “ein guter Mensch”
(87). The way this phrase keeps reappearing in various forms throughout
the film strongly suggests that Donnersmarck had Brecht’s Der gute Mensch
von Sezuan in mind when creating The Lives of Others. I do not claim to
understand fully why Donnersmarck decided to present the communist
playwright Brecht so positively in his ostensibly anticommunist film.19 But
I believe that a detailed comparison of The Lives of Others with Der gute
Mensch von Sezuan may shed light on the role of Brecht in Donnersmarck’s
film. Donnersmarck may in fact be engaging with Brecht’s play in a serious
and meaningful way. The Lives of Others might even be regarded as a kind
of Brechtian attempt to rewrite and even unwrite Brecht’s play. In that sense,
Donnersmarck might be said to be using Brecht to undermine Brecht.
Der gute Mensch von Sezuan is set in a semi-mythical China, in what the
stage directions describe as a “half-Europeanized city.”20 Three gods, who
have evidently seen better days, have come to earth in search of good human
beings. They believe that if they can find just one good person who obeys
their commandments, it will redeem humanity. Their request for lodging
and hospitality is initially rejected by all the ostensibly good citizens of the
92 Paul A. Cantor
city. The only one who will take them in for the night is a prostitute named
Shen Te. In reward for her goodness, the gods give her the money to buy
a little tobacco shop. But before she can get the business going, a crowd of
moochers descends upon her, including the former owners of the shop and
their many relatives, who proceed to sponge off her and otherwise exploit her
good nature. She is too compassionate to refuse any request for a handout.
In order to make ends meet, Shen Te has to invent a masculine cousin
named Shui Ta, who comes to her rescue at several crucial moments. When-
ever Shen Te adopts the role of Shui Ta, she can do the prudent thing and
manage her affairs properly, eventually building her small business up into
a factory operation. But whenever Shen Te goes back to being a woman, she
loses control of her finances and other aspects of her life. For example, she
falls in love with a would-be aviator named Yang Sun, whose unscrupulous
dealings threaten to make her default on some loans. As the confusions
involving the sexually ambiguous identity of the heroine/hero mount, Shui
Ta is eventually accused of having murdered Shen Te. On trial before the
three gods, Shen Te is forced to reveal to them the truth about her mas-
querade and delivers the kind of heavy-handed, didactic speech that is the
stock-in-trade of Brecht’s Marxist dramaturgy:
Your order long ago

to be good and yet to live
tore me like lightning into two halves. I
don’t know how it happened: I could not
be good at once to others and myself.
To help myself and others was too hard for me.
Ah, your world is hard. Too much poverty, too much despair!
The hand that is held out to the wretched
is soon wrenched off! He who helps the lost
is himself lost! For who can
long refuse to be wicked when starvation kills?
Where was I to take all that was needed? Only
from myself! But then I would die. Good intentions
crushed me to the ground. But when I did wrong
I strode in power and ate good meat!
There must be something wrong with your world. Why
is wickedness so richly rewarded and why does such hard punishment
await the good? (100)
As often happens with Brecht, understanding the message of Der gute

Mensch von Sezuan seems very easy.21 He has nothing but contempt for
the respectable and wealthy citizens of the city, while he offers the poor,
the downtrodden, and the outcast as the only possible candidates for true
goodness. What makes it difficult if not impossible for the basically decent
people to put their goodness into action is the capitalist order. Business is a
zero-sum game for Brecht—one person can make a profit only if someone
else suffers a loss. Thus Shen Te cannot successfully enter the business world
without fundamentally changing her identity. She must repress her natural
kindness and adopt the hardheaded, hard-hearted persona of her “cousin,”
Shui Ta. For Brecht, capitalism brings about a complete disjunction between
moral goodness and financial success. One cannot be at one and the same
time a good businessman and a good human being.
Brecht’s clever theatrical trick for embodying this insight on stage is to
split his main character as we have seen into two, Shen Te and Shui Ta. This
procedure is typical of his dramaturgy; he would rather have two flat char-
acters than a single complex one.22 Brecht’s drama is never far from social
satire, and he had no qualms about putting caricatures on stage. He did not
feel compelled, as many other dramatists do, to explore the complexities of
human motivation or to suggest profound inner conflicts in his characters.
Where another playwright would have shown a Shen Te with mixed feelings
about her lover, Yang Sun—torn between her love for him and her realiza-
tion that he is wrong for her—Brecht just divides her up into a Shen Te, who
loves him absolutely, and a Shui Ta, who sees that Yang Sun intends to take
her money and leave her in the lurch.
Brecht knew what he was doing; he was not simply incapable of creating
fully rounded characters (for example, in Mother Courage, protagonist of one
of his greatest plays, Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, he succeeded against
his will in creating an emotionally complex figure).23 Brecht consciously
rejected the realism of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century drama,
which he regarded as complicit in the capitalist order and a product of it.
For Brecht, dramatists such as Ibsen and Chekhov were too eager, out of
commercial motives, to please their audiences, to entertain them with plays
about characters with whom they could identify and sympathize, characters
placed in familiar settings and recognizably human situations with which
the audience felt comfortable. According to Brecht, this kind of realistic
drama makes its audience complacent. Even an Ibsen problem play, which
seems to expose the contradictions in the social order, leaves its audience
94 Paul A. Cantor
passive, accepting the existing state of society as inevitable, simply part of

the human condition.24
By contrast, Brecht sought to unsettle his audiences by every theatri-
cal means at his disposal, to prevent them from reacting emotionally to his
dramas and rather to get them to think about each play. Rather than iden-
tifying with his characters, the spectators should feel distanced from them
and hence more capable of judging them objectively. This is Brecht’s famous
Verfremdungseffekt, often translated as “alienation effect” but more properly
rendered as “distancing” or “defamiliarization” or “estrangement effect.”25
Everything about Der gute Mensch von Sezuan is calculated to prevent the
audience from feeling comfortable with the play, from the exotic setting to
the unfamiliar names to the cardboard characters to the absurdity of the
young woman masquerading as a man so easily. The epilogue, when one of
the actors steps out of character, breaks the dramatic illusion, and addresses
the audience directly, is designed to send spectators home dissatisfied, still
pondering the significance of what they have seen. Brecht openly admits
that his play lacks a satisfactory and satisfying conclusion:
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t be annoyed

We know this ending leaves you in the void.
A golden legend we set out to tell
But then somehow the ending went to hell.
We’re disappointed too, struck with dismay
All questions open though we’ve closed our play. . . .
But what’s your answer to the situation?
For love nor money we could find no out:
Refashion man? Or change the world about?
Or turn to different gods? Or don’t we need
any? Our bewilderment is great indeed.
There’s only one solution comes to mind:
that you yourselves should ponder till you find
the ways and means and measures tending
to help good people to a happy ending. (103–4)
In this typical Brecht ending, the ball is now in the audience’s court; the
spectators must find a solution to the problems that baffled the playwright. If
the function of drama is to provoke social change, Brecht has come up with
an effective approach to writing plays. His theory of the Verfremdungseffekt
is also very convenient for him as a playwright. If one accuses his characters
of being flat, he can reply that he never intended them to be round. If one
accuses his plot of being implausible, he can reply that he never intended it
to be realistic. Basically any fault in his play, from clichéd dialogue to ste-
reotypical characters to abrupt plot turns to heavy-handed moralizing can
be justified as a Verfremdungseffekt. In the ultimate defense mechanism for
Brecht, if the play fails to solve the complex social problems it portrays, it
is the fault of the audience, not of the playwright.
Brecht’s distinctive conception of drama was remarkably self-serving
—he succeeded in erecting a theoretical firewall around his plays that
makes them impervious to conventional criticism. If one applies any of the
traditional criteria of good drama in evaluating Brecht’s work, his answer
is always that the problem is with traditional drama, not with his plays.
This situation can be frustrating to would-be critics of Brecht—one damns
oneself as hopelessly mired in the past if one questions his revolutionary
drama. Nevertheless, the temptation to raise doubts about Brecht’s plays
is irresistible, and Der gute Mensch von Sezuan is a case in point. It is very
doubtful, for example, that feminists would be pleased by the play.26 For a
revolutionary drama, it seems to buy into traditional sexual stereotypes. In
splitting his central figure into male and female halves, Brecht parcels out
the human qualities along conventional gender lines. Shen Te is the compas-
sionate one: sensitive, emotional, and capable of deep love. But she is at the
same time irrational, weak, incapable of dealing with the difficult issues of
life and, above all, she has no mind for business. In short, she is the stereo-
typical flighty and helpless female. Shui Ta is lacking in fellow feeling and
he is tough-minded, if not cruel, in his dealings with others. But he is also
rational, clear-headed, and disciplined, fully capable of taking charge of any
situation, and a sharp businessman—just the way men like to think of them-
selves. As a Marxist, Brecht may be progressive on political and economic
issues, but on the issue of gender, he is a reactionary sexist. If one focuses
on the issue of gender—which is difficult not to do, given the plot—what
Der gute Mensch von Sezuan teaches is that women are by nature unfit for
business and need men to save them from their inherent folly as females.
But Brecht is also vulnerable on the political/economic front—the
moment one steps outside of his Marxist framework. In an obvious way,
Der gute Mensch von Sezuan begs the question on the central issue it raises.
If one parcels out all the morally good qualities to one character and all
the business acumen to another, then of course one will conclude that it is
96 Paul A. Cantor
impossible to be a good human being and a good businessman at the same

time. But the real question is whether it is possible to combine the qualities
of Shen Te and Shui Ta in a single person, and on that issue, history offers
many examples of successful capitalists who behaved morally and com-
passionately in their dealings with their fellow human beings. One might
even argue that decency is the norm in business, which is precisely why we
are so struck by the phenomenon of business criminals. We need to check
Brecht’s portrayal of the capitalist world against historical reality. Although
he rejected conventional dramatic realism, he always maintained that his
plays were truer to social reality than traditional drama had been. Indeed, he
claimed that he broke with the dramatic conventions of the past precisely in
order to be able to represent social reality more accurately, to call attention
to the hard facts of life that were covered up in traditional drama. It is odd,
then, that Brecht chose to set Der gute Mensch von Sezuan in the kind of
orientalist never-never land one normally associates with German operetta,
such as Lehar’s The Land of Smiles (Das Land des Lächelns). Can we really
learn anything about the real world from a play that mixes oriental gods
incongruously with modern airplanes?27 In fact, if one sets aside Brecht’s
ingrained anticapitalist prejudices and looks carefully at what is going on
in the play in economic terms, then it seems to teach lessons very different
from what the playwright had in mind.
Much of what Shui Ta stands for is in fact simple economic common
sense. Brecht wants us to think of the character as hard-hearted, but most
of the time he is saying nothing crueler than that human beings need to
work for a living: “From now on all this must be managed more sensibly.
No more food will be distributed free of charge. Instead, everyone will be
given an opportunity to improve his condition by honorable labor. Miss
Shen Teh has decided to give you all work” (75–76).28 Even the parasites
come to understand that if Shen Te’s business goes under, they will be
worse off, and hence they grudgingly welcome the return of the capable
and efficient Shui Ta: “He’s awfully stingy, but at least he’ll save the shop,
and then she’ll help us” (75). Yang Sun’s mother praises what Shui Ta has
accomplished by imposing discipline on her son: “I must tell you how my
son, thanks to the wisdom and severity of the universally respected Mr.
Shui Ta, has been transformed from a depraved young man into a useful
citizen. As the whole neighborhood knows, Mr. Shui Ta has opened a small
but already thriving tobacco factory near the cattle yard” (79). Mrs. Yang
even compares Shui Ta favorably with Shen Te: “He didn’t make all sorts
of fantastic promises like his widely praised cousin, but forced [Yang Sun]
to do honest work” (84).
No doubt Brecht expects us to think of Shui Ta as just another exploit-
ative factory owner, operating a sweatshop, but even in terms of the plot
Brecht created, Shui Ta is simply recognizing the facts of economic life.
The characters he “mistreats” earn his displeasure only because they are
all demanding to be supported at his “cousin’s” expense, with no effort
on their part. Only a self-styled bohemian artist like Brecht could make a
moral principle out of the demand for a free lunch. Brecht himself shows
that when Yang Sun refuses to work, he does so out of pride—he thinks that
ordinary commerce is beneath his dignity as a potential aviator: “You want
me to stand out in the street peddling tobacco to the cement workers, me,
Yang Sun, the flier. I’d sooner run through the two hundred [dollars Shen
Te gave me] in one night, I’d sooner throw them in the river!” (62). Yang
Sun insists on maintaining his dignity, but he does so with Shen Te’s bor-
rowed money. Perhaps unwittingly, Brecht exposes the hypocrisy of those
who complain about capitalist exploiters while exploiting the generosity of
capitalists themselves. As several critics have noted, including admirers such
as W. H. Auden, in his last decade Brecht himself led a kind of double life: he
did his play producing in communist East Germany but he did his banking
in capitalist Switzerland.29 Indeed, ever since The Threepenny Opera Brecht
had been preaching anticapitalism all the way to the bank.
As an economic argument, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan fails; it is
riddled with fallacies and contradictions. Brecht is the kind of person who
wants cigars but does not want the cigar factories needed to produce them.
All his focus in Der gute Mensch von Sezuan seems to be on the process of
consumption, not of production, and he is evidently not aware that the two
processes are connected. He seems to posit a sort of natural sufficiency of
goods, and the only problem is that they are not distributed equally. The
capitalist exploiters have grabbed all the wealth and deny goods to the starv-
ing masses. Hovering behind Der gute Mensch von Sezuan is the Marxist
ideal: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”
But ironically, in Shui Ta’s wisdom, Brecht shows why this formula cannot
work in the real world and why communism is always doomed to failure. If
people can get what they need through handouts, they will refuse to work,
and the result will soon be that nothing gets produced to hand out. Because
of the problem of economic incentives, how goods are distributed has a
profound effect on how—and even whether—they are produced in the first
98 Paul A. Cantor
place. Brecht inadvertently illustrates this basic economic truth in Der gute
Mensch von Sezuan. Shen Te sets out to run her shop like a communist, but
she needs the capitalist Shui Ta to save her from economic disaster—much
as the Soviet Union continually needed economic aid and guidance from the
capitalist West throughout its catastrophic experiments with communism.
Despite all Brecht’s efforts to prevent it, economic truth ultimately shines
through the Marxist fog of Der gute Mensch von Sezuan. As so often happens
in his work, Brecht the playwright ends up inadvertently refuting Brecht
the Marxist ideologue. If one did not know who wrote Der gute Mensch von
Sezuan, one might initially assume that it was designed to expose the folly
of communism, not the evil of capitalism.30
To my knowledge, Donnersmarck has never commented on Der gute

Mensch von Sezuan or discussed its relation to The Lives of Others.31 We
can, therefore, only guess why he chose to make the phrase “guter Mensch”
so prominent in his film. There does seem to be a basic similarity between
the two works, one that suggests that Donnersmarck may be trying to turn
the tables on Brecht. Der gute Mensch von Sezuan chronicles the search for
a single good human being in the world of capitalism; The Lives of Others
chronicles the search for a single good human being in the world of social-
ism. Donnersmarck seems to be saying in effect to Brecht: “You made it
seem so difficult to find a good human being under capitalism; now you
have your socialist paradise in the DDR; let’s see if it’s any easier to find a
good human being there.” In short, if Donnersmarck goes out of his way
to evoke Der gute Mensch von Sezuan in The Lives of Others, it may be pre-
cisely as a challenge to Brecht. Brecht claims that capitalism is incompatible
with moral goodness; Donnersmarck counters by showing that socialism
is even more incompatible with behaving decently as a human being. His
hero, Wiesler, can become “ein guter Mensch” only by turning traitor to
the communist regime in East Germany.
Donnersmarck also demonstrates his superiority to Brecht as a drama-
tist, at least according to traditional aesthetic criteria. Gerd Wiesler is the
kind of complex, sympathetic character Brecht claimed not to want to create
(although he did so on numerous occasions). In a Brechtian treatment of
The Lives of Others, I suppose Wiesler would have to divide into two char-
acters, one working for the Stasi and one working against it. Where Brecht
typically goes for broad strokes of characterization and sharp contrasts,
Donnersmarck seeks out subtle effects. Where Brecht paints in blacks and
whites, Donnersmarck employs a palette of grays. Brecht puts a label on a

character—“cruel factory owner”—and that is all we need to know about
him.32 Donnersmarck does deal with stereotypes like “Communist Party
hack,” but his characters are more interesting precisely because they do not
always act according to type. Critics of The Lives of Others complain that
Wiesler’s protecting of Dreyman is not sufficiently motivated. But that may
be exactly Donnersmarck’s point. We never know how a particular human
being is going to react in a particular set of circumstances. If one believes
in human freedom, then human action is always potentially a mystery, and
fictional characters may well surprise us with a seemingly unmotivated
change of heart, or at least an enigmatic one.
Much of the criticism of The Lives of Others might be characterized as
Brechtian in spirit. The critics of the film are asking for greater ideological
purity from Donnersmarck, even if they want his film to be more fully anti-
communist rather than anticapitalist, as Brecht would have it. Some critics
want Wiesler to be the prototypical—perhaps even the stereotypical—Stasi
agent, and hence incapable of being the “good man” of Donnersmarck’s
script. Donnersmarck would answer his critics that he is not interested in
being ideologically pure. He is concerned with being true to his vision of
human nature rather than to any ideological position on the historical East
Germany. Perhaps in anticipation of his critics, Donnersmarck built this
defense of his approach into the movie itself. When Dreyman meets with
Hessenstein, the representative of the Western magazine that wants to pub-
lish the article on suicide in East Germany, the editor presses the writer for
more detail and historical background, for example, a clearer explanation
of the differences between the circumstances in the DDR in 1967 and those
in 1977. Dreyman balks at these instructions: “Es soll ein literarisches Text
bleiben. Keine journalistische Hetzschrift”—“It should remain a literary
text. Not a piece of journalistic agitation” (100). As a playwright, Dreyman
refuses to focus his writing on documentary facts and figures; he wants to
keep the spotlight on the human element in the story, the sad tale of the
suicide of the director Jerska.
That of course is exactly what Donnersmarck does in the film himself.
The Lives of Others is at its core an ethical drama; it focuses on the possi-
bility of acting humanely in the most inhumane of worlds. Funder quotes
Donnersmarck making just this point: “More than anything else, The Lives
of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the
right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path.”33 By
100 Paul A. Cantor
contrast, in Brecht’s dramas, politics/economics trumps ethics. He is first

and foremost concerned with the political/economic system under which
his characters live, and he believes that it sets inescapable limits upon their
ability to act ethically. Donnersmarck’s position is just the opposite—in The
Lives of Others, ethics trumps politics/economics. Donnersmarck’s central
point is that a human being can act ethically under any circumstances, even
in a communist tyranny. Instead of talking about the ambivalence in Don-
nersmarck’s politics, we should probably speak of his ambivalence about
politics. He seems by no means certain that any one political system is the
simple answer to human problems, and he is interested in the way acting
ethically can transcend any political setting.
Thus Donnersmarck remains within the broad outlines of the Western
dramatic tradition, which is basically humanistic in nature. From Sophocles
to Shakespeare to Ibsen, the premise of traditional drama is that human
beings are free to act ethically, to make difficult choices even in the most
difficult of circumstances, and thus they can be held responsible for their
deeds—even in tragic situations. This is the tradition of drama with which
Brecht chose to break. His dramaturgy is designed to deflect interest from
character to circumstances. He did not want his audiences to become so
obsessed with complexities of character that they would lose sight of the
underlying political/economic circumstances that force his characters to
act the way they do and eliminate their capacity to make free choices. For
Brecht, the problem is not whether human beings want to act ethically, but
whether social circumstances allow them to do so. In the famous words
of The Threepenny Opera: “Wir wären gut—anstatt so roh / Doch die Ver-
hältnisse, sie sind nicht so” (We as human beings want to be good, instead
of rough [brutal, coarse], but circumstances [conditions] are not that way
[and don’t permit it]).34
For Brecht, ethical questions are comparatively simple and easily
answered: human beings just need to be kind to each other.35 The real prob-
lem is how to reconstitute the social order to make that possible. In Brecht’s
view, the need to raise ethical issues is already a sign of a defect in the social
order. If society were properly ordered, virtue would no longer be necessary.
He has Mother Courage make this argument in the course of condemning
an army commander:
If his plan of campaign was any good, why would he need brave
soldiers, wouldn’t plain, ordinary soldiers do? Whenever there are
great virtues, it’s a sure sign something’s wrong. . . . When a general

or a king is stupid and leads his soldiers into a trap, they need the
virtue of courage. When he’s tightfisted and hasn’t enough soldiers,
the few he does have need the heroism of Hercules—another virtue.
. . . All virtues which a well-regulated country with a good king or
a good general wouldn’t need. In a good country, virtues wouldn’t
be necessary. Everybody could be quite ordinary, middling, and,
for all I care, cowards.36
This attempt to downplay the importance of virtue and to elevate politi-

cal questions over ethical questions is reminiscent of Žižek’s criticism of
The Lives of Others—his objection that Donnersmarck focuses too much
on the moral status of the rulers of the DDR, whether they are corrupt or
not—when the real issue is the underlying political system, which would
be oppressive even if administered by dedicated public servants. There is a
good deal of truth to this argument and, in defense of Donnersmarck, it is
unfair to accuse him of ignoring, or even downplaying, the systemic prob-
lems of the East German regime. No one can come away from viewing The
Lives of Others without thinking that there was something fundamentally
wrong with political arrangements in the DDR.
Nevertheless, in his quest to create a compelling drama in The Lives of
Others, Donnersmarck is justified in focusing on ethical issues. Some of his
critics seem to wish that he had created a political treatise or a historical
analysis instead of the sort of human story audiences expect.37 Brecht did
want to break with the humanistic conception of drama and in effect to turn
his plays into political treatises. But to the extent he actually succeeded in
doing so, he often made his plays insufferably didactic and barely watchable
on stage. In fact, in the Brecht plays that have been theatrically successful,
his instincts as a dramatist overrode his agenda as an ideologue, and the
human element in the drama survived his attempts to suppress it. By far his
most popular work, The Threepenny Opera, has enchanted audiences over
the years not because of its ham-fisted anticapitalist message but because
of its charming and delightful characters, brought to life unforgettably by
Kurt Weill’s music.38
In the history of drama, Brecht is truly the exception that proves the
rule. He made every effort to eliminate the traditional emphasis on charac-
ter in drama, and yet his own plays have succeeded largely because of the
incredible rogues’ gallery of characters he created—from Mack the Knife to
102 Paul A. Cantor
Mother Courage. At their best, Brecht’s morally dubious protagonists win

our sympathy even as they send chills down our spines with their villainy.
Critics have complained that Donnersmarck sentimentalized The Lives of
Others by focusing on romance elements in the plot at the expense of ide-
ology. But how would The Threepenny Opera play with audiences without
Macheath’s romances with Polly, Jenny, and assorted other women in the
plot? As much as Brecht scorned the romantic sentimentality of traditional
drama, he could not do without love scenes in his own works. Even Der
gute Mensch von Sezuan would be much less dramatic without the romantic
involvement of Shen Te and Yang Sun. Contrary to Brecht’s theory of drama,
the love of Shen Te and Yang Sun gives the audience something to identify
with on stage, something to sympathize with.
The issue of sympathy takes us to the heart of the difference between
Brecht and Donnersmarck as dramatists. As we have seen, Brecht wanted
his audience to feel distanced or alienated or estranged from his characters
(even though in practice he often created genuinely sympathetic figures).
By contrast, sympathy is at the very center of Donnersmarck’s conception
of drama and of The Lives of Others. That in fact is what the title points
to—Wiesler must learn to sympathize with “the lives of others.” The film is
about observation in all its many meanings: interrogation, viewing a play,
espionage, empathizing with others. The Lives of Others is reminiscent of
Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang in its obsession with spectatorship, the way
it invites us to watch people watching other people.39 At the beginning of
the film, Wiesler is the cold, objective observer, wholly distanced from his
subjects—the ideal Brechtian spectator. Whether he is interrogating a sus-
pect or watching a play, he keeps his emotions in check because he is try-
ing to spy something out. To become a “good man,” he must bridge the gap
between himself and “the lives of others” and learn to sympathize with them.
He must become the kind of spectator most dramatists crave for their work.
It is perhaps Donnersmarck’s joke on Brecht that he gives the prophet of
alienation a central role in this plot development. Before the hitherto emo-
tionless Wiesler can shed a tear just listening to a piece of music, he must
read a Brecht poem, “Erinnerung an die Marie A.” (“Memory of Marie A.”).
Note that he reads a Brecht lyric, not one of his dramas (which, according
to Brecht, would have reinforced his commitment to communism). This
nostalgic lament for a lost love is as sentimental as Brecht ever gets, which
may be why Donnersmarck chose it. He shows Wiesler turning into a good
man not by virtue of any Brechtian alienation effect—after all, the captain is
alienated enough already. On the contrary, it is Brecht at his most sentimental

who proves to be the force behind Wiesler’s conversion to moral goodness.
In general, Donnersmarck uses Brecht in a very un-Brechtian manner and
for a very un-Brechtian goal—to produce sympathy, not to eliminate it. In
The Lives of Others, Donnersmarck’s use of Brecht creates a de-alienation
effect, leading Wiesler back into the fold of humanity, breaking down his
ruthless objectivity and awakening his fellow feeling. For Donnersmarck to
incorporate Brecht into his movie is, then, just the opposite of an endorse-
ment of his theory of drama, and it does not involve an endorsement of
the communist playwright’s politics either. Contrary to everything Brecht
himself stood for, he functions in The Lives of Others as an emblem of the
power of art to evoke sympathy.
I do not claim to have solved the riddle of why Donnersmarck gives
such a prominent role to the communist playwright Brecht in his ostensi-
bly anticommunist film The Lives of Others. But by exploring the movie’s
subtextual use of Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, we begin to see that
there is at least some irony in Donnersmarck’s invocation of his German
predecessor. If only by example, The Lives of Others refutes Brecht’s concep-
tion of drama. And by quoting a Brecht romantic lyric, rather than one of
his political dramas, Donnersmarck deflects attention from his anticapitalist
agenda and reveals the sentimental element that remained a part of Brecht’s
art, despite all his conscious efforts to suppress it. Thus, in the very process
of evoking Brecht, Donnersmarck manages to question his predecessor and
establish his difference from Brecht’s art and his politics. Above all, Donners-
mark forcefully rejects Brecht’s efforts as a dramatist to shift attention from
character to circumstances. Donnersmarck understands the antihumanistic
implications of Brecht’s dramaturgy. By contrast, in his film he works very
hard to keep ethical concerns at the center.
At the time and in the circumstances in which The Lives of Others was
released, it was impossible not to view the film as a political statement, and
in what it shows about the East German communist regime, it will always
remain a great political film. And yet politics is not what is most important in
the film—not because of some failure on Donnersmarck’s part but because of
what he set out to accomplish. The Lives of Others takes its place in an older
dramatic tradition and is trying to make a statement about human nature.
While remaining firmly rooted in a specific historical and political moment,
The Lives of Others is ultimately about the human capacity to transcend the
limitations and constraints of such a moment. It may be historically true
104 Paul A. Cantor
that “a good man” was impossible to find in the communist apparatus of

East Germany. But it is nevertheless important to Donnersmarck to remind
us that it was at least possible that one such man existed—that, contrary to
Brecht, human nature is not simply the product of political and economic
circumstances. And Donnersmarck has the last laugh on Brecht by choos-
ing his adopted homeland, the socialist paradise of East Germany, as the
ultimate test case of whether it is possible to be a good man in an evil state.
Notes
1. John Podhoretz, “Nightmare Come True: Love and Distrust in the East German
Police State,” Weekly Standard, March 12, 2007, 38.
2. See, for example, Timothy Garton Ash, “The Stasi in Our Minds,” New York Review
of Books, May 31, 2007, 3, http://www.nybooks.com/articles /20210 (accessed July 12, 2009).
Garton Ash really worries over details: “On everyday duty, Stasi officers would not have
worn those smart dress uniforms, with polished knee-length leather boots, leather belts,
and cavalry-style trousers. By contrast, the cadets in the Stasi university are shown in ordi-
nary, student-type civilian clothes; they would have been in uniform. A Stasi surveillance
team would have been most unlikely to install itself in the attic of the same building—a sure
give-away to the residents.” I am sure Garton Ash is right about these details, but he reminds
me of the sort of critic who complains about the fact that Shakespeare’s ordinary Romans
anachronistically wear caps.
3. Anna Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” Guardian, May 5, 2007, 2, http://www.theguardian
.com/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview12 (accessed May 8, 2008).
4. All three quotations are taken from Slavoj Žižek, “The Dreams of Others,” In These
Times, May 18, 2007, 1, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3183/the_dreams_of_others/
(accessed May 9, 2009).
5. Several of the reviews recommend a 2002 Belgian documentary called The Decom-
position of the Soul, directed by Nina Toussaint and Massimo Ianetta, which deals with
Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi prison and interrogation center in Berlin.
6. I cite the director’s commentary from the Sony Pictures Classics 2007 DVD of The
Lives of Others.
7. Since I am not an expert on East German history, I am trying to avoid getting
involved in the debate over the historical accuracy of The Lives of Others. I will confine
myself to pointing out that Donnersmarck did employ a historical consultant on the film,
Manfred Wilke of the Free University of Berlin, who is a recognized authority on the com-
munist regime in East Germany. Wilke wrote an essay for the published screenplay of the
film called “Wieslers Umkehr”—“Wiesler’s Change” (or “ Turnaround” or “Conversion”).
See Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Das Leben der Anderen: Filmbuch (Frankfurt:
Suhrkampf, 2007), 201–13. While Wilke is unable to cite a case in which a Stasi agent behaved
exactly the way Wiesler does, he points to several examples of traitorous behavior within
the official ranks of the Stasi and in particular documents a number of ways in which Stasi
agents appeared to lose their nerve during the waning days of the DDR regime. Wiesler’s
behavior in The Lives of Others may seem implausible, but in 1984, the complete collapse of
the DDR regime five years later would have seemed far more implausible. Something must
have happened to make that collapse possible, and it was not simply the result of external
factors; the DDR regime had been rotting away from within for years. Donnersmarck in
fact does a brilliant job of showing why supporters of the communist regime gradually
lost faith in it and ceased to work for its survival. For what it is worth, one of the skeptics
about the film, Garton Ash, writes: “Now I have heard of Stasi informers who ended up
protecting those they were informing on. I know of full-time Stasi operatives who became
disillusioned, especially during the 1980s. And in many hours of talking to former Stasi
officers, I never met a single one who I felt to be, simply and plainly, an evil man. Weak,
blinkered, opportunistic, self-deceiving, yes; men who did evil things, most certainly; but
always I glimpsed in them the remnants of what might have been, the good that could have
grown in other circumstances” (“Stasi in Our Minds,” 4).
8. Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” 3.
9. In his commentary on the DVD of the film, Donnersmarck reveals that it is his own
voice reporting the news of the fall of the Wall over the radio: “That’s me, overjoyed at the
end of that dictatorship, as I really was, as everybody was, all over the world. It was a great
moment for everybody, of course.” I am not trying to question the sincerity of these senti-
ments, but they make it all the more peculiar that Donnersmarck did nothing in the film to
convey this sense of joy visually.
10. Donnersmarck, Das Leben, 157. All citations to stage directions will be to this
screenplay, and I will also quote the film’s dialogue from the screenplay, making it clear
when the screenplay differs from the final filmed version; hereinafter page numbers will be
incorporated into the body of the essay in parentheses. The translations from the German
are my own, sometimes guided by the subtitles on the film.
11. Much, although not all, of this additional dialogue is included as a deleted scene on
the DVD of the film. In his DVD commentary, Donnersmarck emphasizes Hempf ’s links
to capitalism: “If this guy had lived in the 1980s, he would have become a big shot on Wall
Street or in one of the large corporations.”
12. The stage directions at this point (148) say simply that Dreyman finds the situation
unerträglich (“insufferable” or “intolerable”); it may be that he finds the production distasteful;
it may be that it has simply awakened painful memories in him (which is what ex-minister
Hempf suggests to him in the next scene). Donnersmarck’s commentary on the DVD seems
to support this second interpretation: “And here the same play in a new Germany with a new
Marta, and that is so painful for Dreyman.”
13. In his DVD commentary, Donnersmarck mentions that he considered setting a
scene on the Kurfürstendamm (earlier in the film). I do not know Berlin’s geography well
enough to be sure of this claim, but I believe that all of the post-1989 scenes in the film are
set in the former East Berlin. The only visible change is the appearance of graffiti on the
buildings, something that could never have happened under the old regime. I am not sure
that this development can be regarded as an improvement. In fact, in his DVD commentary
Donnersmarck complains that in order to maintain the graffiti-free look he wanted for the
old East Berlin, his crew had to repaint the buildings every day to eliminate the graffiti that
106 Paul A. Cantor
always mysteriously appeared overnight. The setting of the concluding sequence of the film in
the former East Berlin is emphasized by the fact that the very last scene of The Lives of Others
is set in Karl-Marx-Allee and takes place in the Karl Marx Bookstore. It does seem odd that
an ostensibly anticommunist film ends with the name of Karl Marx still firmly in place in the
new Germany. In the DVD commentary, Donnersmarck seems to have an affection for the
Karl Marx Bookstore and says rather ruefully that it is “always on the brink of bankruptcy in
the West now,” perhaps a hint that even for him not everything is better in the new Germany.
14. And of course, although Wiesler and Dreyman come to understand the role that
each has played in the other’s life, they never actually communicate directly. As Donners-
marck says in his DVD commentary: “It’s a buddy movie, this film, only the two buddies
never meet.” Donnersmarck’s explanation in the screenplay for why Dreyman does not speak
to Wiesler when he locates him at the end is very interesting: “Das materielle Machtgefälle
(und welch eine Rolle spielt das in dem neuen Deutschland!) ist zu gross für eine Begeg-
nung, die auf gleicher menschlicher Ebene stattfinden müsste” (157). Roughly translated:
“The difference in the material level of power between them (and what a role that plays in
the new Germany!) is too great for a meeting, which must take place on an equal human
level.” Without making too much of this pointed reference to inequality in the new, capital-
ist Germany, one might contrast this scene with one of Wiesler’s better moments early in
the film—when he insists on sitting with the common workers at the Stasi cafeteria, rather
than at the officers’ table, and says: “Socialism must begin somewhere” (59). Again, how-
ever negative a portrayal The Lives of Others gives of the DDR, it does not seem simply to
champion capitalism over socialism.
15. For Brecht’s private criticism of the DDR, see Edward Mendelson, “The Caucasian
Chalk Circle and Endgame,” in Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions,
ed. Michael Seidel and Edward Mendelson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977),
341: “Around the time of the Berlin riots of 1953 he wrote (but did not publish) an ironic
poem saying that the government had lost the support of the people—it would perhaps be
best to dissolve the people and elect a new one.”
16. For an account of Brecht’s behavior during the workers’ uprising of 1953, see Ronald
Hayman, Brecht: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 368–69. Here is an
excerpt from a letter Brecht published in the official party organ Neues Deutschland on June
23, 1953: “Organized fascist elements tried to abuse [the workers’] dissatisfaction for their
bloody purpose. . . . It is only thanks to the swift and accurate intervention of Soviet troops
that these attempts were frustrated. It was obvious that the intervention of the Soviet troops
was in no way directed against the workers’ demonstrations. It was perfectly evident that it
was directed exclusively against the attempt to start a new holocaust. . . . I now hope that the
agitators have been isolated and their network of contacts destroyed” (quoted in Hayman,
Brecht, 369). For an imaginative and thought-provoking treatment of Brecht’s response to
the workers’ uprising, see Günter Grass’s play Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand. The English-
language edition, The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), contains an appendix by Uta Gerhardt, “The Uprising of
June 17, 1953” (113–22), which offers a concise but detailed account of the workers’ uprising
in Berlin and Brecht’s response to it. Gerhardt quotes Brecht’s infamous endorsement of the
communist regime in an open letter to Walter Ulbricht, which concludes: “At this moment
I feel the need of expressing my solidarity with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany” (122).
17. Sebastian Koch, the actor who plays Dreyman, suggests in his essay on the film that
even Dreyman’s apartment was based on Brecht’s. See Sebastian Koch, “Warum ich erst jetzt
eine Kinohauptrolle in Deutschland spiele,” in Donnersmarck, Das Leben, 175. Donnersmarck
even links the color scheme of the film to Brecht; when commenting on it on the DVD, he
says: “Here you can see everything in a Brechtian gray; gray was Brecht’s favorite color.”
18. See, for example, Anthony Grenville, “A Good Man in East Germany,” AJR [Associa-
tion of Jewish Refugees] Journal, September 2007, http://www.ajr.org.uk/journal/issue.Sep07/
article.917 (accessed July 28, 2008); and Michael Wood, “At the Movies,” London Review of
Books, March 22, 2007, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n06/wood01_.html (accessed July 12, 2009).
19. For the record, there was to be another use of Brecht in The Lives of Others. The
DVD includes a deleted scene, placed during the birthday party at Dreyman’s apartment, in
which his director friend, Jerska, reads out loud a brief poem by Brecht. Evidently copyright
problems with the poem prevented Donnersmarck from using it in the film, and the text is
not provided on the DVD; it is simply identified as an “animal poem.” It turns out to be one
of what Brecht called his Tierverse; as odd as it may seem, Brecht comes across as a German
version of Dr. Seuss in these humorous poems (there are a total of fourteen of them). The
text of the first is printed in the German screenplay (52–53):
Es war einmal ein Adler

Der hatte viele Tadler
Die machten ihn herunter
Und haben ihn verdächtigt
Er könne nicht schwimmen in Teich.
Da versuchte er es sogleich
Und ging natürlich unter.
(Der Tadel war also berechtigt).
The poem is about an eagle who had many critics; they made him suspicious that he
could not swim in the pond, but he tried it anyway and of course drowned, proving the criti-
cism justified. This “nonsense” verse unfortunately makes a good deal of sense in Jerska’s
case and prefigures his suicide (his “going under”); in effect, Donnersmarck uses the Brecht
poem to show that Jerska has allowed the Communist Party’s criticism to get to him and
destroy his self-confidence.
20. I cite the English translation by Ralph Manheim, The Good Person of Szechwan, in
Brecht: Collected Plays (New York: Vintage, 1976), 6:2. All future citations to this text will be
incorporated into the body of the essay, with page numbers in parentheses.
21. See Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker: A Study of the Modern Theatre (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1946), 224: “The theme of The Good Woman of Setzuan is not hard to grasp.”
22. On Brecht’s tendency to split his characters, see Walter H. Sokel, “Brecht’s Split
Characters and His Sense of the Tragic,” in Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter
Demetz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 127–37.
23. See Peter Demetz, introduction to Demetz, Brecht, 14; and H. F. Garten, Modern
German Drama (New York: Grove, 1962), 213.
24. For Brecht’s critique of traditional drama, see Mendelson, “Caucasian Chalk Circle,”
340.
108 Paul A. Cantor
25. Most of Brecht’s theoretical writings about drama and the theater are conveniently
available in English in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1964). Probably the best overview of his theory is to be found in “The Modern The-
atre Is the Epic Theatre” (33–42). Of particular relevance to Der gute Mensch von Sezuan
is “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (91–99), which, according to Willett, contains the
first reference to the Verfremdungseffekt in Brecht’s writings. For good overviews of Brecht’s
theory of drama, see two essays by Eric Bentley, “From Strindberg to Bertolt Brecht” in his
Playwright as Thinker, 209–31; and “The Stagecraft of Brecht” in his In Search of Theater
(New York: Vintage, 1957), 134–51.
26. See, for example, Elizabeth Wright, “The Good Person of Szechwan: Discourse of a
Masquerade,” in The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 117, 122–23. For the contrary view that
“Brecht’s deconstruction of character is consistent with recent feminist theory of gendered
identity,” see William E. Gruber, Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern
Drama (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 73.
27. Brecht himself was uncertain about the setting of Der gute Mensch von Sezuan. When
he first got the idea for the play, he planned on setting it in Berlin. Even after he decided upon
a Chinese setting, he worried over how oriental the setting should be: “We are still mulling
over the problem; bread and milk or rice and tea for the Szechwan parable? Of course there
are already airmen and still gods in this Szechwan. I have sedulously avoided any kind of
folklore. On the other hand the yellow race eating white French bread is not intended as a
joke.” Brecht was troubled by the unreality of his Chinese setting and sought to counter it:
“The city must be a big, dusty uninhabitable place . . . some attention must be paid to coun-
tering the risk of Chinoiserie. The vision is of a Chinese city’s outskirts with cement works
and so on. There are still gods around but aeroplanes have come in.” Both quotations are
taken from Stephen Unwin, A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht (London: Methuen, 2005),
202–3. These comments suggest that Brecht never satisfactorily resolved in his own mind
how real and how unreal he wanted the setting of the play to be. On the issue of the reality/
unreality of the setting, see also John Willett, introduction to Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays,
vol. 6, pt. 1, The Good Person of Szechwan (London: Methuen, 1985), v–vi, ix–x. Willett quotes
Brecht as expressing his concern that the Chinese setting had become a “mere disguise, and
a ragged disguise at that” (v).
28. The translation I am quoting uses the name “Shen Teh” for some reason; I have
retained the “Shen Te” of Brecht’s original German version in my own prose.
29. A. R. Braunmiller reports in his introduction to The Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny, trans. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (Boston: David R. Godine, 1976), 12,
that Auden said of Brecht: “You must admire the logic of a man who lives in a Communist
country, takes out Austrian citizenship, does his banking in Switzerland, and, like a gambler
hedging his bets, sends for the pastor at the end in the event there could be something in that,
too.” On Brecht’s hedging his bets, see also Mendelson, “Caucasian Chalk Circle,” 340–41.
30. On the way Brecht’s practice as a dramatist often contradicts his theories as a Marx-
ist, see Sokel, “Split Characters,” 133; and Demetz, introduction, 8, 13. On problems with
Brecht’s Marxism, see Sokel, “Split Characters,” 137. Brecht always said that he wanted his
plays to make people think. The unspoken assumption behind his theory is that they will
then think in Marxist terms. But as Demetz points out with regard to Der gute Mensch von
Sezuan: “The Epilogue will hardly persuade an audience to reply with the Marxist answer
desired by Brecht” (introduction, 13). More generally, Demetz writes: “Alienation effects show
relations and events in a new light; they demonstrate that the world is changeable and keep
the audience alert for practical political action—why it should be action along Communist
lines, Brecht alone knows” (4).
31. The only comment I have been able to find in print from Donnersmarck on Brecht
comes in an interview done with Vadim Rizov for the Reeler, February 7, 2007, under the
title “Lives in His Hands: German Director von Donnersmarck on the Art and Politics of
The Lives of Others.” Donnersmarck shows that he understands the contradictions in Brecht’s
life and art, and the dualities in his existence: “Brecht first of all is just a great poet. But then
he was also someone who lived continuously with this dilemma of somehow theoretically
embracing Communism but practically just seeing the awfulness that it was leading to.
There’s this one beautiful poem of his where he asks forgiveness of the future generations
for all the terrible things they did in the name of Communism. And at the same time, he
chose to be in the GDR, but then led this strange life between the US and the GDR. There
was no one else who had that weird dual existence” (2, http://www.thereeler.com/features/
lives_in_his_hands.php [accessed July 12, 2009]). Donnersmarck makes similar comments
about Brecht in the DVD commentary when he gets to the scene of Wiesler reading Brecht:
“And here Brecht’s beautiful poem. Brecht is really worth learning German for. He is such a
master of the perfect word. And that’s why I wanted him in here, apart from all his connec-
tions to the whole Communism issue. He was someone who was torn between a fascination
for that ideology and a full realization of the wrongness that unfortunately came with it, of the
violence, of the dictatorship. And that’s why I think Brecht had to be in this film. Although
maybe I would have put him into any other film too. Because he is just a genius, a forgotten
genius, a little bit, outside of Germany, at least I think, forgotten, and even in Germany. But
a genius nonetheless.” Donnersmarck goes on to talk about giving the keynote address at
a Brecht Congress in Augsburg, where he spoke about the importance of Brecht in his life,
beginning with his reading of Brecht’s play Baal when he was twelve years old.
32. See Sokel, “Split Characters,” 134: “Brecht, in definite and sharp contrast to tradi-
tional Western tragedy, does not begin with the individual but with the problem. . . . Brecht’s
protagonists . . . are exemplifications of human problems; they are primarily not individuals
but dilemmas. They are types.” Sokel goes on to show that Brecht’s characters are more typi-
cal of comedies than of tragedies.
33. Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” 3.
34. Die Dreigroschenoper, Bertolt Brecht: Werke, Berliner and Frankfurter Ausgabe
(Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1988), 2:263 (Erstes Dreigroschen-Finale).
35. See Sokel, “Split Characters,” 128, for the view that in Brecht “for human beings it
is an easy thing to be good.”
36. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Eric Bentley (New York:
Grove, 1966), 39.
37. In his interview with Rizov, Donnersmarck said: “I didn’t want it to turn into some
abstract political thing; I just wanted to show the effects with these individuals” (Rizov,
Lives, 1).
38. See Garten, Modern German Drama, 206.
39. One indication of the pervasiveness of observation as a motif in The Lives of Others
110 Paul A. Cantor
is the fact that the chief observer, Wiesler, often becomes himself the observed. Consider
six scenes: (1) When Wiesler is instructing the Stasi class on the art of interrogation at the
beginning of the film, we learn at the end of the scene that he has been observed the whole
time by his superior officer Grubitz; (2) When Wiesler is leading the team that bugs Drey-
man’s apartment, he is observed—through a keyhole—by a neighbor across the hall; (3)
Just before entering the bar, Wiesler pauses in the street to observe more of Sieland; we sud-
denly learn that a drunk has been observing him and he startles Wiesler by asking: “What
are you staring at?”; (4) When Wiesler interrogates Sieland, he is being observed the whole
time again by Grubitz through a one-way mirror; (5) When Grubitz arrives with his team
for the first search of Dreyman’s apartment, he winks sarcastically at Wiesler through the
surveillance camera, as if to say: “I’m watching you”; (6) At the end of the film, Dreyman,
having discovered Wiesler’s identity, observes him unseen from a passing car as he walks his
delivery route. More generally, the movie repeatedly associates looking at a play with spying
into people’s lives, and of course throughout, we as audience of the movie are “spying” into
the lives of others.
5
The Tragic Ambiguity, or

Ambiguous Tragedy, of
Christa-Maria Sieland
Dirk R. Johnson
To the question of what The Lives of Others is about, one might answer it is
about the oppressiveness of totalitarian societies that monitor and control
their citizens’ lives and careers. In fact, while The Lives seems to be about
the machinery of surveillance in one totalitarian society in particular—that
of the state secret police, or Stasi, in the former East Germany—it reflects
the entire spectrum of totalitarian states that have cast their shadow over
Europe’s “long twentieth century.”1 Indeed, it does not take a great leap of
imagination to envision similar scenarios in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s
Italy, Stalin’s Russia, or Ceauşescu’s Romania. But what makes this film
much more than a snapshot of any one particular society and its oppres-
sive security apparatus is the fact that Director Florian Henckel von Don-
nersmarck does not focus on the macro picture as such but crafts a classic
human tale with a tragic heroine at its center, a tale in which misguided
human passions, compounded by unchecked political power, ambition,
and corruption, destroy lives.2 In true Aristotelian fashion, Donnersmarck
presents how the lust of a high-ranking East German state minister (Bruno
Hempf) for a glamorous stage actress (Christa-Maria Sieland, or “CMS” )3
sets in motion a chain of events that inexorably leads to her death. Despite
his nod to Bertolt Brecht,4 Donnersmarck succeeds in portraying the tragic
dimension of this late-twentieth-century reality much more effectively, I
will argue, because he adheres to an Aristotelian conception of the tragic.5
111
112 Dirk R. Johnson
Brecht’s dramatic theory rejects direct audience identification with the

central characters and their actions. Brecht expects the audience to think
through the main characters’ actions and to gain an awareness of the larger
historical, political, and social forces that prevent them from escaping their
predicament. The audience is not meant to identify with the central charac-
ters or their fate but to leave the theater thinking that the tragedy might have
been averted if the tragic figures had not been trapped by the larger social
and historical conventions of the time. The character of Mother Courage, for
example, in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) encounters the
deprivations and horrors of the Thirty Years’ War but does not change her
ways and learn from her mistakes because she has internalized the horrible
logic of war in order to survive. In the play the Life of Galileo (1937–1939),
the title character of Galileo, unencumbered by the historical implications
of his theories, ushers in a scientific revolution that threatens to topple the
power of church and state, but he fails to recognize that scientific knowl-
edge cannot be divorced from social responsibility. Brecht works against
the audience being drawn in by the tragedy of these characters and instead
uses dramatic effects—most famously, the V-Effect (Verfremdungseffekt, or
alienation effect)—to create an emotional distance between the character and
the audience and a dialectic between the individual and larger social forces.
As the founder of “epic theater,” Brecht sets himself up in principal
opposition to the dramatic theories of Aristotle, the most famous theoreti-
cian of ancient tragedy, for whom the natural identification of the audience
with the tragic figure on stage was central to tragedy. In his hugely influen-
tial aesthetic treatise, the Poetics, the philosopher suggests how tragedians
should craft their plots to maximize the sensations of “fear and pity” and
subsequent “catharsis”—an effect that could best be achieved if the tragic
fate of the main character resonated with the audience at some deep emo-
tional level. To achieve this rare form of aesthetic pleasure, the playwright
should choose an individual higher than us (in Aristotle’s time, this meant
someone of noble birth or royal lineage) but also like us; and he should
present a figure who was not “perfect” but had some “flaw,” a corollary to
the first principle.6 Finally, Aristotle argued that the plot of the tragedy must
arise out of the actions of the characters on stage and that this plot should
be arranged in such a way that the audience experiences tragic inevitability.
Nothing in the plot could be extraneous; every action had to lead directly to
another action, all culminating in the final tragic moment.7 The “goal” here
was not to gain greater understanding of the historical and social forces that
Christa-Maria Sieland 113
inhibit progressive change (Brecht) but to gain insight into the fundamental
tragic nature of existence. This process of tragic purification and purgation
(catharsis) would, in a perfect tragedy, ennoble the audience and leave it
with a deeper and fuller awareness of the world.
Brecht would have been the more logical inspiration for the director of
The Lives. By establishing a creative dialectic between the state apparatus
and the individual, a Brechtian approach might get us to think about the
nature of political power and how the tragic fates of the characters result
from an incomplete awareness of their own historical necessity. The fact that
Donnersmarck devotes the majority of screen time to behind-the-scenes
views of Stasi power structures and surveillance methods further suggests
that Brecht might have served as the perfect dramatic model for The Lives.
Aristotle’s emphasis on the lone tragic individual, on the other hand, might
not allow the audience to appreciate the role of “the political” in the actions
of the characters, and we might lose sight of the larger lesson to be learned
from the story of political power and its corruption, specifically, the repres-
siveness of the Stasi state. But I will argue that Donnersmarck opts for the
Aristotelian approach by making the actress Christa-Maria Sieland the film’s
tragic centerpiece.8 The director’s artistic decision in no way diminishes the
role of the “political”; on the contrary, it gives the story an even greater emo-
tional resonance, allowing the audience to reflect on the pervasive cruelty
inflicted on individuals in oppressive regimes.9
Donnersmarck opens and concludes his film with a framing device.
The audience immediately experiences the Stasi’s brutal interrogation and
training methods in the initial scenes. With a few deft strokes, the director
creates a mood of apprehension, terror, and tension. But the actual dramatic
narrative first gets under way when Grubitz suggests that he and Wiesler
attend a theater production in the evening. Wiesler is skeptical, but Grubitz
reveals his self-serving reason for going: “I heard that Minister Bruno Hempf
plans to go to the theater tonight. As director of the Department of Culture,
I should be there.” The film’s title, The Lives of Others, then appears on the
screen. This is followed by the scene in the theater, the actual opening to
the narrative. Similarly, the logical conclusion to that narrative is the death
of Christa-Maria. However, Donnersmarck chooses not to close his film
there, instead following the personal trajectories of those men touched by
the actress Christa-Maria—her lover Dreyman, their Stasi protector, Wiesler,
and even Bruno Hempf, the man she rejected. Between the bookends of these
two events, Donnersmarck presents the dramatic arc of Christa-Maria’s story.
114 Dirk R. Johnson
In the theater, State Minister Hempf, who desires the actress Christa-
Maria, orders his subordinate, Grubitz, to launch a surveillance operation
on the playwright Georg Dreyman. Grubitz has just finished telling his own
subordinate Wiesler that he believes that Dreyman is “cleaner than clean”
and doesn’t need to be monitored. But Grubitz is naïve about the nature of
power: Hempf will use the levers of the state to dispatch a rival and to gratify
his desire. Wiesler, at the bottom rungs, clings with a childlike intensity to
the ideals of socialism; the midlevel Grubitz wishes to enjoy the preroga-
tives of power with minimal exertion; but Hempf believes that he is entitled
to the spoils of the system: in this case, what he characterizes as the “most
beautiful pearl of the German Democratic Republic,” Christa-Maria Sieland.
Thus, everything that the GDR has at its disposal is brought into motion by
the lust of one man. By revealing the intensely personal nature of this “state
action,” Donnersmarck not only exposes the venality and corruption of
the Stasi regime, he recognizes a very elemental truth about human nature
and its relation to absolute political power as such, namely, how political
power becomes instrumentalized in order to satisfy basic human desires.10
Furthermore, by having the lust of one man serve as the dramatic impetus,
Donnersmarck reinforces the Aristotelian nature of his narrative: the tragedy
emerges directly out of individual motivations and passions.11
While the men discuss their plans, we catch a glimpse of the action on
the center stage of the theater. Written by Georg Dreyman, Christa-Maria’s
lover, the play we see has a Brechtian feel. Brecht, who had chosen to live
in East Germany during his final years and had established an influential
“house theater” in East Berlin (the Berliner Ensemble), was East Germany’s
most famous author in its early years. But while Donnersmarck presents
Dreyman’s Brechtian play on center stage, he launches his own Aristotelian
narrative in the film. Interestingly, the outlines of the story that he does
present on stage foreshadow Christa-Maria’s eventual tragedy. In the role
of the character Marta, she says: “No, sister, believe me. He has fallen. To
his death. The great, powerful wheel has crushed him.” If one were to sub-
stitute “Christa-Maria” for the fallen “Artur,” one could recognize her own
upcoming fate.
On another level, the Brechtian play in the film suggests a further histori-
cal irony. Though the play could suggest itself as the dramaturgical model
for the story to come, it would seem to be counterintuitive since that play,
according to Brecht’s own Marxist principles, would then need to highlight
the injustices of a system, but those injustices should already, theoretically,
have been overcome (aufgehoben). In the “perfect” society of the GDR, the
Brechtian play could only focus its attentions outward (for example, toward
the unfulfilled promise of historical socialism within Western capitalism) or,
selectively, inward (by dramatizing the minor shortcomings of the socialist
system on its way to greater perfection). (The glimpses of the play we receive
seem to indicate the latter model.) The idea that the “real existing” social-
ism in East Germany might itself be the “crushing wheel” would contradict
the Brechtian worldview. Just like Wiesler on his own terms, Dreyman has
chosen to believe in the “goodness” and the promise of the system, and that
is why he can safely write in the Brechtian vein. (Wiesler, too, is safe in the
state as long as he fulfills its functions.) But through the personal tragedy
of Christa-Maria, Dreyman will come to realize that the Brechtian model
cannot do justice to the elemental tragedy and suffering in human existence.
At the post-production party, Minister Hempf closes in on Christa-
Maria. In front of Dreyman, Hempf attempts to initiate a dance but is coyly
rebuffed. Dreyman is now left with Hempf. In their conversation it becomes
clear that Hempf holds the fates and careers of GDR artists in his hands.
Dreyman pleads with him to reinstate his friend the director Jerska, who
has been blacklisted from cultural life. When Dreyman asks the minister
if Jerska can at least hope for reinstatement, Hempf replies cynically: “Of
course he can hope! As long as he lives. And even longer. For hope is always
the last to die.” In this tense scene between a state representative and an
intellectual, it is apparent that the “cultural producers”12 in the GDR are at
the mercy of single powerful individuals who can crush the careers of intel-
lectuals, writers, directors, or actors at whim. Considering how the GDR
controlled the entire work world, it would have been impossible for someone
trained in the arts to find any other position in official culture once he or
she had fallen from favor. This point is forcibly driven home by the scenes
of the broken, bitter Jerska, who must live out the rest of his life in cramped
corridors, devoid of hope: “What does a director have who can no longer
direct? Not much more than a projectionist without film, a miller without
flour. He has nothing.”13 Dreyman attempts to console his friend with false
promises: “[Hempf] gave me hope. Concrete, literal hope.” That hope dies
with Jerska’s suicide.
As the Stasi begins its surveillance of Dreyman, Minister Hempf takes up
contact with the actress and starts to apply pressure, making appointments
to meet her on Thursdays. The director leaves it unclear whether these ini-
tial contacts are sexual in nature, but it is more likely that Hempf is trying
116 Dirk R. Johnson
to “court” her. The scene in the limousine shows a woman so disgusted and
resistant to his advances that Christa-Maria probably had to give in to his
sexual predation here for the first time. The psychological effects of Hempf ’s
sexual pressure, however, have already taken their toll. In an earlier scene, we
see Christa-Maria swallow pills as she prepares for her lover’s party. Though
she might already have been addicted, Donnersmarck reveals this scene at
the moment we know that Christa-Maria is being pressured. Christa-Maria
has by now made a “choice”: faced with the prospect of being ostracized
from the acting profession and ending like Jerska or giving in to Hempf ’s
advances to salvage her career, she has “chosen” to sleep with the minister.
Wiesler decides to make Dreyman aware of the situation: he connects
the wiring of their doorbell so that it rings just as Christa-Maria leaves
Hempf ’s limousine. Wiesler thus forces Dreyman to confront Christa-Maria’s
“betrayal.” (Of course, the fundamentally decent Wiesler knows that Christa-
Maria is an unwilling participant in this relationship, and by his action he
is both testing Dreyman’s commitment to her and pushing him to stand
up for his lover: “Time for bitter truths,” he says as he connects the wires.)
After returning to the apartment and showering, Christa-Maria curls up
in bed with her back to Dreyman. Though he wants to broach the topic of
Hempf at that moment, Dreyman instead remains silent and hugs her. A
warm smile slowly appears on Christa-Maria’s face.
Clinging to a precarious balance within herself, one that might allow
her to save her career, to do what she needs to do to rescue herself, and to
keep some dignity and purity intact despite her wretched compromise,
Christa-Maria feels that her bond with Dreyman can at least allow her to
believe in a purer, better world, the possibility of a more whole self. Earlier
Christa-Maria told Dreyman: “You are strong and forceful. And that’s how
I need you, to be whole and pure [heil]!” Christa-Maria admires Dreyman’s
aura of wholeness and moral integrity. As a more fragile human being, she
lacks the inner reserves to resist the moral pressures that face her in the form
of Hempf. At the same time, she has a deeper awareness of human nature
and the corruptive forces that surround her. Whereas Dreyman manages to
believe in the purity of the system while still reaping its institutional rewards,
Christa-Maria cannot afford that luxury. Her dilemma is stark: compromise
or go under. Her beauty and sexual allure are both the keys to her success
as an actress and what make her seductive to the forces of corruption. But
this is not a woman who decides to sleep with a more powerful person to
advance her career. Her life and passion are acting; she has a talent that no
one doubts but herself; and yet her career and livelihood will be crushed if
she refuses Hempf. Her only other choice is to end up like Jerska.14
This brutal reality is emphasized in a later scene. Just before she plans
to rendezvous with Hempf, Dreyman tries to stop her. He implores her to
believe in herself: “You are a great artist. You don’t need him! You don’t need
him. Stay here. Don’t go.” Dreyman seems to believe that true love will con-
quer all. The more worldly-wise Christa-Maria has to spell it out for him:
“No? . . . I don’t need him? And I don’t need this whole system? And you?
You don’t need it either then? Or not really? Then why do you do it? Why
do you sleep with them, too? Why do you? Because they can destroy you
just as easily, despite your talent, in which you don’t even doubt.”15 Christa-
Maria implies that what she is about to do in a literal sense is what they
have all been doing metaphorically. But as a beautiful, alluring woman, she
is expected to pay the higher price: expose her body to a flesh-and-blood
representative of the system. While Dreyman at most makes intellectual
compromises, Christa-Maria must become the living spoils of the apparat-
chiks. What Jerska said earlier about his professional life applies even more
to Christa-Maria. Dreyman can continue writing as a dissident within the
system even if he can no longer stage plays—as he in fact does after Jerska’s
death; her career requires performance: once she is removed from the stage,
her career is over. It is easy for Dreyman to expect Christa-Maria to make
a sacrifice, but hers must be complete, whereas his is only partial. At the
same time, she confronts Dreyman with the stark reality of their predica-
ment. What difference does it make to “sleep” with the apparatchiks if you
have already had to sleep with them all along? Her honesty reveals a higher
moral sensitivity to their existence in the GDR.
By deciding to meet with Hempf, Christa-Maria sides with the part of
herself that accepts political realities as they are. She jeopardizes her rela-
tionship with Dreyman by seeing Hempf, but she will do what she needs to
do to preserve herself; she will separate the feelings she has for Dreyman
from the more immediate concern for survival. But Donnersmarck then
introduces a perfectly situated plot point to test her character. Wiesler, who
has just overheard their exchange, enters a bar for a nightcap. Shortly after,
Christa-Maria comes in and Wiesler summons the courage to talk with her.
Aware of her intention to meet with Hempf but having to keep that infor-
mation concealed, Wiesler continues with the line of thought that Dreyman
had previously introduced. He presents himself as a member of her devoted
audience and tells her that she is a great artist who must trust in herself:
118 Dirk R. Johnson
“You are a great artist. Don’t you know that?” “And you are a good man,”
Christa-Maria responds. With that, she returns to the apartment and Drey-
man’s arms. Wiesler appeals to the better side of Christa-Maria’s nature—not
the side that makes compromise after compromise to save her career, but
the one that makes her the great artist others know she is. When she tries
to lie to Wiesler, one of the kinds of routine lies that were second nature
in the GDR, he responds: “You see, now you weren’t at all like yourself.”
Instead, her higher, more honest self is revealed during live performances
on stage, where she is allowed to be who she “is”: “I saw you on stage. There
you were more like you are than you . . . now are.” This is the Christa-Maria
her devoted fans can see; it makes her into a great actress;16 and with the
strength of that knowledge she can return to Dreyman.
Christa-Maria’s reclaiming of her “true” self is the turning point, or
peripitia, in the tightly woven plot; for with that decision she has sealed
her own fate. In choosing to stand by Dreyman, she must turn her back on
Hempf. In a later scene, we see a lonely, dejected Hempf sitting on the edge of
a hotel bed after another failed rendezvous with Christa-Maria;17 this scene
transitions in right after Christa-Maria, who has figured out that Dreyman
has become an active dissident, tells him: “I am now completely with you, no
matter what.” Of course, she should realize that a powerful man like Hempf
will not take her rejection lightly. Though she might be tempted to repress
this awareness, she can be under no illusions.18 Hempf will come down hard
on her for her betrayal; indeed, the tentacles of control now begin to squeeze
her ever tighter. (“Whether you break her neck or not is up to you,” Hempf
later tells Grubitz. “In any case, I don’t want to see her playing on a German
stage again.”)19 Donnersmarck could simply have shown us the vindictive
side of Hempf and let us assume that the communist hack would act in such
a petty way, but he blends in the short, poignant scene of the dejected Hempf
alone in the hotel room. Even this corrupt, despicable human being seeks
physical connection—with a beautiful, alluring woman whom he feels he
cannot attain by any other means.20 His corruption lies in his using force
and coercion simply because he can. Here, too, Donnersmarck goes against
any moralizing impulse and the instinct to see and judge power in terms of
black and white; he shows us a world where power serves to conceal as well
as compensate for deep-rooted insecurities.21
Christa-Maria’s decision to return to Dreyman also represents the
turning point for her lover. Whereas Christa-Maria tells him that “she will
never again leave,” Dreyman tells her “that he will now have the strength. I
will do something.”22 Indeed, Dreyman will now be motivated to write the

incriminating article about hidden suicide statistics in the GDR for the West
German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which in turn will enable the Stasi to
close in on Dreyman. But what is important is that Dreyman’s motivation is
brought about by Christa-Maria’s renewed commitment. Her love for him
and the risks she takes upon herself inspire Dreyman finally to take a prin-
cipled stand against the regime, something that his dissident friends have
long encouraged him to do. Her example and willingness to take on great
risk for her lover bring out the moral courage that Dreyman has until now
failed to exhibit. The tragic irony is that the very decision that the two lovers
make at the height of their passion, a decision that makes them more fully
human, is the one that will lead to Christa-Maria’s demise.
The events leading up to Christa-Maria’s arrest and interrogation fol-
low rapidly. Provided the pretext by Hempf to bring her in for questioning,
Grubitz uses the opportunity to discover who is behind the Spiegel article.
In the scene with Grubitz, Christa-Maria succumbs to fear and pressure,
offering to work as a Stasi informant (IM) and even to sleep with Grubitz
(“Maybe I can do something that might not be so disagreeable to both of
us”) if doing so can rescue herself and her career. Though she first thinks she
has been taken in for the illegal purchase of drugs, Grubitz informs her of
her actual offense: “You have turned a very powerful man into your enemy.”
Christa-Maria now realizes that she must pay the price for having chosen
Dreyman over Hempf. She is even willing to expose her lover as the author
of the Spiegel article, for in the following scene we see the Stasi appear at
Dreyman’s doorstep. Christa-Maria has informed on Dreyman, though she
has not revealed (yet) the most important incriminating detail: the hiding
place of the typewriter, which even for the Stasi is a necessary precondition
for arrest.23 What others say about Christa-Maria, and what she fears about
herself, is that she does not have the courage to withstand Stasi pressure.24
But should we expect that of her? Though under no illusions about the
regime (unlike the idealistic Dreyman), Christa-Maria never intended to
become a political dissident or to offer moral opposition. She has chosen a
form of “inner emigration” in her art that can give her at least a semblance
of freedom and sanity. It is a choice made by countless intellectuals and art-
ists within totalitarian societies. It may lack the heroism and the prestige
of active resisters, but we should not minimize the suffering and loneliness
felt by those who merely seek to survive out of fear for themselves or their
loved ones. Individuals with strong moral or ideological convictions may
120 Dirk R. Johnson
have the stamina to take on great personal risks;25 but individuals who cling
to a sense of their moral self while pressured to compromise their humanity
day after day can embody a more profound sense of tragedy.26
Christa-Maria is then brought to interrogation with her secret sup-
porter Wiesler. Donnersmarck suggests several possible explanations for
their peculiar hedging behavior in this scene. Wiesler gradually turns his
swivel chair to face her, fearing that she will recognize him from the bar. He
does not want to startle her, since he knows that Grubitz is observing their
“performance.” Though Christa-Maria clearly recognizes him, she tries to
conceal her surprise. But what is going through her mind? Does she think
that Wiesler’s earlier actions in the bar were just the clever ploy of an ill-
intentioned Stasi agent? Was she foolish to trust him then and must now
pay the price? Or does she think that Wiesler may actually be on her side
(he was, after all, the “good man” who inspired her to return to her lover
Dreyman) and may be willing to help her? Why else would he need to con-
ceal his identity now? (Wiesler surely did not reveal enough to her in the
bar to incriminate himself.) Donnersmarck further complicates matters by
having Wiesler (or so it seems) give Christa-Maria encouraging gestures to
trust him and divulge the hiding place of the typewriter.27 We find out later
he intends to use that information to remove the device, but how could she
know that? Is there enough evidence for her to assume that he will help her?
How? These kinds of questions are important as they relate to the nature
of her moral complicity, but the director ultimately leaves her motivations
unclear. Do Wiesler’s interrogation tactics, which play on her fear and van-
ity, get her to reveal the hiding place? Is it the minuscule hope—her only
hope—that perhaps this man will rescue her? Or is it resignation and the
futility and desperation of the situation? In any case, there can be no doubt
(based purely on her actions and not her motivation) that on some level
Christa-Maria betrays her lover to the Stasi. Whatever the reason for her
confession—whether she confesses out of a small hope for salvation or out
of a mixture of fear and vanity—Christa-Maria falls back on the most basic
instinct of survival.28
There seems little hope that Christa-Maria will be able to redeem her-
self. She returns to her apartment and once again takes a shower, her usual
response to a feeling of self-defilement. Dreyman comes in and asks her
where she’s been; she lies to him, prepared to keep up the pretence. Wiesler
told her in interrogation that an accomplished actress like her should manage
to dissemble in front of her lover, and indeed we would expect Christa-Maria
to be able to do so. But then the Stasi appears at their door, demanding a new
search. With information provided by her, Grubitz quickly locates the spot
in the apartment where the typewriter is supposedly hidden just as Christa-
Maria exits the bathroom in her bathrobe.29 She looks in humiliation over
at Dreyman, who realizes her betrayal. Unable to bear the intensity of his
glance and the guilt of her decision,30 she rushes out of the apartment into
the street. Though the director leaves it open whether Christa-Maria is so
shaken that she is not entirely conscious of what she’s doing or whether she
intentionally puts herself in the way of the oncoming truck, she becomes
one of the many victims of suicide that the “perfect society” of the GDR
tries to conceal from the world.31
How does Christa-Maria become a tragic figure? What allows her to
redeem her humanity and leave the audience with a profound sense of trag-
edy for her plight? How can we connect with someone who has betrayed the
trust of her lover? Christa-Maria is not a “perfect” character, but she must
fight to retain her humanity in the face of insurmountable pressures. The fact
that she does not always make the best decisions but still remains aware of
the morally ambivalent nature of those decisions allows us not to lose faith
in her better, more noble nature.32 Donnersmarck gives us several reasons
not to question her essential nobility. First of all, Christa-Maria is incapable
of doing exactly what everyone expects the actress to do so easily (and what
everyone else in the GDR seems to have mastered), that is, to act “naturally”
in a thoroughly duplicitous environment.33 In moments when she should
conceal her intentions and protect herself, she cannot; only when acting on
stage can she reveal her true self (“There you were more like you are than
you now are”). The reason her audience loves her, Wiesler implies, is because
it recognizes her essential sincerity and genuineness as an actress; but that
same lack of guile also prevents her from being a successful “actor” on the
“stage” of the GDR. Christa-Maria should be able to lie in interrogation;
but her interrogators have no problems detecting her lies. She should also
be able to feign shock or disbelief when the Stasi uncovers the typewriter
in front of Dreyman; but she is incapable of dissembling in a society that
demands continual dissimulation.34
When Dreyman looks to her in disbelief, Christa-Maria is not able to
keep up the pretence. Though she confesses out of weakness and fear, she
recognizes now she had betrayed not only her lover but her better self. If the
latter is gone, what does she have left? The confession might have seemed
the only possible decision for her in that time of psychological duress, but
122 Dirk R. Johnson
it now reveals its terrible price: she has forfeited that part of her humanity
that made her both a great artist and a person worthy of love and respect. On
the other hand, Dreyman’s reaction, though understandable, is harsh, based
on a too simple view of the circumstances. He is quick to judge Christa-
Maria without truly understanding her predicament. He has to believe in
her absolute moral purity—he disregards his dissident friends’ concerns
for her reliability—for his worldview can accommodate only absolutes. For
Dreyman, there must always be good and bad people; and while his moral
certitude is what attracts Christa-Maria to him, it also prevents him from
understanding the ambivalent universe she inhabits and in which she fights
to survive. While Christa-Maria measures herself against the high standards
and expectations that Dreyman sets (and then condemns herself based on
them), Dreyman’s own moral rectitude prevents him from appreciating the
moral complexities she faces.
Suicide becomes the only way out. Though it is impossible for Christa-
Maria “to make good again what I have done,” as she says in her dying words,
her decision to take her life should not be seen as a momentary gesture of
desperation or self-loathing but as her final effort to reclaim autonomy. The
system has systematically stripped her of dignity and freedom, but what it
can’t take away from her is the freedom to condemn herself according to
her own standards and values. Perhaps the most horrible indictment against
totalitarian regimes is that in them suicide can become the last honorable
means to express humanity and dignity. Once societies turn behavior pat-
terns such as betrayal, deceit, and duplicity into second nature, into one’s
“true” nature; once they crush individual hopes and aspirations, then some
will choose to opt out of that dehumanizing form of existence. Donnersmarck
highlights one such seemingly random suicide and thwarts our expectations
of what we tend to think about suicide, namely, that it exhibits moral failure
or weakness of character. Instead, he shows us that for people like Christa-
Maria, and in repressive societies like the GDR, suicide can become the
sole means to reclaim moral autonomy. With Wiesler at her side, the dying
Christa-Maria says: “I was too weak.” But her life was one not of weakness
but of an inner struggle against the worst human instincts that the system
both encourages and exploits. Her tragedy resonates with the audience not
because it sees her as a pure moral beacon, but rather because she is an all-
too-fallible woman who seeks to survive on her own terms but ultimately
is crushed by the “great, powerful wheel.”35
Donnersmarck could have chosen to end his tragic tale with this final
scene. His tightly woven Aristotelian narrative followed the tragic heroine
from the heights of her fame as an artist in the GDR to her anonymous
suicide on the dreary streets of East Berlin. In Aristotelian fashion, the
film’s ending triggers a “catharsis”: the audience feels for the plight of this
woman, whose weaknesses certainly contributed to her downfall but whose
tragic fate was nonetheless cruel and undeserved.36 The director has also
created, as Aristotle had demanded, a character that, though “higher” than
ourselves,37 is still “like us”—not excessively moral, pure, or righteous, but
with shades of both strength and weakness. It would have made sense to end
the film here.38 The audience would have recognized that life is essentially
tragic, and the aesthetic pleasure of the film would have resided in experi-
encing someone of great promise and merit encounter an undeserved fate.
But Donnersmarck decides to append a non-Aristotelian conclusion to the
film; one could even say that he devises a Brechtian finale. Is the “natural”
ending to the film (the death of Christa-Maria) simply too tragic for our
modern sensibilities? Would the Aristotelian conclusion perhaps make this
film less commercial, less acceptable to audiences that expect Hollywood
consolation and reconciliation? Why does the director deprive us of the full
cathartic release of his tightly woven plot?
Let me explore first what I have termed Donnersmarck’s “Brechtian”
solution. By reconnecting his story to the larger historical forces (the rise
of Gorbachev; the fall of the Wall; German reunification), the director con-
textualizes the tragedy of Christa-Maria and redeems it within the larger
scope of recent historical events. One could now say: even though she had
to die, the greater trajectory of history allows us to learn from her example
and to move toward a more informed and humane society. Many of the final
scenes of the film take place in former Stasi headquarters, which is now
dedicated to education about that period, finding out about Stasi informants
and procedures, and contributing to what Germans term Vergangenheitsbe-
wältigung—a coming to terms with the past by openly confronting it. This
concept is itself “Brechtian”: learning from the dialectic of history in order
to move toward a more progressive future.
But what if we were to interpret the ending in another way? What if the
director has instead taken Aristotle one step further? What if he decided
to show us the effect of Aristotelian catharsis on the “audience” of his char-
acters? The release and purgation of emotion (catharsis) following tragic
performances should, Aristotle suggested, somehow ennoble and refine our
awareness of life and the world around us. The effect of tragedy purifies—
124 Dirk R. Johnson
puts our souls into a forge of emotion to distill out their impurities and to
heighten our sensibilities. As the ancient dramatists practiced it, tragedy is,
in essence, moral, even if it uses the amoral means of art to achieve its ends.
What is original in Donnersmarck’s script is that it does not end with the
tragic death of the heroine but follows the lives of the three men in Christa-
Maria’s world after the tragic events and shows us how she continues to haunt
them. In the case of Hempf, he still thinks about her and reveals perhaps
deeper emotions than one would expect, but he can’t understand her tragedy
as something he had caused. He selfishly thinks about how Christa-Maria
wounded him and the resentment he still feels toward her betrayal. Her
tragedy, then, has not changed him one bit, and his life continues to be as
miserable as it was before.
Wiesler’s life changes fundamentally with Christa-Maria’s death. By
protecting her from harm, he had put his own career at risk; he must pay
the price by losing his position as high-ranking Stasi interrogator. Wiesler’s
secret devotion to Christa-Maria pushes him to break with his former self
but opens him to a warmth and humanity that he had lost. Whereas Christa-
Maria struggles to hold onto a humanity that she’s always in the danger
of losing, Wiesler hopes to recapture a humanity compromised by years
of working for a dehumanizing, soulless regime. Christa-Maria’s death is,
therefore, a truly humbling experience for him, bringing his world of power
and status crashing down. We cannot but have the sense that Wiesler’s life
has been enriched despite this. Wiesler is the only one of the three men who
actually gives up something because of his commitment to Christa-Maria;
but he is also the only one who, despite these sacrifices, reflects an inner
peace and a sense of reconciliation with his life and the consequences of
his decisions. Donnersmarck’s brilliance in showing the humbled Wiesler
walking the streets of Berlin as a postman, pulling along his pathetic little
bag,39 reinforces the message that this simple man, who went through the
vicissitudes of strong emotions and personal loss and who sacrificed every-
thing to become a “good man,” is now richer in soul and awareness than
those who do not fully learn the lesson of Christa-Maria’s life and death. In
the end, he has every right to say that Dreyman’s book is “for him,” because
he’s now in the position to receive it.
As for Dreyman, the full impact of Christa-Maria’s death doesn’t hit him
at first. In the theater, Dreyman watches his same Brechtian play from the
beginning (in the very same scene) being performed in a reunified Berlin,
this time in a modern, trendy staging.40 Dreyman seems to have perfectly
adapted to the new requirements of the capitalist theater world and has
made the necessary adjustments to succeed in a different system. But he
leaves the theater when he is painfully reminded of Christa-Maria. While
he stills remembers her, her death has not substantially changed him and he
has continued in the same paths of his former life. Above all, his art remains
unchanged (except for the staging and costuming to reflect different tastes),
devoid of passion and immediacy. (It is not surprising that his dramatic art
could make the seamless transition from East to West because it remains
unthreatening and sterile in both systems.) And his emotional life is built
on a fundamental misreading of Christa-Maria’s death: he has conveniently
made a martyr out of her, perhaps blaming himself for being too hard on
her, but probably convinced that she had removed the typewriter for him.41
Once again, Dreyman can accommodate only simple, uncomplicated truths
about people, and he has come to terms with Christa-Maria’s death in neat,
manageable categories.
Hempf ’s revelation in the theater lobby changes all that. Sifting through
the Stasi records, Dreyman discovers that it wasn’t Christa-Maria at all who
had removed the typewriter; it was an unknown Stasi agent intervening on
their behalf. This discovery has two profound effects on him. For one, he
understands that an anonymous man took on great personal risk to help
them. His sense of compassion was stronger than his loyalty to the system
or concern for his own life and career. When Dreyman later follows Wiesler
and witnesses the humbleness of his life and station, he realizes even more
how much this man had to sacrifice. But at another level, Dreyman also real-
izes the truth about his lover Christa-Maria, that his neat picture of her was
based on false suppositions and that she was a more complex and conflicted
person than he cared to admit. This revelation gives him a fuller picture
of her as a human being, and he can now grasp the pressures that she was
under. Instead of believing that it was all about him, he can see that it really
was about her, above all, her attempts to navigate an impossible situation.
The impact of these discoveries finally allows him to confront the full scope
of her tragedy and to achieve catharsis.
Dreyman can now achieve a breakthrough as an artist. He has found a
subject matter that actually relates to his life experience, one that emerges
from a deeper awareness of individual sacrifice and suffering. By understand-
ing the full extent of Christa-Maria’s tragic situation and sacrifice, Dreyman
can write a novel that is more than just an exercise in creative writing. Since
his fame and reputation had previously depended on tacit support and
126 Dirk R. Johnson
approval from the East German culture office, Dreyman never really had
to risk anything as an artist. His successes fell to him too easily, and they
didn’t require him to probe his conscience. The death of his friend Jerska
and his subsequent decision to write a subversive political piece on suicide
in the GDR may have been his first steps in the direction of greater creative
awareness and moral reckoning. But even then, his article remained primar-
ily an intellectual exercise—a rationalist’s attempt to come to terms with the
phenomenon of suicide and the death of a close friend. The discovery of the
full story behind Christa-Maria’s death and Wiesler’s involvement, however,
crashes through the convenient inner barrier that he built up around that
tragic event. He is now able to take in its full suffering and then to release
it in the cauldron of art. The catharsis of Christa-Maria’s tragedy has finally
changed him at the core of his being and he can move away from his cool,
bloodless dramas and produce art truly enriched by personal experience
and suffering.42
How, then, does Donnersmarck’s Aristotelian approach relate to the
political dimension of the film? How does it prove superior to what could
have been a more Brechtian treatment of power structures? The Brechtian
model assumes the corruption of current political structures and a con-
spiracy of elites against the realization of a humanistic ethic. While Brecht
had meant his plays to critique residual capitalist institutions that impeded
progress along a Marxist continuum of historical-materialist evolution, his
theories could be appropriated by any storyteller intent on pointing out the
oppressive nature of institutions—even, ironically, if those institutions hap-
pened to be (allegedly) fully realized socialist states. Brecht’s most mature
dramatic creations, such as Mother Courage and Galileo, were far from
being one-dimensional victims of the dominant political realities of their
time; they were also complex individuals whose faults, vanities, and weak-
nesses contributed to their tragic downfalls. However, Brecht’s theories and
methods of dramaturgy kept the audience’s focus on power structures and
how they blinded his characters to their full human potential. His charac-
ters were immersed in an unfolding historical struggle that was larger than
they were and that they could not fully comprehend, but Brecht intended
to render this struggle explicit to his audience members through dramatic
means so that they could effect progressive change. Brecht’s vision, despite
his efforts to do justice to the reality of moral complexity and ambiguity,
required “victims” and “perpetrators”; it required, in short, a belief in moral
absolutes.43
If one leaves aside the slightly Brechtian optimism of the final scenes,
where the director holds out the hope of a more progressive future through a
direct confrontation with the past, the darker heart of Donnersmarck’s story
is the Aristotelian tragedy of his central heroine, Christa-Maria. Here, the
moral lessons to be learned are more ambiguous, more uncertain. Christa-
Maria is not a pure “tragic heroine”; nor does her betrayal of her lover seem
to correspond to our simple notion of how a “moral” character should
behave. Moreover, Donnersmarck shows us other characters who exhibit
similar behavior, such as the poor neighbor Frau Meineke, who must suffer
in silence while Dreyman’s apartment is being bugged due to fear for her
daughter’s future.44 Shouldn’t a truly moral person try to help her neighbor,
we might ask ourselves, even if that means jeopardizing her daughter’s uni-
versity career? Certainly, the director presents several characters who exhibit
more traditional “heroic” models of moral courage, such as Dreyman’s friend
Paul Hauser, a man imprisoned by the system, the film implies, for politi-
cal resistance. Hauser could have become the moral beacon in a film that
otherwise shows its characters in various stages of moral compromise with
the regime. But instead, Hauser’s intransigence has rendered him slightly
inhuman and cold, as though moral righteousness automatically entitles
one to feel superior, even toward one’s fellow citizens. Does the very fact of
Hauser’s imprisonment give him that right? And Jerska—are resignation and
bitterness the only possible responses to artistic blacklisting? While Don-
nersmarck in no way intends to whitewash the culpability of the system in
its destruction of these human lives, he also does not want to give us one-
dimensional, holy victims, making it easy for us to lay the blame.
This returns us to Christa-Maria’s tragic situation. What is it in her
independent story that gives us a deeper understanding of this regime’s
moral corruption? What makes Donnersmarck’s film such a masterpiece
in capturing the essence of late-twentieth-century political oppression?45
Through the character of Christa-Maria, Donnersmarck can reveal to us
the insidiousness of everyday, banal forms of moral corruption. It is not
a question of laying the complete burden of blame on a generic system of
political governance or oppression, such as on the East German state, or
on neatly defined “perpetrators,” such as the Stasi and its informants; that
would be far too easy and predictable. It is to show how the so-called sys-
tem as a whole infiltrates the moral fiber of its citizens at a root level and
forces them through gradual increments to surrender their personal integ-
rity and autonomy. This is not a classic system “from above,” in some pure
128 Dirk R. Johnson
Brechtian sense; those systems are long gone and have been superseded by
more clever and pervasive mechanisms of control and suasion. It is now a
complete “society” of peers and neighbors—of friends, family, and lovers.
In short, there are no morally pure figures in this gray universe, for each
has been forced to make corrosive moral compromises along the way. But
in subtly fleshing out the portrait of one such anonymous figure in this dark
period—that of the actress Christa-Maria, or “CMS”—Donnersmarck has
allowed us to see how difficult it is for any one person to hold onto a sense
of moral self when the pressures to surrender integrity have become all but
insurmountable. The “heroes” in Donnersmarck’s world, therefore, are not
the ones who inhabit an absolute, coherent moral space—such as the Paul
Hausers or the Georg Dreymans, for example. The “heroes” are the ones
who, while remaining anonymous, fight an uphill battle just to cling to a
promise of a better world, the ones who at least have the potential to be
redeemed by art. Donnersmarck’s film is not about the “political,” the high
and the mighty, or the morally virtuous; in the end, it is a film about those
unsung “lives of others.”
Notes
1. I use this term in contrast to Eric Hobsbawm’s reference to Europe’s “short twenti-
eth century,” as I see political totalitarianism as the defining feature of the entire twentieth
century (and beyond).
2. There has been much discussion surrounding the historical accuracy of the film and
its supposedly fanciful portrayal of the Stasi reality. Here it might be helpful to remember
Aristotle’s words in the Poetics concerning the difference between history and dramatic art:
“The poet and historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. . . . The true difference is
that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more
philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, his-
tory the particular” (Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Francis Ferguson [New York: Hill and Wang,
1961], 68). While there might not be a single documented case of a Stasi agent who acted
like Wiesler, there is also nothing to suggest that there could not have been a Stasi agent who
might have acted like him.
3. The film puts a human face on the anonymous tragedies of the regime’s victims.
In the protocols to her case Dreyman later finds Christa-Maria’s initials, CMS. But behind
these clinical, bureaucratic, and dehumanizing initials resides a human tragedy. This film
won’t allow Christa-Maria Sieland to remain CMS.
4. Aside from the “Brechtian” play written by Dreyman, we see Wiesler read Brecht’s
poem “Erinnerung an die Marie A.” Unlike Brecht’s theater, which had explicitly didactic,
political overtones, many of Brecht’s poems can be enjoyed on purely lyrical terms. (After
Christa-Maria’s death, the camera pans over open sky and the tops of trees, an image that
seems to allude to the opening lines of Brecht’s poem: “It was a day in that blue month Sep-
tember / Silent beneath the plum trees’ slender shade / I held her there / My love, so pale
and silent / As if she were a dream that must not fade.”) Does this indicate Donnersmarck’s
greater appreciation for the lyricist than for the Marxist dramatist?
5. The world of theater and drama is central to the film. It is about dramatic perfor-
mance on many different levels and it is structured like a play. While we the film audience
watch the characters perform, they are either watching a dramatic performance (while they
are watching each other!) or Wiesler is “watching” (and directing!) the “performance” in the
apartment or Grubitz is watching the performance of Christa-Maria and Wiesler (who are,
of course, “performing” for each other), etc. The characters are always “on stage”—for each
other and for us, the “guilty” onlookers. The similarity of the plot of The Lives to that of the
German classic Emilia Galotti, G. E. Lessing’s eighteenth-century “bourgeois tragedy,” seems
more than coincidental. There a prince asks for the help of his minister to seduce the bour-
geois maiden Emilia. The corrupt courtier Marinelli uses the mechanisms of state power to
kidnap and hold the girl against her will so that the prince can seduce her. Lessing himself
wrote a famous disquisition on Aristotle’s aesthetics, and the tightly woven plot of Emilia
Galotti owes much to Aristotelian principles.
6. “There remains, then, the character between these two extremes—that of a man
who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or
depravity, but some error or frailty” (Aristotle, Poetics, 76).
7. Friedrich Nietzsche understood the difficulty of creating this dramatic necessity:
“We know the sort of technical problems that absorb all of a dramatist’s energies, often mak-
ing him sweat blood: how to give necessity to the knot and also to the resolution, so that
there is only one possible outcome” (Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, section 9, in Friedrich
Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron
Ridley and Judith Norman [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 249). Nietzsche’s
observation is based on an understanding of the underlying ethical dimension of tragic art.
Dramatic necessity is not merely an arbitrary formulistic principle but rather reflects a subtle
awareness of how profound tragic situations could resound in viewers on a subliminal level,
thereby effecting a change in their inner being.
8. Surprisingly, most of the studies on the film seem to emphasize the central male
characters of the film. This reflects a bias against, and a diminishment of, the fascinating
female lead, Christa-Maria, and it leads to essential misunderstandings about the film. For
example, Thomas Lindenberger suggests that the film is “misogynistic” (!) and then goes on to
present dismissive opinions of Christa-Maria (“Stasiploitation—Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s
Historical Creativity in The Lives of Others,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 [2011]: 562).
Interpretations often write the actress off based on her supposedly negative traits (betrayal,
drug addiction, neuroses, vanity, etc.) and then turn to the two male leads, Wiesler and Drey-
man, who refract more comforting and traditional aspects of “goodness.” But I think that we
miss the problematic heart of this film if we do not recognize that Donnersmarck shows us a
dominant “man’s world” represented by the three main male characters (Dreyman, Wiesler,
Hempf) who, in their obsession with the beautiful female object of desire (Christa-Maria),
corrupt and destroy an essentially innocent woman.
9. Mary Beth Stein claims that the film’s “focus on human motivation makes the plot
more universal and universally understandable to foreign audiences, but it leaves the ideo-
130 Dirk R. Johnson
logical rigidity and deep-seated paranoia of the SED state largely unexplored. . . . The tragic
love story has the effect of blunting the film’s political impact” (“Stasi with a Human Face?
Ambiguity in Das Leben der Anderen,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 [2011]: 570). But
Stein here reveals a Brechtian sensibility—i.e., that somehow the story would be more effec-
tive if it focused on the “political” superstructure. Yet it is Donnersmarck’s wise decision to
tell an Aristotelian tragedy that allows the story both to transcend its specific Stasi milieu
and at the same time to transmit to its audience the corrosive nature of this particular form
of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
10. Manfred Wilke claims that dissatisfaction with the regime increased in the final
years because people began to realize that members of the all-too-human “clique at the top,”
the handful of privileged families in the regime, were treating their country like their own
“private commissary” (Selbstbedienungsladen): “They were only concerned with their privi-
leges, a sybaritic lifestyle and personal power” (“Fiktion oder erlebte Geschichte? Zur Frage
der Glaubwürdigkeit des Films Das Leben der Anderen,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3
[2011]: 598). On the other hand, Stein critiques the director for personalizing the motiva-
tions of the Stasi power elites, arguing that this was not “realistic” and also detracted from
the “political” (“Stasi with a Human Face?” 570–71). I think Donnersmarck’s decision to
“personalize” the motivations does not arise from his supposed desire to appeal to foreign
audiences or to Hollywood but springs from a deep, pessimistic insight into the nature of
human passions and political power.
11. The elemental nature of Hempf ’s drive, his lust for the beautiful Christa-Maria, is
similar to the elemental force of Achilles’ anger: it triggers the series of events that will lead
to Christa-Maria’s demise.
12. The term Kulturproduzenten is revelatory of the way in which the GDR saw “its”
artists only in terms of their production value to the state.
13. Stein accurately, I think, refers to the regime’s targeted practice of Zersetzung (decom-
position) in the way Jerska is shown to be treated in the film, and this practice leads to his
thorough isolation and psychological withdrawal and “decomposition”: Zersetzung “aimed
at the systematic destruction of people by disseminating malicious rumors and creating fear
and doubt” (“Stasi with a Human Face?” 574).
14. Jerska is Christa-Maria’s negative pole, the horrible “other” that she seeks to banish
because he’s a living shadow of what she might become. Preparing for the party, she tells
Dreyman not to associate with Jerska, that he should not bring that emotional wreck into
his life (“Hol dir nicht diese Kaputtheit in dein Leben”).
15. The theme of artistic self-doubt reoccurs throughout the film. Whereas Dreyman
appears self-confident and never doubts his talent, Christa-Maria questions hers. But self-
doubt is an integral part of the creative process and can lead to great artistic production.
Great confidence in one’s abilities and artistic talent, on the other hand, can yield mediocre,
commercial work. It is Christa-Maria’s insecurity in this regard that makes her the more
human and ultimately more tragic figure.
16. She is a stage actress, not a movie actress, and one is required to reveal much more
of oneself in live performance than on film, which in addition allows for numerous takes
and final editing.
17. In his description of the scene in the script, Donnersmarck writes: “[Hempf]
realizes that she will not come, that she will never come again. That it is over” (Das Leben
der Anderen: Filmbuch von Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2006], 113).
18. In the scenes after Christa-Maria sides with Dreyman, she appears to be on a high,
seemingly oblivious to the consequences of her decision. She rejoices in her renewed com-
mitment to Dreyman and her sense of liberation from Hempf. (We know that she is dancing
on the precipice.)
19. Hempf ’s words reveal Donnersmarck’s keen awareness of the differentiated power
competencies of the regime: while Hempf supplies the incriminating evidence against Christa-
Maria to the Stasi officer Grubitz, letting him decide how to deal with her, he, in his capacity
as minister of culture, will blacklist her from cultural life.
20. An interesting parallel is the scene where Wiesler is shown engaging in sexual inter-
course with a prostitute to find human connection. Here, too, it is the character of Christa-
Maria that triggers this need.
21. Hempf ’s insecurity is revealed again in a later scene when he tries to project his
own failings and frustration onto Dreyman. After Christa-Maria’s death, he tells Dreyman:
“We knew everything about you. We even knew that you couldn’t really satisfy our little
Christa.” Hempf too cannot shake her lingering memory. (He leaves the theater at the same
scene, which for both evokes the memory of the dead actress: “I had the same feeling,” he
tells Dreyman. “I had to leave too.” Despite his audacity in comparing himself to Dreyman,
Hempf at least admits to his feelings.)
22. These words, written into the protocol by Wiesler’s coworker, are spoken during
moments of “intense intimacy.”
23. The fact that Christa-Maria refrains from telling him the hiding place of the type-
writer may not minimize her guilt in revealing Dreyman as the writer of the Spiegel article,
but she may hope that Dreyman will manage to escape the Stasi dragnet.
24. When Dreyman is about to tell her about the Spiegel piece, Christa-Maria asks him
not to: “Perhaps I am really as unreliable as your friends say.” Christa-Maria fears her own
trustworthiness when put under Stasi pressure.
25. Dreyman’s confidant, the journalist Paul Hauser, personifies this type: he is stern
and uncompromising and has paid the price for his resistance, but perhaps fails to appreciate
the moral complexities of everyday lives in the GDR.
26. This dilemma is portrayed well by the character of Dreyman’s neighbor Frau Meineke.
Though she would like to tell Dreyman about the surveillance, Wiesler’s threat to end her
daughter’s medical career at the university if she says anything puts her in a horrible pre-
dicament. Christa-Maria’s situation echoes Lessing’s title character in Emilia Galotti. There
Emilia provokes her death at the hands of her father not to prevent the prince from taking
her by force but because she knows that she, as a passionate young woman, might not be
able to resist his sexual advances. In both cases, the central tragic heroine is not the simple,
resolute figure that others (e.g., Emilia’s father in Lessing’s drama, Dreyman in The Lives)
think that she is or want her to be but a more complex, passionate character with conflicting
emotions, forced to make difficult choices.
27. Wiesler echoes the words he spoke to her in the bar, that she should consider her
audience. (This causes Grubitz to chuckle; he thinks it is a strange interrogation tactic and
not a subtle reference.) Is this just another of Wiesler’s hints for Christa-Maria to remember
him? Is he trying to gain her confidence? Is he just playing to her vanity? Also, Wiesler gives
132 Dirk R. Johnson
her an intense, beckoning nod after asking where the typewriter is hidden. Is this a sign that
she should trust him to help her?
28. Christa-Maria at first says that she knows nothing about a typewriter and that she
had previously lied, but then decides to confess during interrogation. We cannot exclude
the possibility that Wiesler’s offer that she will be able to return to the stage was the decisive
factor in her decision to confess. But is this so terrible? The world of her art is the only thing
that Christa-Maria has left to sustain her in this oppressive society.
29. Christa-Maria is wearing a white bathrobe, white being the symbol of purity. Don-
nersmarck also adds a fascinating little detail: on the upper-right-hand corner of the bathrobe’s
lapel there is a golden star. For a director like Donnersmarck, so conscious of every cinematic
detail and so aware of historical resonances, the golden star must suggest the golden Star of
David the Jews were forced to wear in the Third Reich. But what does the director mean by
this? Does he give Christa-Maria the ultimate symbol of the victim? Does it refer to the con-
tinuity between totalitarian systems on German soil? Or does he want to compare her fate to
that of the countless other victims during the Third Reich who suffered similar anonymous
tragedies through no fault of their own? Timothy Garton Ash has alluded to the simplistic
identification in people’s minds of “Stasi” and “Nazi” in his review of the film (“The Stasi on
Our Minds,” New York Review of Books, May 9, 2007), and others have also criticized the
historical verisimilitude of showing Grubitz in a “smart” Nazi-style uniform, also likely to
suggest totalitarian continuity in Germany. Yet I don’t have a problem with Donnersmarck
referencing this; on the contrary, I think he is getting us to reflect on the persistence of cer-
tain human types despite outward changes in the regime.
30. In the notes to this scene, Donnersmarck writes: “Dreyman now looks at her, full
of suspicion and harshness. Her gaze cannot withstand his.”
31. Donnersmarck films this scene very suggestively. Christa-Maria runs out of the
building, casting a quick sideways glance down the road. We can hear the sound of a
truck in the background. She stops at the edge of the pavement and then steps out onto
the street, looking forward. As she turns to face the street, she has a blank, stunned look
just before the truck hits her. In the notes to this scene, the director makes it a more
straightforward suicide.
32. In an Aristotelian sense, Christa-Maria’s “tragic flaw” might be her lack of personal
self-confidence, which makes her doubt her talent and renders her susceptible to the pres-
sure of others.
33. In the brilliant scene with Wiesler and the young boy in the elevator, even a child’s
innocent question could lead to terrible repercussions.
34. According to Stein, the “film illustrates how communist dictatorships produced
a similar schizophrenia whereby individuals negotiated the tension between state and self
through the creation of distinctly public and private faces.” I argue that Christa-Maria’s
greatest vulnerability is that she fails to achieve the “Stasi habitus of studied inscrutability
or what Markus Wolf termed ‘Die Kunst der Verstellung’ ” (“Stasi with a Human Face?” 576).
35. Donnersmarck accentuates her humanity with a symbolic gesture. Dreyman holds
the dying Christa-Maria in his arms in the street. Her position in her lover’s arms recalls
Michelangelo’s famous Pietà; there the dying Christ lies in Mary’s arms. This reference sug-
gests the Christlike purity of his heroine, whose weaknesses and fallibility and attempt to
remain human under difficult circumstances must elicit our compassion. Of course, the
director gives her the only telling name of the characters: she is both Christ(a) and Maria,
victim and consoler. She is the woman into whom all three men (Dreyman, Wiesler, Hempf)
project their longings and desires and from whom they await salvation. But none of them
take her for the woman she is: complex and ambiguous, weak and strong, talented and ridden
with doubts, strongly sensual and strangely aloof. While the men envision her as the figure
of purity and perfection, she must fall victim to their unrealistic expectations.
36. “Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like
ourselves” (Aristotle, Poetics, 76).
37. Donnersmarck accentuates Christa-Maria’s glamour, particularly in contrast to the
drab, depressing reality that surrounds her. In the scene at the seedy bar, she appears with
large, dark sunglasses and wears an opulent fur hat. She is aware of her superiority, and she
exudes an aura of exclusivity and mystery. As a coveted actress in the regime, she is granted
the rare but highly fragile privilege of being exclusive in the otherwise ruthlessly egalitarian
society of the GDR.
38. I will disclose here that I was at first disappointed with the film’s ending, thinking
that its somewhat lengthy historical coda detracted from the visceral power of the original
story of Christa-Maria. But after repeated viewings I have come to understand and appreci-
ate Donnersmarck’s decision to conclude the film in this way.
39. Wiesler is the only one whose status remains unchanged in the “new” Germany.
While those with former prestige manage to keep their standing in the reunified country
(Dreymann’s plays are still performed and Hempf seems well fed and well clothed), the lowly
Wiesler does not experience any upward mobility: he has graduated from opening letters
to delivering them!
40. Donnersmarck has an excellent eye for the German theater world: many plays per-
formed in Germany’s state-subsidized major theaters are presented in pretentious, artsy pro-
ductions that appeal only to an elite educated audience. In fact, the current German theater
scene shares this in common with the former East Germany and its cultural sponsorship.
Rarefied and insular productions are often the result. Is this film Donnersmarck’s attempt
to write and “stage” a viable, competitive (cinematic) alternative to the state-sponsored
theatrical fare?
41. When Grubitz removes the plank from the hiding place and finds it empty, he mut-
ters: “The actress.” Dreyman looks up in realization: both of them suspect that Christa-Maria
had removed the typewriter.
42. “The literature that transcends the dehumanizing aspects of political repression is
also the vehicle through which Dreyman and Wiesler are, in effect, reconciled to one another
and their separate pasts” (Stein, “Stasi with a Human Face?” 567).
43. The fact that so many discussions of the film return to the simple moralistic dichot-
omy of “perpetrators” and “victims” indicates to me that they have fundamentally misun-
derstood Donnersmarck’s film. He shows us a disturbing, morally ambiguous world, one too
difficult for many of us to accept, where there are no neat and clear distinctions between
victims and perpetrators but where everyone is compromised by various degrees of complic-
ity. It is no coincidence that the dominant shade of color in the film is gray.
44. The film opens with another such character, one who is “forced” to betray his
neighbor after extreme physical and psychological duress from the Stasi, even if his only
crime might have been friendly association with his neighbor before he attempted to flee to
134 Dirk R. Johnson
the West. Lindenberger claims that the director could have made a greater film about such
“lesser” characters (“Stasiploitation,” 564–55). The fact is: he did.
45. Lindenberger faults the film for being too generic in its portrayal of a totalitarian
state, arguing that such a lack of historical specificity renders the film inauthentic (ibid., 565).
But here I must agree with Wilke: the question is not the factual accuracy of the historical
details as such but rather the overpowering atmosphere of the film itself, which allows the
audience to feel the pervasiveness of totalitarian control at a subliminal, “gut” level. The
director “conveys a feeling of authenticity that goes underneath the skin” (Wilke, “Fiktion
oder erlebte Geschichte?” 599). The content may not be applicable only to the Stasi reality,
but certainly the GDR state perfected this form of physio-psychological penetration of its
subjects to an unprecedented degree.
Part 3
The Lives of Others and Other Films
Martina Gedeck (as Christa-Maria Sieland) and Sebastian Koch (as Georg Dreyman).
6
The Lives of Others, Good Bye Lenin!

and the Power of Everydayness
James F. Pontuso
At first viewing, The Lives of Others and Good Bye Lenin! could not be more
different. Good Bye Lenin! is a fanciful, lighthearted, and sometimes poignant
journey into a world lost forever as the result of the collapse of communism.
The Lives of Others is a realistic and chilling account of the lengths to which
the ruling Communist Party went to keep that world from failing. Although
The Lives of Others highlights the dark and menacing side of tyranny, both it
and Good Bye Lenin! reveal a striking feature of post-totalitarian regimes—
the Communist Party’s dependence on “everydayness” as a mechanism of
rule.1 The movies illustrate the power of everydayness to envelop people so
fully in the activities of daily life that they have little time or inclination to
object to their political or social system. After all, communism survived long
after most people had lost faith in its ideals. As Russian dissident Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn argues, “If no one believes and yet everyone submits, this dem-
onstrates not the weakness” of a political system “but its frightful . . . power.”2
Surprisingly, both films also show the limits of the artificially manufactured
and party-manipulated everydayness and highlight the extraordinary influ-
ence of a deeper, more subtle, and complex form of interaction that truly
governs the relationships between people.
The Problem Raised by The Lives of Others

As we know from the various analyses in this book, The Lives of Others is
about a loyal and effective Stasi operative, Hauptman Gerd Wiesler, who
137
138 James F. Pontuso
is assigned to spy on Georg Dreyman, a well-known GDR playwright, and

his live-in-lover, Christa-Maria Sieland, one of East Germany’s foremost
actresses. The issue raised by this chapter is why Wiesler comes to iden-
tify with the people he is watching. It is not exactly clear why a dedicated
state security agent would switch sides and oppose the government he has
worked so long and hard to support. Was Wiesler an idealist disgusted by
the Communist Party’s abuse of power? Was he still a loyal communist who
could not stomach the instruments of party rule misused for personal, pru-
rient motives? Had he come to realize that the whole system of communist
leadership had been besmirched by egocentric, careerist bureaucrats? Or
was his conversion more personal? Perhaps he compared his sterile, soul-
less life of commitment to the cause with the vibrant, loving relationship of
Sieland and Dreyman.
Storyline—Good Bye Lenin!

Good Bye Lenin! takes place primarily during the exhilarating and unset-
tling period in East Germany just as the Berlin Wall falls. It is a story about
the high hopes and shattered promises of communism. The movie relates
the life of Alex Kerner, who we see initially in 1978 as a Pioneer (the com-
munist version of a Boy Scout), proudly celebrating the first East German
astronaut to fly in space. The scene switches to 1989. An older, longhaired,
bohemian Alex is in a crowd of street protesters. He has become one of the
GDR’s discontented and dispirited young persons characteristic of the late
communist era. When his mother, Christiane, who is passing by, sees him
in a melee between police and demonstrators, she collapses on the street.
Alex is arrested but released by the authorities so that he can attend to his
critically ill mother. At the hospital he discovers that she is in a coma after
suffering a severe heart attack.
Alex is particularly attached to his mother because of the trauma she
experienced in 1978 when her husband—Alex’s father—abandoned the
family. She was so distraught that she fell mute and had to be admitted to
a psychiatric hospital. She awakened only to Alex and his sister Ariane’s
desperate pleadings. Christiane thereafter is a changed person, or at least
seems to be. She becomes a loyal communist, throws herself into building
socialism, and enlists her children, friends, and coworkers into the ever-
present social, cultural, and political activities provided by the party to elicit
citizen participation.
The Power of Everydayness 139
Now, in 1989, Christiane remains in a months-long coma while com-

munism collapses in Central Europe, the Berlin Wall is torn down, the GDR
disappears, and East and West Germany vote to reunite. Unexpectedly, Chris-
tiane awakens, but in a much weakened state. Doctors warn that any shock
might kill her. Alex believes that if his mother were to discover the failure
of the nation for which she labored so fervently, it would be her demise.
He concocts a scheme to fool his bedridden mother into believing that the
GDR is alive and well. He redecorates the family apartment with the plain
dull furniture that had been relegated to the basement shortly after the end
of party rule. He makes everyone who visits Christiane wear their cheaply
made, 1970s-style, East German attire—long since gone out of fashion in
the West and quickly vanished in the GDR. He rummages around the city
to discover jars of foodstuffs no longer produced by now-defunct East Ger-
man industries and carefully refills the obsolete containers with products
from the West. Alex and a friend with ambitions to be a television direc-
tor fabricate videos that they pass off to Christiane as the daily news. They
reverse history so as to make the street protests against the GDR seem to be
demonstrations against the capitalist West. In Alex’s made-up world, East
Germany is not only still alive, it is thriving.
During a trip to their country cottage, Christiane reveals a startling piece
of news to her children. Their father, Robert, had not abandoned the family.
In fact, he had defected to the West in hopes of building them a better life.
The plan called for Christiane and the children to follow soon after. But as the
time approached for the escape from East Germany, she had been paralyzed
by fear. We can surmise that her attachment to communism was based less
on principle than on fear of being uncovered as a would-be traitor to the
socialist cause. In one of those odd mental tricks people are prone to as the
result of betraying responsibility to a loved one, Christiane throws herself
into a cause to hide, even from herself, her guilt and shame.
Although Christiane eventually discovers Alex’s deception, she never
lets on. Instead, she pretends to believe that an East German hero, astronaut
Sigmund Jähn, has become the nation’s president. In the alternative universe
Alex creates, the Berlin Wall falls but it is communism that prevails in the
cold war. It is not, however, the gray, dull, sclerotic communism of party
hacks who make inane speeches about the glories of socialism. Nor is the
nightly news focused on harvest yields and factory outputs, all delivered in
the stylized Soviet-speak that had become the norm wherever communists
ruled. Instead, it was the communism of equality, humanity, and solidarity
that Marx had envisioned and people like Christiane had dreamed would
remake the world. Christiane passes away peacefully, outliving East Ger-
many by a few days.
Backstory
By the 1980s, East Germany was one of the more successful countries in the
communist bloc. The effort to build a consensus in the GDR was aided by
the traditional discipline and respect for authority of the German people.
The unspoken bargain between rulers and ruled rested on the socialist sys-
tem’s ability to provide a safety net for citizens.3 The party responded to the
economic predicament of the 1970s and 1980s by decentralizing the man-
agement of industries. This scheme worked no better than Stalinist central
planning since the government would not allow any industry to go bankrupt
or even worry about making a profit. Managers had little inducement to
produce goods that appealed to consumer preferences. Instead, industries
became fiefdoms that incentivized hoarding raw materials, equipment, and
skilled labor—all the antithesis of efficient business practices. By the late
1980s, the unit price of East German goods was actually higher than those
manufactured in West Germany, although GDR workers received one-
sixth the real wages of West German workers.4 “The overall result of these
half measures and systematic rigidities,” Joseph Rothschild argues, “was
to transform both the Soviet Union and east Central Europe into a single
‘Greater European Co-Stagnation Sphere.’ ”5 Vladimir Tismaneanu explains
that “the social contract” between the party and the population “was based
on political immobility, widespread apathy, and mass resignation to a status
quo perceived as marginally less horrible than the Stalinist period.”6
Of course, the party still expressed a belief in its ideals and heroes.
Wendy Graham Westphal maintains that Good Bye Lenin! both highlights
the symbols of communist authority and indicates how rapidly East Ger-
mans abandoned these once-powerful icons. She explains that “Good Bye,
Lenin! depicts this shift away from the cultural memory and towards the
everyday, communicative memories. . . . The use of the English term ‘Good
Bye’ informs the audience that the cultural memories of the East . . . will
be replaced by a westernized (or even Americanized) identity.” Of course,
Lenin was the pivotal figure “of socialist or Communist states and their ide-
ology” and became a key element in the “state’s efforts to create a cultural
memory of itself.” To say good-bye to this “mythical” idol of “East German
propaganda,” Westphal concludes, “represents the farewell to the cultural

memories for which they [dedicated East Germans] stood.” 7
The party even tried to make its ever-present network of secret police
and informers a routine part of daily life. As Václav Havel points out in his
analysis of the greengrocer, people became so used to being watched that
they simply ceased thinking about an alternative to party rule or to the way
of life that it had created for them.8 The secret police methodically isolated
and manipulated those who deviated from the established line into supinely
accepting the status quo. Stefan Sperling explains that “the Stasi employed
what was called Zersetzung, a form of psychological warfare that proceeded
by person-specific anonymous manipulations intended to dissolve its victims’
interpersonal and intimate relationships. The Stasi University at Potsdam
even offered a doctorate in the subject.”9
When the founding ideology lost its luster, communist rulers were stuck.
They did not have the resources to adapt to the economic challenges of the
West, and they certainly could not tolerate a cultural norm that urged indi-
vidualism over collective action. Instead of adapting to a changed world, they
attempted to create an alternate reality, one in which 1960s technology and
1970s style became the everyday norm. In economists’ terms, the authori-
ties defended their sunk costs by making it a monopoly. Marxism promised
to fulfill people’s needs, but it could not match the real material progress of
the market system. Instead, ruling elites relied on the power of convention,
ordinariness, and conformity to control people. The party enforced a system
in which everything was planned, organized, and unchanging. Apartments,
clothes, food, transportation, education, entertainment, art, and music were
all made to correspond not so much to the Marxist ideal but to the era in
which communism had enjoyed its greatest economic advancement. The goal
was to fully enmesh people in a particular way of life so that they unthink-
ingly accepted it as natural, normal, and commonsensical.
This communist alternative reality is wonderfully and comically
expressed in Good Bye Lenin! when its lead character Alex Kerner has to
go to such elaborate and arduous lengths to re-create the everyday life of
East Germany, “a country,” he remarks, “that never existed in that form.”
Everydayness
Every strategy communists employed—force, ideology, and the effort to
provide economic security—failed to justify their continued predominance.
Whether by design or default, communists attempted to use the inertia of

everyday life to maintain their authority. As Martin Heidegger explains,
everyday life has a certain power. Everydayness, a term Heidegger coined, is
the ordinary, commonplace routine way in which human beings encounter,
understand, and deal with the world. We hardly ever wonder about everyday
occurrences; not much reflection goes into brushing our teeth, tying our
shoes, or drinking coffee. We rarely ponder why the sky is blue or the sun
comes up in the east. We expend little effort worrying about why we should
drive on the right-hand side of the road—unless, of course, we visit England.
We take the things ready at hand to be natural, reasonable, and the way they
should be. “Because average everydayness constitutes the ontic immediacy
of this being [Dasein],” Heidegger explains, “it was and will be passed over
again and again. . . . That which is ontically nearest and familiar is . . . farthest,
unrecognizable and constantly overlooked.” Everyday life enframes us in the
familiar such that we almost never distinguish what is truly natural from
what is culturally derived. It is as if some distant, anonymous “they” estab-
lished a set of rules that we all are compelled to follow. Heidegger explains,
“We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read,
see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also
withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw, we find ‘shocking’
what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite and which all
are, though not as a sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.”10
Because our consciousness, what Heidegger terms Dasein, takes its
bearing from the they, “it is insensitive to every difference of level and
genuineness. Publicness obscures everything, and then claims that what
has been thus covered over is what is familiar and accessible to everybody.”
This covering over of different ways of life is what communists hoped would
support their status quo. Moreover, Heidegger explains, everydayness can
overpower ingenuity, complexity, and diversity since “every mystery loses
its power. The care of averageness reveals, in turn, an essential tendency of
Da-sein, which we call leveling down of all possibilities of being.”11 Every-
dayness is the background on which consciousness rests. In every time and
place everydayness has been the manner in which people relate themselves
to reality. Communist rulers seemed to intuitively apply Heidegger’s analysis;
they hoped people would forget to question the life around them because it
had become so common.
For Heidegger, authenticity is the alternative to everydayness. To be
authentic entails living beyond mere existence, questioning conventions,
and pondering Being—the fathomless source of existence. Authentic

people reject the comforts of everydayness and do not let “them” decide
their actions. To be authentic we must stalwartly face the uncertainty
of living without the guidance of “them” and embrace the angst-filled
existence that the awareness of our own demise entails. The authentic
life is preferable since everydayness can become a kind of social tyranny
in which the human spirit loses its dignity. Heidegger claims that “this
being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Da-sein completely into the
kind of being of ‘the others.’ ” In a sense, identification with “others” is so
total it becomes “inconspicuousness” and “unascertainability.” It is at the
point in which the authority of others is not perceived that “it unfolds its
true dictatorship.”12
In many ways Heidegger’s criticism of everydayness was a response to
the technology-grounded direction of the modern world and especially
Karl Marx’s economic-based theory of life. Marx argues that the most fun-
damental human activity is to provide for one’s physical needs, and all that
comes after is influenced by this endeavor. He explains, “Life involves above
all eating and drinking, shelter, clothing. . . . This is the first historical act
. . . which must be fulfilled . . . today as well as a thousand years ago.” From
this premise Marx postulates that the way in which people gain their liveli-
hood affects everything else they do. In a real sense, he claims, people are
what they produce and the way they produce it. He reasons: “The way in
which a man produces his food . . . his mode of production . . . is . . . a defi-
nite way of expressing . . . life. As individuals express their life, so they are.
What they are, therefore, coincides with what they produce and how they
produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions
which determine their production.”13
Marx claims that we are “species beings” and that our individual destiny
is significant only as part of the masses. The metaphysical questions that
give rise to philosophic inquiry are irrelevant because investigations into
the origin, purpose, or end of life are not fruitful. He advises: “Give up your
abstractions and you will give up your questions. . . . Do not think, do not
question me, for as soon as you think and question, your abstraction from
the existence of nature and man makes no sense. Or are you such an egoist
that you assert everything as nothing and yet want yourself to exist.”14 To put
it bluntly, Marx would consider Heidegger’s authentic life a ridiculous waste
of time. Angst is foolish for Marx since death is best overcome by not think-
ing about it. Furthermore, the purpose of life is readily known—humans
obtain the material necessities that make life possible. One could go so far
as to say that for Marx everydayness is all that exists.
What does everydayness have to do with Good Bye Lenin! and The Lives
of Others? These films show that communist governments did not, as many
scholars suggest, deviate from Marx’s principle.15 They stressed economic
progress as the most important activity of human society. It is no coincidence
that in communist countries the corn or wheat harvest and factory output
became the central topic on the closely controlled nightly news. Occasion-
ally the monotony of everydayness was broken by some innovation, as is
shown by excitement of the young Alex Kerner for East Germany’s entry
into the space program or by the consummate theatrical performances of
Christa-Maria Sieland.
When manipulated by a group desperate to maintain power, everyday-
ness became a tool of oppression. “Society was petrified,” Havel explains,
“into the fiction of everlasting harmony.”16 The Lives of Others accurately
portrays the Stasi seeking to know and manipulate everything so that the
communist mirage of a normal society could not be breached. The high
point of everydayness occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s, a time “of apathy
and widespread demoralization,” Havel explains, “an era of gray, everyday
totalitarian consumerism.”17 The system succeeded in creating peace and
calm but, Havel quips, it was “calm as a morgue or a grave.”18
Everydayness and Alltag Films in the GDR

There is evidence that East German authorities used a strategy of everyday-
ness to control the population. The state-sponsored film industry, always a
propaganda tool of the party, created a genre called Alltag—everyday life.
Daniela Berghahn explains that the GDP’s 1950s socialist realism movies,
which were intended to make the everyday labor of ordinary workers heroic,
were transformed by East German filmmakers in the 1960s into a way of
highlighting the gap between socialist ideals and the grinding mediocrity of
everyday life. However, the GDR’s unadventurous leadership balked at this
bleak realism. At its plenum held in 1965, the party banned films known
as Gegenwartsfilme (contemporary films) that “examined socialist society
more critically and more honestly.”19
Artists loyal to the party adapted to the limitations on creativity by cre-
ating a new genre: Alltag. Alltag movies presented everyday life in the GDR
but presented it as neither dreary nor heroic. Alltag films made ordinary life
synonymous with Marxist-Leninist principles. GDR film director Lothar

Warneke explained his use of Alltag while justifying it with an ideological
credo: “Every moment is endlessly rich, . . . boredom is the most superficial
reaction to everydayness.” The routine behavior of ordinary people “has
political meaning; the individual becomes a conscious subject.” Thus Alltag
films show “to what degree Communist principles have become inner human
requirements, what, as Lenin put it, has become habit.”20
Alltag movies became a propaganda tool of communists highlighting
the legitimacy of the East German way of life. Indeed, Kurt Hager, chief
ideologist for the East German Communist Party, declared in 1972 that
“today the great, the historically, and personally meaningful grows precisely
in Alltag.”21 Guenther K. Lehmann, a professor of aesthetics at Leipzig Uni-
versity known for his adherence to the party line, explained that everyday-
ness, while critical of the overblown heroes of socialist realism, had became
a way of orientating people favorably to the experience of their daily lives.
Everydayness seems to have always been identical with the boring

and monotonous. For this reason, genuine, meaningful human
existence has never seemed accessible in the prose of Alltag. Now,
however, literature and art compete to uncover the poetry of “or-
dinary Alltag.” The interest in everyday subjects and processes is
general. We often find headlines in papers and illustrated magazines
such as “Out of the Alltag of the Republic,” “Passing the Test in
Alltag,” “The Arts in Socialist Alltag,” “From the Alltag of Socialist
Jurisprudence,” etc. . . . In concern for everyday activity, a healthy
skepticism toward idealized exceptions combines itself with a de-
cisive orientation toward that which animates millions of people
every day and everywhere.22
Joshua Feinstein’s book-length study of East German films, The Tri-

umph of the Ordinary, raises the key paradox of the Alltag genre. How could
the progressive character of Marxist philosophy be squared with the inert
makeup of communist East Germany? Feinstein holds that
a distinct image of East Germany gradually emerged in the GDR

cinema, but it was not the one that the regime had originally sought.
Instead of a heroic, future-oriented vision of socialism, a largely
static society came into focus. . . . How was it possible to depict a
society as simultaneously dynamic and subject to an authority that

was unimpeachable and thus timeless? The articulation of properties
associated with Alltag, or everydayness, occurred in film as well as
in other media both as a means of resistance and as an avenue of
accommodation. . . . Positing the existence of a preexisting essen-
tially timeless community satisfied the regime’s need for legitimacy
while also providing refuge from the Party’s forced march toward
the future.23
Nature’s Everydayness
We are now in a better position to understand The Lives of Others and Good
Bye Lenin! Both movies were a reaction to Alltag films and disclose the artifi-
ciality, conformity, repression, and mind-numbing self-deceit of the everyday
life created to keep communist regimes in power. We also see, ironically,
that the comedy Good Bye Lenin! is in some ways more heartbreaking than
The Lives of Others. While The Lives of Others has a tragic moment when
Christa-Maria’s disloyalty is disclosed and she meets a horrible end, much
of Christiane’s adult life is a betrayal and a lie. She threw herself into party
activities not because she cared about the GDR’s brand of socialism but
because she was frightened that her untrustworthiness would be revealed
and her attempt to defect punished. In choosing to stay in East Germany, not
only did she leave the husband she loved, she also cut her children off from
their father and deceived them into believing that they had been abandoned.
These films also show us that party-constructed everydayness turned
out to be a poor mechanism of control. It forced people to follow a specific
set of doctrines and to sustain a static, never-altering society. Life is too
complex to follow one path; the lives of most people are full of mysterious
twists and turns—loves, hatreds, and longings—that can never be calculated
or controlled at the central planning office. Havel explains: “Between the
aims of the post‑totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning
abyss: while life, in its essence, moves toward plurality, diversity, independent
self‑constitution, and self‑organization, in short, toward the fulfillment of
its own freedom, the post‑totalitarian system demands conformity, unifor-
mity, and discipline. While life ever strives to create new and improbable
structures, the post‑totalitarian system contrives to force life into its most
probable states . . . a movement toward being ever more completely and
unreservedly itself.”24
The Lives of Others sharply contrasts the barren everydayness of exis-

tence in the GDR with the more spontaneous authentic lives of Dreyman,
Sieland, and their friends. The movie has been attacked because Stasi agent
Wiesler suddenly dedicates himself to protecting the subjects of his surveil-
lance—something, critics maintain, that would never occur to a hardened
veteran of the East German state security system. But perhaps Wiesler felt
as if he could live fully only by involving himself in the lives of others. This
seemingly incongruous plot twist reveals much about communism’s collapse.
The artificial, managed, rigid, and sterile everydayness that communism
used to maintain control was undermined by a truer, more multifarious
reality of people’s everyday existence. Sieland and Dreyman have complex
and interesting lives, full of music, creativity, art, and passion. Wiesler, on
the other hand, inhabits the artificial world of late communist tyranny. His
apartment is functional but dull and monotonous. The art on his walls is
pedestrian, in line with the egalitarian principles of the regime. He eats
packaged, precooked food, an efficient way to deliver calories but hardly an
appealing experience for the senses. Even Wiesler’s sexual encounters are
perfunctory—undertaken with an inexpensive prostitute for the gratifica-
tion of the most rudimentary erotic urges.
The Lives of Others’ creator, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, makes
an odd and perhaps revealing comment about the inspiration for the film:
“And, so, the original idea came from this quote by Lenin who said that he
didn’t want to listen to a certain type of music anymore because it made
him feel so soft inside that he couldn’t commit all the atrocities he [felt] he
had to commit to finish his revolution. So, basically, my film took that lit-
erally and tried to find a way of forcing Lenin to listen to that music.”25 On
the surface von Donnersmarck’s remark seems to wish for a more humane,
less brutal, path to socialism than the one inspired by Lenin. But perhaps
Donnersmarck is indicating that the boredom, tedium, and rigidity of late
totalitarianism were an inevitable outcome of Lenin’s revolution.
Why did Donnersmarck compare the Marxist revolution with art?
Lenin’s goal was to transform the human condition. He hoped to institute a
social system that resolved life’s existential uncertainty, a project that gave
meaning to his life and guidance to his adherents. Lenin was supremely
confident, perhaps to overcompensate for the doubt and uncertainty that
surrounded every choice he made. He believed that Marxist philosophy had
resolved the ambiguity of being; once people enjoyed material well-being
equally, all their longings would be fulfilled and their lives made whole.
However, despite what Marx claimed, existence is always shrouded in

mystery. Humans would be content with satisfying their everyday material
needs if they weren’t aware of the fragility and contingency of their lives. If,
as Marx suggests, they could forget death, they might be happy to exist in
the moment as species beings.26 But we are finite creatures who can imagine
the infinite and we are never fully satisfied or at home even in the most lush
of material circumstances.
In order to master the elusive character of being, Lenin asserted his will
against other people to make them obey, against nature to make it bounti-
ful, and against being to make it orderly. Lenin allowed no inner doubts to
check his ambition or ameliorate his cruelty. His Marxist doctrines made
him believe that he could conquer chance. Acting on these principles, Lenin
hoped to make individuals free from contingency, anxiety, and material
shortages. He wanted to put people in full control of their destiny. Such an
endeavor turns out to be impossible since the beginning, end, and purpose
of our lives are not fully comprehensible. So long as the mystery surround-
ing human life persists, the totalitarian temptation will be attractive because
it seeks to stamp out mystery. By the 1980s the revolutionary optimism of
communism was gone, lost decades earlier in the brutality of Stalin’s Gulag.
Communism’s only mechanism for maintaining power was to make rigid,
structured, and controlled existence seem normal. But because people won-
der about their existence, the artificially created everydayness of late com-
munism inevitably became surreal to those living under its grip.
But even if Lenin could have created a Marxist utopia, would it resolve
all human problems? What, for example, could the best-ordered society do
to fix poor choices, the kind that Christa-Maria or Christiane made? Would
infidelity and misfortune disappear simply because society had become more
equitable? How could even the most just regime repair the heartbreak of
having neglected one’s responsibilities? Even the most productive societies
cannot fully stem people’s baser passions. It is hard to imagine, for instance,
that Hempf would be less obsessive and jealous because there was a higher
gross domestic product. Even a just government could not cure the sorrow
Alex’s sister Ariane felt when she discovered letters from her father hidden
by her fearful mother. True, a decent and prosperous society can resolve
some human problems. But because we have inner lives independent of our
environment, society can only be a necessary but not a sufficient source of
our happiness.
People are shaken from the assurance of everydayness by natural disas-
ters, political upheavals, economic reversals, or personal crises. Of course,

humans are self-conscious as well as conscious of their surroundings.
They contemplate ways of life different from their own sometimes boring
and ordinary existence—which is why art and artists gave the communist
authorities such trouble. In order to be entertaining, even the simplest art
cannot merely reflect ordinary life. Art would be boring if it only re-created
what we ordinarily do. Art must present something new, different, and
unexpected. The eternal need for art exists because we are not fully at home
or satisfied with our lives. We are beings who can imagine perfect wisdom,
beauty, harmony, and happiness, but never fully attain it. Art exists because
we have a longing for something we can never quite reach. At its best, art
presents an alternative to everydayness and makes us ponder the meaning
of our lives. It is little wonder, then, that even pliant and loyal artists such
as Dreyman in The Lives of Others were always under suspicion and often
culpable of challenging the party-enforced status quo.
The revolution to bring about a perfect world defined Lenin’s life. Revo-
lutions are exciting and interesting for the revolutionaries. For Lenin’s revo-
lution to succeed, people would have to be happy to become species beings
and content with everyday life. Had Lenin listened to music, he would have
realized that human beings are never content with mere materialism and
that art engages the imagination in such a way as to provide a glimpse of
the beautiful and eternal, while at the same time demonstrating that these
moments of delight are fleeting.
Marx was incorrect because he thought a life dedicated to material well-
being both for oneself and the species would make us happy. But we are far
too complex to be content with mere life. We seek love, companionship,
beauty, and fun besides the satisfaction of our physical desires. Despite all of
his mother’s indoctrination and devotion to the cause of socialism, the young
adult Alex Kerner is far more interested in the affections of a pretty girl than
he is in the fate of the masses. As we have seen, his mother, Christiane, was
not as dedicated to building socialism as she seemed; she turned to it as an
alternative to a lost love and a marriage broken by the division of Germany.
Marx was even wrong about materialism. Consumers seek more than
having goods that meet their bare needs. They want new, innovative, and
stylish products. As Good Bye Lenin! delightfully shows, within a short time
after the collapse of communism, the whole centrally planned way of life in
East Germany vanished, visible only as heaps of rubbish left for the trash
collector. “I can’t believe what crap we used to wear,” Ariane comments when
Alex coaxes her into wearing a pre-1989 outfit. Producers of those Western
goods were, of course, driven by the profit motive, just as Marx contended.
But they also sought to create something new and interesting. They wanted
their innovations to be popular and attractive. Besides wealth they sought
honor and distinction, as shown by as Alex’s friend Denis, who longs to
become an important filmmaker.
Heidegger was wrong as well. Everydayness does not overwhelm our
ability to live authentic lives. Wiesler is converted by the authentic relation-
ship between Sieland and Dreyman. Their passion is not merely physical;
it grows out of the realization of their vulnerability. They understand the
fragility of existence, as indeed most lovers do. It is, after all, awareness of
our own mortality that makes us say, “I’ll love you forever,” even and perhaps
exactly because we understand that nothing is forever.
Because of our contingency and fragility we have empathy; occasionally
we relate to other people’s problems. While Heidegger dismisses empathy as
little more than a primordial awareness of the they, a distant, ever-present
foundation of consciousness of the way the world works, it is more likely that
empathy is possible because we can put ourselves in the place of others.27
When we see other people’s fears, hopes, tensions, and pains, we readily
understand their feelings and sometimes make them our own.
We usually learn about virtue when we are children, a time when we
are weak, dependent, and needy. Our vulnerability at such times makes us
aware of the need for standards of conduct since we are the ones most likely
to be hurt by their absence. Alex is particularly empathetic because, at a time
when he needed them, he almost lost both parents in his youth; his father
seemingly abandoned the family and his mother suffered a nervous collapse.
It should not be surprising, then, that teenagers—feeling less at risk—throw
off the lessons of youth to test their independence or power. Alex, of course,
rebelled against the regime his mother was so devoted to. People not treated
well as children often spend their lives confused and anxious, as if they do
not know how to live well. They seem always to be searching for some for-
mula—as does Ariane—that will guide them through life. It seems, then,
that humans want to be trained in morality.
Empathy is the basis of all the metaphysical experiences that are
particularly human. Empathy is the reason that we comprehend general
categories of such things as love, friendship, courage, good, and evil. We
have empathy because in our everyday lives we were taught about the world
by particular people. Our families, teachers, elders, and neighbors instructed
us in how to behave. We were not thrown into a world controlled by some

anonymous distant they, as Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis insists;
more likely we were first carried around the world by our mothers.
Part of our everyday experience is a consideration of the ethical and
moral consequences of our actions. All morality begins with an awareness
of how our actions might affect others. We can put ourselves in the place of
others and feel—or imagine we feel—their joys and sorrows. A moral sense
arises from envisaging how others perceive our behavior. Perhaps it is not
so odd that even a grizzled Stasi veteran such as Wiesler could experience
compassion for people caught in a difficult situation; perhaps he was acting
like a human being.
It is astonishing that works of popular culture—The Lives of Others and
Good Bye Lenin!—show that two of the most influential philosophers of the
twentieth century were wrong about the human condition. The real power of
everydayness was not, as communist leaders had hoped, its ability to make
us satisfied with a mundane existence. Nor is everydayness characterized
by inauthentic, thoughtless activity, as Heidegger argued. Real everyday
life, as these two movies show, is more complex, mysterious, full, and rich
than Heidegger or Marx maintain. Everyday life is governed by the nature
of human longings, and the nature of human beings is to wonder about
their individual fate. We are beings who love and hate, who act nobly and
wickedly, who desire more than mere life, who seek fulfillment as well as
longevity. It could be argued that nature’s everydayness proved not only that
the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century was wrong, it was
also the true conqueror of communism.
Notes
1. The post-totalitarian system was one in which show trials, torture, mass deporta-
tions, and executions were things of the past. Josef Stalin and his henchmen had murdered
so many people and destroyed so many lives that even the most ardent communists had
doubts about returning to terror as a method of political control. By the 1970s and 1980s
the Communist Party had developed less fearsome but more subtle and selective methods
of maintaining its self-appointed leading role in society. Post-totalitarian communists were
not reticent about using power to maintain their position. Those caught deviating from the
party line could lose their job, not be able to work at their chosen profession, and forego
any possibility of advancement in their career. Those considered a real threat were forced
to relocate to a part of the country where they could find “suitable work.” They were denied
passports and could not travel. Their families suffered. Spouses could not obtain work, elderly
parents were harassed and (by far the most effective threat), children were not allowed to
receive a good education. For a lengthy treatment of post-totalitarianism, see James F.

Pontuso, Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2004), chap. 3.
2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Sakharov i kritika Pisma vozhdyam,” Kontinent 2
(1975): 352–53, quoted in John Dunlop, “Solzhenitsyn in Exile,” Survey 21 (Summer
1975): 135–36.
3. Marc Fisher, After the Wall: Germany, Germans and the Burdens of History (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 114–16.
4. Lonnie R. Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 258–59.
5. Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 219.
6. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stain to Havel (New
York: Free Press, 1992), 87.
7. Wendy Graham Westphal, “Dis-membering and Re-membering the GDR: Mate-
rial Culture and East Germany’s Self-Reflexive Memory in Good Bye, Lenin!” in Germany
and the Imagined East, ed. Lee M. Roberts (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2005), 8.
8. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings,
1965–1990, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1991), 131–55.
9. Stefan Sperling, “The Politics of Transparency and Surveillance in Post-reunification
Germany,” Surveillance and Society 8, no. 4 (2011): 400n6.
10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1996), 41, 119.
11. Ibid., 119.
12. Ibid.
13. Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 53, 136; Arthur
Mendel, ed., Essential Works of Marxism (New York: Bantam, 1965), 104; Karl Marx, Writings
of the Young Marx on Philosophy and History, ed. and trans. Lloyd Easton and Kurt Guddat
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 19, 149, 409, 458.
14. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal (New York: International, 1933),
14–15; Marx, Writings of the Young Marx, 313–14.
15. See, for example, Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
16. Václav Havel, “Stories of Totalitarianism,” in Open Letters, 336.
17. Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala, trans. Paul
Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1990), 119–20.
18. Václav Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” in Open Letters, 72.
19. Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Man-
chester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 142; Andrew Gaskievicz, “A History of
Film in the GDR: Review of Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood behind the Wall,” Humanities and
Social Sciences, March 2007, http://www.het.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12971 (accessed
January 20, 2014).
20. Quoted in Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life
in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002), 200.
21. Quoted in ibid., 202.

22. Guenther K. Lehmann, “Poesie des Alltäglichen, Bemerkungen zu äesthetischen
Fragen der Arbeit,” Sonntag 50 (1973), quoted in Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary, 202.
23. Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary, 229.
24. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters, 134–35.
25. “The Lives of Others,” interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Movie
Interview, February 6, 2007, http://www.moviefreak.com/artman/publish/interviews_
florianhenckelvondonnersmarck.shtml.
26. Marx, The German Ideology, 14–15; Marx, Writings of the Young Marx, 313–14.
27. Heidegger, Being and Time, 116.
7
On the Impossibility of Withdrawal

Life in the Gray Zone
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
Wretchedness was the lot of those who, under any circumstances, remained
in the middle.
—Ivan Klíma
Among the Polish writer Sławomir Mrożek’s delightful fables there is one
entitled “The Lion.” The scene is a Roman amphitheater where the Roman
citizens as well as the emperor are watching an entertainment. I retell it here
in abbreviated form.
A group of Christians is huddling at the center of the arena. A roaring
group of lions emerges from the tunnel. Gayus, the keeper of the lions, is
checking whether all the beasts have come into the arena when he notices
one lion has stopped at the entrance and is calmly chewing a carrot. Gayus
prods him with his long pole. After all, it is his duty to see that none of the
lions remains idle. Repeated prodding does not help. The lion merely turns
his head and says, “Oh, leave me alone.” Gayus gets worried. If the supervi-
sor catches him neglecting his duties he will soon find himself among the
victims in the arena.
A discussion ensues during which Gayus pleads with the lion to at least
run around in the arena and roar without jumping on any of those wretches
there. “I’m no fool,” the lion says finally. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that one
of these days the Christians might come to power?” Fixing his wise gaze on
the stunned Gayus, he continues: “And then what? Investigations, rehabili-
155
156 Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz
tations, and those up there in the amphitheatre will say, ‘It wasn’t us, it was
the lions.’ And I want to save my skin. There will be witnesses to say that all
I did was eat a carrot. Mind you, it’s filthy stuff, this carrot.”
Gayus hesitantly manages to object: “But all your colleagues in there,
they’re all gobbling up the Christians with gusto.”
“Stupid beasts, shortsighted opportunists,” is the lion’s curt answer.
After some intense thought and a good deal of stutter Gayus finally
manages to ask the lion a key question: “And . . . should they, those Chris-
tians, come to power . . . will you then testify that I didn’t force you to do
anything?”1
The ironic wisdom of this brief fable reaches directly and deeply into the
atmosphere permeating two Central European films that deal with societies
under a totalitarian dictatorship: Czechoslovakia under Nazi occupation and
East Germany under communism. The films are multileveled explorations
of human nature under coercive political circumstances. The Czech film
Musíme si pomáhat, circulating in English under the somewhat confusing
title Divided We Fall, was made in 2000 by the Czech director Jan Hřebejk
(film script by Petr Jarchovský), with the well-known comic actor Boleslav
Polívka in the main role.2 Seven years later, in 2007, the German film Das
Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) was debuted by first-time writer
and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
I will explore how the films portray the lives of people, “normal” citizens
trying to live decent and ordinary lives, who get sucked into a murderous
political system and become its tools, even collaborators. Basic, perennial
human qualities that could be regarded as innocuous in themselves—ambi-
tions, desires, fears, lassitude, or indifference—appear as the main drives
that propel the protagonists into a moral and existential quicksand from
which there is no return, unless it comes from a drastic reversal of the situ-
ation: the downfall of the ruling regime. This is the case in both films as the
filmmakers use the reversal, each in his own unique way, as a harmonizing
coda to the often-discordant symphony of the characters’ lives. Although
ideology as such (National Socialism in the former film, communism in the
latter) is not explicitly mentioned but is recognizable only by its visual iconic
signs—uniforms, helmets, flags, and the use of certain typical phrases—it is
obvious that it exists everywhere. Like Ibsen’s Boyg, it is shown to penetrate
the entire atmosphere and the characters’ very lives.
My main concern is the films’ dealing with the so-called gray zone—a
kind of ethical no-man’s-land—in which the characters find themselves and
On the Impossibility of Withdrawal 157
try to maintain an uneasy balance, consciously or unconsciously. Living

under what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn simply called “the Lie,” the protagonists
of the films tried to create their own secret laws and values in contrast to the
“laws” of the system. When Georg Dreyman in The Lives of Others shrugs
and turns to his piano, when Josef in Divided We Fall constantly speaks of
the system as “they,” each works on the assumption that he feels he does
not belong to the alien realm that “they” own and command. But by with-
drawing into this gray, seemingly nonpolitical area and claiming rejection
of any political stance, they act under an illusion. Both films explore why
this attempt at withdrawal fails, but they also force viewers to face the reality
of the success of totalitarian power. A seemingly simple question has been
asked in many variations since the totalitarian regimes held millions in their
sway: how could people endure these regimes? Manès Sperber—perhaps a
typical “Central European” who was born in Galicia and lived in Vienna and
later taught in Berlin—offers an interesting answer that comes to the fore
in both of these films. Totalitarian power is possible because “it succeeds in
forcing those whom it endangers into a state of alienation from themselves,
and by permitting the powers to enter their own souls, they can, without
realizing it, end up on their side.”3
Balancing Acts
Divided We Fall is set in a small town in Czechoslovakia that in 1939 had
become a German protectorate under Nazi occupation. The film’s first images
show an episode in the year 1937: three friends jump out of a rickety old car
and relieve themselves, with their backs to the camera, against the lovely
vista of the peaceful Czech countryside. Merrily pretending that one of them
is to be left behind, they engage in a boisterous game. We are faced with an
idyllic scene of carefree youth. Within a couple of years the three will have
to face radically different fates: one, David, is a Jew destined with his family
for the concentration camp and likely death; the second, Horst, German by
birth, will benefit from his nationality to become an ally of the occupying
Nazi forces; the third, Josef, is just trying to live a quiet life with his wife, stay
out of trouble, and not rock any boat. Allowing the film’s concrete scenes to
become transparent, we could lightly regard these figures as an archetypal
threesome reflecting basic patterns of human nature: man the thinker, who
becomes a victim; man the player, indulging in any game that is to be played;
and man submerged in the multitude, holding still under the waves of life.
It is this third one who turns out to be the film’s uneasy protagonist.
He is an ordinary guy, basically decent but a little lazy, easily frightened,
perhaps a bit of a yes-man who wants to get by, make the best of things the
way they are, and be left in peace. The Czech filmmaker, true to the ironic
tradition of his nation that cringes at displaying “heroism” of any sort, goes
to some length to stress the nonheroic nature of his “hero.” He reveals him
as a grouchy fellow who is nursing the “disabled” status that was granted to
him after an accident on his job some years ago, seemingly impotent, and
even unable to control his bowels in a dangerous situation. Yet, as if despite
himself, and despite being constantly seen in a comic light, Josef rises to the
occasion, and an extremely dangerous occasion at that. In his cellar and with
his wife’s support he hides their Jewish neighbor David, who has managed
to escape from the concentration camp where his family has perished. It all
happened as if by chance, not by a conscious rebellious decision on Josef ’s
part but rather during a tense yet hilarious rain-soaked scene involving
German officers stuck on a country road. Josef, with David packed into the
trunk of his car, advises them in faulty-accented German—adding to the
mixture of comedy and horror—how to change a switch in their engine. As
the German car takes off, Josef, staring at the empty misty country road,
can’t bear to see David walk off into darkness and most likely death. So he
takes him home, hides him in his cellar for two years, and manages, under
great danger and at times very precariously, to save his life until the end of
the war and the Nazi occupation.
Absurd political systems require varieties of balancing acts on the part
of their citizens. Josef ’s balancing act means coping with the constant fear
of being discovered. And it also means facing difficult ethical choices. By
hiding David, Josef must consider engaging in some distasteful behavior.
The audience is led with Josef into the gray area of moral ambiguity since
Josef has realized that he must collaborate in order to save not only his wife
but also his secret Jew in the cellar. Josef ’s collaboration with the enemy
includes becoming a drinking partner of the town’s Nazi commander and
even acting as confiscator of Jewish property. When the regime changes near
the end of the film, Josef barely escapes being shot by the revengeful militia
that considers him a traitor.
In The Lives of Others Georg Dreyman, a playwright, is also involved in a
balancing act. However, this is only implied and is likely to go unnoticed by
someone not tuned into the atmosphere. The year is 1984. Dreyman, whose
plays run successfully in official theaters, reads in the privacy of his home
Western journals that have been spirited into the country but does not use
in any subversive way the information he gleans from them. We might ask:
has ambition drawn Dreyman into being a quasi-tool of the system? We
know, after all, that he is the winner of something called the Margot Hon-
ecker Award. But then we might argue that his ambition is no more than
the healthy wish of a writer/dramatist to see his plays performed. There is a
clear contrast here with Dreyman’s blacklisted friend, the once-prominent
director Albert Jerska.
Later on we find out that the balancing act of his lover Christa-Maria
Sieland, a well-known actress, has darker colors. Up to now, the film implies,
Dreyman is not even aware of balancing his existence, and there is no inkling
of a price he has to pay for adapting himself to the demands of the system.
In his naïveté, which allows him still to harbor some hope in the system’s
fairness, he approaches the powerful minister of culture with a question
regarding his colleague and friend Jerska (a talented director whose “sub-
versive” political attitude resulted in his being banned from his professional
work in the theater). When Dreyman asks the minister whether there is
hope for his friend to be permitted to work again, the answer is given with a
paternalistic smile close to a smirk: “Hope? Of course! One can always hope,
even after death!” This ironic and obliquely religious reference would have
pleased the shrewd old devil of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters who advises
his nephew to keep the person to be seduced by evil “well fed on hazy ideas.”4
Dreyman’s question has been answered ostensibly positively. The pleader
stands there, seemingly rewarded but strangely shaken. The moment of his
hitherto avoided enlightenment comes soon afterward when he receives the
news of his friend’s suicide. It is only now that he becomes aware of his own
previous balancing act and realizes that up to this moment he had internal-
ized the absurd situation he was part of and accepted it as “normal.” Does
Aldous Huxley provide another, admittedly cryptic, yet implicitly political
view of the situation? “Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man
it happens to . . . but in some indescribable way the event is modified, quali-
tatively modified, so as to suit the character of each person involved in it.”5
The figure who has aroused most interest among critics and commenta-
tors is Gerd Wiesler, the Stasi captain, ice-cold interrogator and stern lecturer
at the Stasi academy who moves from monitoring Dreyman’s bugged apart-
ment in order to find incriminating information to protecting Dreyman from
his superiors. His change from Saul to Paul, if you wish, resulted in Wiesler’s
actually saving the playwright, whose subversive activities undertaken after
the death of Jerska would surely have landed him in prison. The filmmaker
Donnersmarck explained in an interview that the basis of Wiesler’s change
is his lost faith in ideology. But this comment in no way affected the excited
discussions that the film unleashed. Their focal thought could be reduced
to the following question: could a brief perception of the beauty of poetry
(Wiesler reads a Brecht poem in a volume he had lifted from Dreyman’s
apartment) and the mysterious wonder of music (Dreyman’s friend had
composed a piece of music, the “Sonata for a Good Man”—“Die Sonate vom
guten Menschen”) that Wiesler hears (ironically) through his earphones
really result in so drastic a change? Debates ensued among commentators,
scholars, and the media whether it is at all possible for a man hardened by
ideology to undergo a change of this sort. For example, an internation-
ally rather prominent voice, that of Timothy Garton Ash, claimed that “it
would take more than the odd sonata and a Brecht poem to thaw the driven
puritan we are shown at the beginning.”6 Of course there is a point to this,
but the debates seem to have overlooked the subtly indicated previous
cracks in the ideological armor of Wiesler’s mind. When, for instance, he
is shown pleading with the business-minded call girl whom he had booked
(who consults her watch when she has done her job) to “please stay a little
longer”(a request she cheerfully denies because other customers are wait-
ing), he is reduced—the filmmaker makes sure that we realize this—to a
pathetic, aging man, aware of his own loneliness and the paucity of his life.
The film does not imply Wiesler’s realization that this paucity is due to the
system he serves, but his longing touch of the lovers’ bed during one of his
hurried secret visits to their apartment suggests a yearning far beyond the
erotic and the political. Later, when he experiences the beauty of poetry and
the mystery of music—both of which have been denied to him (the party
ideology rejects mystery, goodness is dictated as adherence to this ideology,
and beauty must conform to the ideology’s prescription)—we might be led
to the question: is Captain Wiesler’s “conversion” (underacted admirably by
Ulrich Mühe), culminating in his new refusal to accept an absurd system as
“normal,” really an impossible dream?
Thinking of the duo Dreyman/Wiesler, whose absurd relationship
appears as the main theme of The Lives of Others, one might call to mind
a text that provides a surprising inverted view of their connection. It is by
Wolf Biermann, the German poet and Liedermacher (song maker), as he calls
himself, who wrote the “Stasi Ballad,” which he performed during his 1992
tour of North America. Some verses will give a taste of the provocative text:
In human terms I feel close to

those poor Stasi-dogs
who in snow and thundershowers
tiresomely have to keep up with me
who installed the microphone
songs, jokes, quiet curses,
in the john and in the kitchen,
brothers from security
you know all my misery
You alone can bear witness
how all my human striving
passionately tender and wild
is linked to our great endeavor
Words that else were lost
you capture on spools of tape
and I know! Now and then
in your bed you sing my songs.7
Gerd Wiesler did not sing a Biermann song but he was carried away by the
“Sonata for a Good Man.” Wiesler too is thus lured away from his envelop-
ment of normality and forced to confront questions and longings from which
he had heretofore been shielded. He and Dreyman move along similar arcs.
The focal point, then, of both films is the illusion of “normality” that
emerges as perhaps the most deadly weapon of totalitarian and also post-
totalitarian systems. The dissident writers were acutely aware of this. The
Czech writer Ivan Klíma captures how this illusion of normality comes to
dominate the personalities of citizens of these nations: “Totalitarian power
does not allow differing opinions and therefore does not allow debates or
even meaningful conversation. . . . Every individual, regardless of his inner
make-up has to adapt to the official model; the development of his person-
ality is restrained; the space in which the human mind and spirit moves
becomes continually narrower.”8
Yet another question arises: what enables some individuals to burst
through these confines of the human spirit but not others? Why do some
people seemingly surrender to the Lie and flourish under the system while
others are crushed and tossed aside? Here is another area where the two films
are of use. For in each case there are secondary characters who illuminate
the range of human possibility under these regimes.
In The Lives of Others there is Georg Dreyman’s lover, the beautiful, high-
strung, renowned actress Christa-Maria Sieland, constantly reassured by
her friends as well as by her adoring audience that she is a great actress. She
harbors the ambition to keep her position in the theater and realize herself as
the artist she hopes she might be. In the film this eventually comes at a price:
it means admitting the sexual advances of a very powerful man, Hempf, the
minister of culture in the GDR. Could she therefore be considered selling
herself? A hesitant “yes” seems to be the only answer here. But—to stretch
a point—in the tradition of the noble century prostitutes who appear in lit-
erature from Dostoevsky to Brecht she sells only her body, not her soul. And
yet, we know she sells more than her body. Her anguish when confronted
by Dreyman suggests Christa knows this as well. Eventually, under extreme
pressure and the threat of losing her stage career, she betrays her lover’s by
now illicit activity by revealing the hiding place of Dreyman’s typewriter.
Not realizing that he was saved by another source, she later runs out of the
house and is killed by a truck. Was this an accident or suicide, the ultimate
example of self-censorship? The film does not tell us. Her life, balancing in
the morally gray zone, has collapsed.
Consider then Josef ’s friend Horst in Divided We Fall, who is caught
up in the web of the German/Czech conundrum. Born in Czech lands to a
German-speaking family and saddled with the unfortunate German name
Horst, very difficult for Czechs to stomach (the Nazi Horst Wessel song rings
in their ears), he is married to a German and from all we hear an enthusiastic
adherent of Hitler. Under the German occupation this means that Horst is
in good stead with the authorities and thus finds a way to flourish—mate-
rially, that is—under the Nazi occupation. He brings food and drink to his
friends, but they have to listen to his impassioned lectures about the victori-
ous German army encircling Moscow, which he demonstrates graphically on
the dining-room table with the sausages he brought, while his hosts worry
about their good china.
Now, is Horst merely a cheap opportunist who wants to show off as his
friends’ benevolent helper? He is both more and less than that. The moral
ambiguity of his character comes to the fore in various ways: for example,
he does not let anyone know that Josef and his wife illicitly have a slaugh-
tered pig hanging in the cellar. The fact that Horst benefits from his silence
by way of several excellent pork chop dinners weighs lightly on the moral
scale if compared with his silence when he suspects that there is something
“subversive” going on in the cellar—much more dangerous than the illicit
pig. There are French lessons going on there; indeed, it is David, the hidden
Jew, who teaches French to Josef ’s wife. But Horst’s obvious willingness to
shelter his friend whom he suspects of harboring a secret is almost deleted
in the audience’s mind when he makes rather brutish but unsuccessful erotic
advances on Josef ’s pretty wife. Some years later, in 1945, when the war has
ended and the regime changes, we find him, obviously beaten up, huddled
in a cellar under the guns of the newly formed local Czech militia. Now it
is his turn to be “saved” by Josef, who identifies him (falsely) as a physician.
For all his moral murkiness, viewers are likely to be glad that he is saved
from brutal revenge by the irate Czech militia, not only because throughout
the film they have been amused by his antics but also because he, having
helped at the birth of his own children, could assist at the birth of the half-
Jewish baby of Josef ’s wife. The moral ambiguity of the character rubs off
on the audience which, at this point, is likely to leave ethical considerations
aside and adopt purely utilitarian principles in view of the urgent situation.
Again, the audience imperceptibly is made to emulate the character’s dubi-
ous ethics, although the sustained humor of the action seems to let viewers
morally off the hook—a brilliant touch. One more word about the “half-
Jewish” baby: Josef, frantic because circumstances force him to announce
that his wife is pregnant, urgently pleads with David to “help” him out of
the dilemma, believing this to be the only possible salvation (since Josef
himself is impotent). David does help.
There are other portraits in The Lives of Others that provide us with dif-
ferent views of souls who appear to have surrendered themselves to totali-
tarian power. Colonel Grubitz assigns his inferior Captain Wiesler to the
watchdog job above Dreyman’s apartment. His restless spirit flits through the
action, busy trying to realize his ambition to pull his weight in the system.
He emulates the system itself by his contradictory treatment of a student
whom he overhears telling an antigovernment joke. In quick succession he
frightens and then jovially reassures the student—and with him the audi-
ence. Only in the last minutes of the film do we find out that the reassur-
ance was a sham and the student was expelled and punished. However, as
becomes obvious in brief flashes, Grubitz himself is constantly plagued by
fears. He, too, is caught in the web of power. In the end, after he has made a
threatening but at that point impotent gesture against his inferior Wiesler
because he realizes that he has been outwitted, we lose sight of him. He is
likely, one is made to feel, to continue his rat’s dance under the new system.
An interesting example that provides another significant insight into
the workings of the communist system in The Lives of Others but is hardly
mentioned in critical analyses of the film is the husky, lowly employee of
the Stasi with whom Captain Wiesler, the boss in this situation, shares the
watching shifts, the recording devices and earphones. Cheerfully clueless
about other matters, he just does his job, even enjoys it (particularly when
he becomes witness to the lovers’ most intimate moments), mumbles apolo-
gies when he is criticized for being late, and is pleased when he is praised.
He perceives only one ledge of authority above himself: Wiesler, his boss.
We, the audience, know that Wiesler is caught under the pressure of his own
boss, Colonel Grubitz, who in turn is caught under an even higher power,
the minister of culture. The whole hierarchical pattern of authority and
responsibility, false or corrupt, is revealed in this dark, dirty, unheated attic.
In the Czech film the representatives of Nazi power who appeared,
typical of Hřebejk’s comic genius, in semi-ridiculous moments during the
action, find their end. One German medical officer who had boasted of
having sterilized a thousand of the “Roma trash” has committed suicide.
Again, the ingrained irony of the film leaves us in an opaque moral space:
in case we might feel some sort of regret for the demise of the young man
out of sympathy extended humanely even to an enemy, we are made quickly
to realize the real reason for our possible regret—as the only medical doc-
tor at hand, he was desperately needed for the delivery of Josef ’s baby. The
other representative of Nazi power, an aging officer (who had been drink-
ing merrily with Josef when the latter pretended to collaborate) who lost
his son in the war and whose grandson (a mere child soldier at the end of
the conflict) had just been shot as a deserter is being pushed through the
streets by the Czech militia and now stands helplessly against a wall endur-
ing the slaps of a child in his mother’s arms. Again, this possibly justified
albeit grotesquely funny gesture of revenge is likely to evoke an odd feeling
in the audience because the wrathful mother can be recognized as the wife
of the citizen who, years earlier, upon discovering David, the escaped Jew-
ish neighbor, tried but failed to get the attention of the German police to
arrest him. The grimly ironic implication of this scene becomes clear when
we realize that this neighbor now, when the regime has changed, has rap-
idly morphed into the leader of the local armed militia, and his wife, hav-
ing appeared several times at key moments, peering, greedy for news, from
behind the safety of her curtained window, now stands there as a figure of
revenge, admonishing her children to express her newly found contempt
and anger at the defeated enemy.
The end of the film dissolves all this. Its final sequence shows Josef hap-
pily pushing a pram with his new baby son across the ruins of his town, as
those who perished (the Jewish family and the German boy soldier) appear
to him in the distance like a friendly vision. It is a wondrous final scene—
a healing fairy-tale ending to a story about the horrors and dangers of the
absurd murky reality a small town at the center of Europe experienced dur-
ing the war and enemy occupation.
Self-Censorship and the Perpetuation of Evil

It bears repeating that at the core of both films is the notion that the absurd
senselessness of the system and its ubiquitous lies are internalized by the
population and become habitual and hence “natural.” Self-censorship, the
most noxious of censorships, has become a prevalent human quality. It causes
an individual’s disintegration into several selves that, as it were, keep watch
over each other. The Czech communist regime invented a politically use-
ful euphemism for such a situation. The period after the country was once
again—this time from the other side—occupied by tanks in August 1968
was officially termed “normalization.” In the films the normal or normalized
attitude of the characters is revealed repeatedly as the tense attitude of self-
censorship. When Josef in Divided We Fall gets a lesson from his manipu-
lative friend Horst on how to train himself to achieve a facial expression
that does not betray what he thinks, we witness an amusing but grim les-
son in self-censorship. When Georg Dreyman assures the Stasi officer who
has been in charge of the house search that left his apartment in shambles
that everything is left “in bester Ordnung,” in perfect order, he obviously
practices self-censorship. It remains for us to ponder: how does constant
self-censorship affect persons who practice it? Drawn into the sphere of
the totalitarian system, they “may surrender their human identity in favor
of the identity of the system . . . they may learn to be comfortable with
their involvement, to identify with it as though it were something natural
and inevitable and ultimately . . . come to treat any non-involvement as an
abnormality, as arrogance.”9 Although this would obviously be stretching a
point, it might be of some interest to extend the thought by asking in what
way the self-censorship under a coercive regime differs from the form used
in a democracy today? Could we think here of today’s phenomenon of
“political correctness,” a socially or personally imposed form of language
that specializes in certain avoidances and substitutions? Is it disputable or
at least unfair to suggest an opaque comparison with the language practiced

constantly under totalitarianism that was never named?
The theme of evil is present in the films discussed here but it is less
obvious. In Divided We Fall it temporarily emerges as we see the innocent
victims (the Jewish family going, still hopeful, to their deaths). But what may
concern us more in this context is how the workings of evil are implied in
the constant anxiety and sudden bouts of icy fear and agonized uncertainty
displayed yet concealed by the characters.
Apart from the slimy minister wielding his power from the top of the
communist system’s hierarchy, the obvious representative of evil, the “devil,”
in The Lives of Others initially seems to be Wiesler, the Stasi captain. Here lies
the main dramatic, political, and ethical interest of the film. The same ques-
tion seems to wedge its way into any argument concerning this film, as it also
did in these pages. As we know, Wiesler changes diametrically and indeed
becomes a sort of savior, risking not only his job but also his life. Can Don-
nersmarck’s film be criticized (as it has been) for projecting a black-and-white
message? The Czech film discussed here seems to avoid possible starry-eyed
conclusions, lifting us from the dark background into a fairy-tale dimension
and leaving us there with a shrug and a smile. But it could be argued such a
black-and-white understanding of The Lives of Others oversimplifies matters.
In the last minutes of the film we see Wiesler, a gray and hardly noticeable
figure, pushing a newspaper cart along the street. Dreyman, now knowing
about his act of courage, passes by in a taxi. The audience, probably yearn-
ing for a satisfying resolution in the form of some compensation for the gal-
lant “hero,” has to watch the taxi go by. The resolution, realistically leaving
Wiesler under the new regime in a lowly menial job, allows him to enter, in
his imagination at least, the “lives of the others” when he discovers the book
that recognizes in him “a good human being.” Will Wiesler recognize himself
in its pages? This seems no longer important. The film ends with his clutching
the book and answering (to a salesperson who offers to gift wrap it): “This is
for me.” This irresistible double entendre closes the film.
Approaching the topic from an entirely different point of view, we might
think of Brecht (who plays a significant part in the “conversion” in The Lives
of Others). In his play Life of Galileo the protagonist also strikes a compro-
mise, clearly out of fear, against his own convictions. His fear of torture
leads him to recant his discovery and form a pact with the powers of the
church. Brecht has an idealistic pupil call out: “Unhappy the land that has
no heroes!” Galileo, who has just proved that he is not a hero, answers by
inverting the phrase: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes!” There are no
heroes in the films under discussion. Or does Wiesler come close to being
one? How would Brecht have commented on him or on the author who gave
him life in his film script?
The main figures in each film are faced with having to make certain fate-
ful decisions, while only vaguely or not at all aware of their moral weight. In
neither of the films does the relevant character express his or her decision
(for better or for worse) in words. This shows the refusal of the filmmakers
to dwell on the complexity of the situations with even a shadow of moral-
izing. As a person who lived as “dissident” under a coercive political system
as well as a playwright dealing with such issues on stage, Václav Havel could
be considered as speaking for these filmmakers who show us the workings
of two “absurd” political systems. “The absurd playwright does not have the
key to anything,” writes Havel. “He sees his role in giving form to something
we all suffer from, and in reminding us, in suggestive ways, of the mystery
before which we all stand equally helpless.”10
My discussion of these challenging films leaves another and larger ques-
tion open: what do these films tell us, who live in another time, in another
country, aware of and faced with different problems? The films give us a
message many of us might feel we don’t need any longer because it refers
to the past. But although the allure of totalitarian regimes has faded, ideo-
logical temptations are still very much with us. We ought never to forget
the boundless human capacity for self-deception. The films remind us that
the amazing but also dangerous ability of human beings to “make the best
of things,” usually cited (and often justifiably) as an admirable quality, can
lead us into an illusionary world that mimes success and happiness but
can also spell dependence from which there is no escape, confusion about
who we are, and above all loss of a sense of value. About the possibility to
change our view of the world, the films show us, if we care to notice, that
we can overcome fear (Josef), engrained habits of assumption and thought
(Wiesler), and recognition of our own weakness (Horst and Christa-Maria).
The Czech writer Pavel Kohout brilliantly captures the problem here in a
scrap of a conversation from his rollicking novel I Am Snowing, in which
the characters are swaying between Nazism and communism. The ebullient,
lovable heroine with a checkered past—personally as well as politically—asks
a run-of-the-mill schoolteacher, “Did you teach your children that . . . how
did it go? You can live decently off a lie but only with truth can you have a
decent life? Am I saying it right?”11
Turning with a smile—possibly a wistful one—to Mrożek’s lion, with

whom I opened these remarks, we may find that the lion was well aware of
societies suffering under absurd and brutal regimes. Continuing this thought,
we might think of Gayus, the lion keeper, who could have entered the world
of our films, having learned the ways of behavior—balancing acts—such as
an absurd regime requires. If the films ignite sparks of understanding and
perhaps recognition in the minds of today’s audience, their appeal will be
a lasting one.
Notes
1. Sławomir Mrożek, The Elephant, trans. Konrad Syrop (New York: Grove, 1962),
43–45.
2. “Divided we fall” follows “United we stand” in John Dickinson’s revolutionary “The
Liberty Song.” The literal translation of the Czech title is “We have to help each other.” This
phrase is repeated by different characters multiple times during the film. It is used as a folksy
expression and could be ironic depending on the occasion.
3. Manès Sperber, Sieben Fragen zur Gewalt (Munich: DTV, 1978), 29 (the transla-
tion is my own).
4. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, rev. ed. (New York: Collier Books, 1982), 43.
5. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto and Windus, 1947), 389–90.
6. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” New York Review of Books, May
31, 2007, 6.
7. Wolf Biermann, Ein deutsch-deutscher Liedermacher (A Political Songwriter between
East and West), trans. Leslie A. Wilson, North American tour 1992, Goethe Institut.
8. Ivan Klíma, The Spirit of Prague and Other Essays, trans. Paul Wilson (London:
Granta Books, 1994), 119.
9. Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage Books,
1992), 143.
10. Ibid., 133.
11. Pavel Kohout, I Am Snowing: The Confessions of a Woman of Prague, trans. Neil
Bermel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 233.
Part 4
The Lives of Others and the History
of the GDR
Sebastian Koch (as Georg Dreyman).

8
Fiction or Lived History?

On the Question of the Credibility of The Lives of Others
Manfred Wilke
Translated by Dirk R. Johnson
The attempt to show the mechanisms of communist dictatorship from the

perspective of a Stasi officer went against the standard victim-perpetrator
debates held in Germany after 1990 on the question of membership in the
Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or MfS). East
German society’s self-liberation from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) and its most impor-
tant instrument of repression in the peaceful revolution of 1989 went hand
in hand with moral condemnation of that organization. It became a matter
of justice and of German democracy’s political morality to rehabilitate the
victims of the Stasi regime after German reunification.
It was already provocative as such to turn a captain of state security
into a positive hero. But then this was only amplified by showing Captain
Wiesler’s transformation while he spies on a writer. Wiesler refuses to serve.
The film reminds us that even state security functions only through the
work of individuals, and these individuals can change. The discussions sur-
rounding the film began with its credibility and with the historical burden
of the facts in the script. As the film was shown in theaters, the automatic
response was: was there ever any form of divergent behavior or opposition
within this ministry? Doesn’t the script make use of a fiction that puts the
Stasi and its activities into a better light?
The scriptwriter and director of the film are one and the same. Florian
171
172 Manfred Wilke
Henckel von Donnersmarck knew that he would be criticized. He had already

discussed the first draft of the script with me. One of the questions concerned
state security “evaders.” My response was that there weren’t many of them,
but that there were members of the MfS who opposed the leadership, who
got out of the country, or who spied for the West German secret service.
For example, the first two ministers of state security—Wilhelm Zaisser in
1953 and his successor Ernst Wollweber in 1958, two old communist revo-
lutionaries—dared to oppose the SED general secretary, Walter Ulbricht.
Both lost their positions and Ulbricht installed Erich Mielke as minster of
the MfS; he had served as state secretary since the founding of the ministry
in 1950. Mielke remained in that post until 1989. During his tenure, Major
Gerd Trebeljahr and Captain Werner Teske, two dropouts from the orga-
nization, were condemned and executed in 1979 and in 1981, respectively.
In 1979, Werner Stiller crossed over to West Germany and blew the cover
of a group of MfS spies. He had previously led a network of agents among
scientists in West Germany and had served as a double agent for the West
German secret service.
As the minister of state security, Erich Mielke was merciless toward “trai-
tors”; within the organization, he made that abundantly clear, threatening:
“We are not immune from having a scoundrel among us once in a while.
If I were to know that right now, he would be dead by tomorrow. A quick
verdict! I can have such an outlook since I am a humanist.” He declared this
to his generals in 1981—and he added: “All that nonsense about whether
or not to execute is garbage, Comrades. Execute—even without a verdict
if necessary.”1
No such fate threatens Wiesler at the beginning of the film. He is por-
trayed as a conscientious MfS officer who is asked to clear up a case of
“desertion of the republic” in the Stasi Detention Center in Berlin—Hohen-
schönhausen. A sleep-deprived inmate is being forced to reveal the name of
a man who had helped someone else “desert the republic.” “Illegal border-
crossing” was, according to the criminal code of the GDR (paragraph 213),
a “crime against the state order” and could lead to two years in prison. Just
preparing for and attempting to “flee the republic” were considered crimi-
nal offenses. In his investigation, Wiesler tries to determine if this was a
case of “enticement to desertion of the GDR” or of trafficking in humans
(paragraph 132).2
This paragraph also served to prevent escape from the GDR. After the
internal German border was secured in 1952 and the Berlin Wall was built
Fiction or Lived History? 173
in 1961, there were those in the West willing to help people escape. The
GDR regarded their illegal activities as criminal and they were prosecuted.
Anyone who actively helped a person to get “abroad” could be sentenced
to up to eight years in prison, according to the criminal code of the GDR.
Separation of powers went against the principle of dictatorial power in
the SED. The MfS was not only responsible for spying on its citizens for sub-
versive political behavior but also for investigating political crimes, including
“desertion of the republic.” In his history of the MfS, Karl-Wilhelm Fricke
came to the following verdict about the role of state security in the political
proceedings of the GDR: “In reality, state security from the very beginning
decisively influences the course of investigation and its subsequent proceed-
ings.”3 The MfS also suggested to the prosecution the extent of the penalty.
The director of the film did not want to make a pure Stasi movie but
rather to show the role and significance of the secret police for the SED dic-
tatorship. At the same time he wanted to produce a thriller that would meet
Hollywood expectations. The film makes the problem of the hierarchical
connection between party and secret police a more personal one, and the
character of Hempf (in his role as a member of the SED central committee)
embodies the state party. In the name of the party Hempf orders the Stasi
officer Grubitz to spy on the writer Georg Dreyman. This sets in motion
Operation Dreyman, which then becomes the basis for the film’s narrative.
For the MfS, the term “operative procedure” (operativer Vorgang, or
“OV”) meant the highest level of conspiratorial or concealed surveillance of
suspicious individuals. What the MfS stressed—here in the administrative
jargon of state security in 1976—was the preventive nature of the OV: “The
goal-oriented development of operative procedures is a preventive mea-
sure to stop the effective emergence of hostile-negative energies, to prevent
the introduction of possible damages, dangers, or other possible harmful
consequences of hostile-negative activities and thereby to contribute in
an important way to the continuous execution of the policies of the party
and the state.”4 With this, the ministry officially determined the operative
importance of OVs.
As a scholarly consultant to the film, I was responsible for the historical
accuracy of facts in the script. But if I was the historical expert, Ulrich Mühe
became for the director the specialist regarding the film’s atmosphere. Mühe
deservedly won an Oscar for his precise and emotionally distant portrayal of
Wiesler. At this point I would like to introduce my personal memory of the
actor. By 1989, Mühe was already a highly regarded actor at the Deutsches
174 Manfred Wilke
Theater in East Berlin. By the early 1990s, he had gone through his Stasi
records. According to his own account, he had washed his hands of the
GDR. He acted on stage in Hamburg and Vienna in the 1990s, putting the
state and his oppressive experiences behind him. By the time he assumed
the role of Captain Wiesler, he played it without hatred or anger; he claimed
he only needed to remember.
Donnersmarck chose the character of the MfS captain to project a single
communist’s crisis of faith during the final phase of the GDR. That represents
the underlying theme of The Lives of Others. In the first instance, the film
treats the deeply Christian questions of transformation and redemption as
exemplified in Wiesler’s refusal to serve. Donnersmarck’s original idea for
the film was inspired by a report by the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who
had chronicled Lenin’s admiration for Beethoven’s “Appassionata.” Someone
who experiences true art can no longer serve as a slave to dictatorship. Art is
capable of piercing the armor of ideological worldviews and of reactivating
individual conscience. To illustrate such a conflict of conscience, the director
uses the words of Lenin quoted by Gorky. Lenin explains why he can’t listen
to Beethoven’s music too often, drawing from it the opposite conclusions:
“[This music] attacks the nerves. One is tempted to utter sweet stupidities
and to stroke the heads of people, who live in such a disgusting hell and are
able to produce something so beautiful. But nowadays, one shouldn’t stroke
people’s heads; one’s hand will be bitten off. One must smash in their heads,
smash them in without pity, although we are, according to our own ideals,
against all forms of violence against other human beings. Hm, hm, it is a
devilishly difficult task!”5
At the beginning of the film, Wiesler is a devoted communist and, as
such, a true believer, if we are to assume that communism was a secular
religion. At the same time he is turned off by the cynical careerism of some
comrades, reflected in the film in the person of his supervisor, Grubitz.
When Wiesler, who lives alone, complains to Grubitz about the pressures of
protecting socialism—“Don’t you sometimes wish that communism would
have already arrived?” he asks—Grubitz prescribes the services of an MfS
prostitute as a cure for his depression—hardly true solace for a faithful com-
munist. The noble goal should be to abolish all inequality between people,
to abolish the state, and to bring about earthly paradise through violent
socialist revolution. Wiesler yearns for this form of earthly happiness. It
is an understandable wish, considering the dreary everyday reality of life
in the “real existing” socialism of the GDR, where nothing then seemed to
indicate that happiness was just around the corner, even though the Com-
munist Party had pledged to achieve that goal politically.
Ever since the communist takeover of Russia in 1917, this visionary end
goal of history was imperiled by socialism’s imperialist enemies—at least
according to the self-legitimizing fiction of the dictatorship. Already on
December 20, 1917, Lenin had founded in response the All-Russian Com-
mission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, or Cheka.6 MfS mem-
bers therefore proudly called themselves the Chekists of the GDR. Wiesler
was obliged to make the following pledge: “As member of the Ministry for
State Security, I will fight alongside the protective and security organs of the
Soviet Union and its allied socialist countries against the enemies of social-
ism, even at risk to my life, and will fulfill all my duties to protect the state.”
The Chekists needed the motivating forces of both faith and hatred
to succeed mentally in their struggle against enemies both internal and
external. While Wiesler still held onto the emotional qualities of a commit-
ted communist, the careerists’ faith had turned into cynicism; only hatred
remained. The interrogation scenes at the beginning of the film show the
function of such hatred. It allowed the MfS to deal with suspects it inter-
rogated as individuals only from a criminological point of view. Even if
the person were not yet convicted, an arrest alone proved that he or she
was an enemy or hostile-negative “element.” The political mission of the
MfS was to intervene actively and threateningly into the “lives of others” in
order to change those lives at a fundamental level if they did not conform
to party expectations. The party’s expectations for “its people,” both inside
and outside the party, were laid out in programs, plans, directives, and clear
parameters, such as those in the criminal code. At the root of their actions
stood a dualistic Marxist-Leninist worldview motivated by class struggle
that communists promoted in the GDR and in the world. The world politi-
cal opposition between West and East was secured by the existence of two
separate states in a divided Germany. This dichotomized worldview, struc-
tured conceptually, was binding, and it allowed the SED and its Chekists
to give political categories to human behavior both within and without the
GDR. This reduction of humans to categories affected artists and writers in
particular. Minister of Culture Hempf unabashedly refers to Stalin when he
says that writers are “engineers of the soul” who need to be controlled and
utilized by the state. The conceptual elimination of personal traits permit-
ted the MfS to categorize the “others” they had to spy on and combat, and
it allowed them to convert those “others” into objects of hatred. Combined
176 Manfred Wilke
with the hatred of one’s enemies, which was required by Chekists in their
work, there was a faith in communism and the happiness of future genera-
tions. MfS captain Wiesler lives and works with such self-awareness until
he assumes control of Operation Dreyman.
The MfS considers the writer Dreyman to be loyal to the party. But appar-
ently Culture Minister Hempf, who has risen through the career ranks of the
ministry, mistrusts him and orders an “operative procedure” against him.
Wiesler is called on to organize this surveillance, instructed to hand over all
his findings directly and only to Grubitz. After the suicide of a blacklisted
theater director, Dreyman decides to publish the GDR’s suicide statistics,
confidential since 1977, in the West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
He enters into negotiations with a Spiegel correspondent in his apartment,
thinking that it could not be bugged. The correspondent agrees to publish
the story and assures him anonymity.
At this point the question returns: is this fiction or lived history? To be
able to answer that, I will first need to describe the process a GDR writer had
to go through to be allowed to publish in the West. Such potential publica-
tions had to go through the copyright office, which was controlled by the state.
In the case of an article on suicide, it would have been impossible to get that
permission. Statistics such as these were confidential and to publish them
would have violated a series of paragraphs in the GDR criminal code. The film
hints at such paragraphs without explicitly mentioning them. For example,
Paragraph 97 (Espionage)
If a person collects for a foreign power confidential information
or material detrimental to the interests of the German Democratic
Republic, its institutions or its representatives, or for a secret service
or for foreign organizations and their helpers; if he reveals such
material or such information to them, transfers it over to them or
in any other way makes it accessible to them; he will be convicted
with no less than five years in prison.
Paragraph 99 (Treasonous Transfer of Information)

If a person transfers nonconfidential information detrimental to
the interests of the German Democratic Republic over to places or
individuals mentioned in Paragraph 97; if he collects or makes it
accessible to them; he will be convicted with a prison sentence of
between two and twelve years.
Paragraph 219 (Illegal Contacts)

If a person contacts organizations, institutions, or individuals whose
goal is to pursue activities directed against the state order of the
German Democratic Republic, or makes contact aware of such goals
or activities, he will be convicted for up to five years.
Dissidence, opposition, and resistance within the Soviet Empire were

common topics for the Hamburg newsmagazine Der Spiegel. It published
texts written by Soviet dissidents and Polish and Czech civil rights leaders as
well as literature forbidden in the GDR. Included among the writers forbid-
den in the GDR were Robert Havemann and Jürgen Fuchs, whose “memory
protocols” of the time he spent under investigative arrest in Hohenschön-
hausen appeared in Spiegel in 1976–1977. The director used those protocols
as a source for the interrogation scenes at the beginning of the film.
In January 1978, the newsmagazine published the manifesto of the
Union of Democratic Communists in Germany from within the GDR. The
publisher cited “mid- and high-level SED functionaries,” who had requested
anonymity for obvious reasons, as its sources. After 1989 it was disclosed
that the man primarily responsible for the manifesto was Professor Doctor
Hermann von Berg, a historian at the Humboldt University–Berlin. Dur-
ing the 1960s, Berg had worked for the press office of the GDR Ministers’
Council. He was in charge of West German journalists, and GDR Minister
President Stoph had sent him as a delegate to West Germany to help prepare
the ground for the new policy of Ostpolitik. At the same time he reported as
an informant (inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, or IM) to the main office for recon-
naissance in the MfS. Hubertus Knabe revealed this information when
he published the MfS file. A few years later, the historian was fed up with
conditions in the GDR, and he entrusted his manuscript to East German
Spiegel correspondent Ulrich Schwarz to be published. The so-called Spiegel
Manifesto—which unleashed for a short time a hefty public debate involving
both the Pravda in Moscow and the Neues Deutschland, central party organ
of the SED—begins with a position statement toward the Soviet Union:
“The political bureaucratic orthodoxy in Moscow has, in an objective sense,
become reactionary. . . . It pursues a great-power politics that ignores the
international workers’ movement or its so-called brother nations.” Stalinism
and National Socialism are both conceived as “twins” due to their terrorist
qualities. The manifesto describes conditions in the GDR through statements
couched as suggestive questions. One such question: “Why is the GDR the
178 Manfred Wilke
world leader in divorces, suicides, and alcohol abuse?” The main target was
the “clique at the top,” which “did more damage to the idea of socialism in
Germany and Europe than all so-called enemy propaganda.” The criticism
culminates in this statement: “No ruling class in Germany has sponged off
the people and protected itself against the people as much as the two dozen
families who treat our country like their own private commissary. . . . Take
a close look at them: has any one of these self-appointed leaders come up
with a single idea or written a book or an article? In any area of special-
ization or even in the field of politics? . . . These political bureaucrats are
painfully vain. Just count their official titles: We, Erich & Co., by the Mercy
of Brezhnev, King of Prussia, etc.”7 The “clique at the top” responded to the
manifesto’s publication by closing the Spiegel office in East Berlin. The MfS
arrested Hermann von Berg, stripped him of his professorship, and had him
deported to West Germany.
The Spiegel Manifesto inspired the director in his portrayal of Drey-
man’s actions in the film. The manifesto’s characterization of the top ruling
families in the GDR informs Wiesler’s change of heart. Wiesler soon finds
out that the real reason that the “comrade culture minister” ordered him
to spy on the writer was personally motivated. The love affair between the
actress Christa-Maria Sieland and the writer annoys the minister. Hempf
then uses his position as minister of culture to force an affair with Frau
Sieland—the film presents their affair as “illicit sexual relations with a
subordinate.” In order to get his romantic rival out of the way, Hempf
orders Grubitz to initiate an OV against the writer. The state has become
a self-service shop for personal aggrandizement. The zealous MfS lackey
Grubitz makes it clear to Wiesler that they both “have a lot to gain from
this story . . . or to lose.”
It is the moral corruption of the SED’s “clique at the top,” as criticized
in the Spiegel Manifesto (a clique to which Hempf belongs), that turns
Operation Dreyman into a goad for moral self-examination on the part of
the communist Wiesler. Was it really a struggle against imperialist “diver-
sion,” or was the MfS being misused in order to manipulate a minister’s
love affair to his advantage? Hatred of the enemies of socialism is of little
service to one confronted by such moral quandaries. Who is the enemy
of socialism in this situation? The harassed actress; the writer, who until
then had refused to take a stand in the internal debates in the GDR; or the
minister, the party representative who had ordered him to find incriminat-
ing evidence against the writer so as to pressure the actress to break off her
relationship? Wiesler begins to encounter personal doubts in a situation

where the friend-enemy schema no longer applies. It is at this point that
the director introduces music as the catalyst in Wiesler’s decision making.
The “Sonata for a Good Man” frees him from his Chekist esprit de corps
and initiates his transformation.
For the first time he questions his obligation to serve. A boy, shown
playing, asks him if it is true that he works for the Stasi. Wiesler responds
with his own question, asking the boy if he even knew “what that meant, the
Stasi?” The boy responds: “They are bad men, who lock other people up . . .
so my father says.” Instinctively Wiesler wants to know the name of the boy’s
father but stops himself in midsentence. Members of the MfS were there to
ensure “socialist legality” and his duty would have required him to uncover
the father’s name. To make such a statement was considered a crime, and a
paragraph in the criminal code of the GDR dealt with it:
Paragraph 220 (Public Disparagement)

A person who disparages the state order or the organizations of the
state, its institutions or its social organizations or its activities or
measures in public will be convicted with up to three years in prison.
The boy absolves him of his actions: “But you are not an evil man.”8
Wiesler is still completely loyal when Hempf initially hopes the Stasi
will find something incriminating in Dreyman’s apartment, but things
become more serious after Wiesler’s inner break: Dreyman decides to take
a stand, agitating against conditions in the GDR with his Spiegel article on
GDR suicide rates. Now Captain Wiesler cements the break. He keeps his
supervisor in the dark about this criminal offense and falsifies information
in the investigative protocols. Further, he tries to protect the actress from
the minister’s encroachments and tries to prevent Hempf from banning her
from public performance. He uses his position as an MfS officer to protect
her from persecution. He is forced to interrogate the newly arrested Christa-
Maria Sieland in Hohenschönhausen to uncover the hiding place in Drey-
man’s apartment where the “evidence,” the typewriter Dreyman used to type
his Spiegel article, is concealed. Wiesler already knows the location through
his surveillance. He now sees his chance. He commits the actress to work as
an MfS informant (IM) so that he can release her after her confession. But
his attempt at rescue ends in tragedy.
Before his supervisor Grubitz can get his commandos to search Drey-
180 Manfred Wilke
man’s apartment, Wiesler has already removed the typewriter. The end of
Operation Dreyman also ends Wiesler’s career in the MfS.
By this time Mikhail S. Gorbachev had become the general secretary
of the Soviet Communist Party. The Neues Deutschland, which heralds this
news, lies on the passenger seat next to Grubitz as he puts an end to Wiesler’s
career. Here the film makes a symbolic reference to the beginning of the
SED dictatorship’s demise.
The writer discovers for the first time the identity of his “guardian angel”
after he opens the MfS file on his case; this file contains Wiesler’s falsified
reports. With this, the film makes a subtle case that victims of repression and
historians should have access to MfS files after the reunification of Germany
in 1991. It was a form of belated self-liberation when victims could find
out the identity of those who had served in the GDR security state, where
by 1989 approximately 13,000 of the 91,000 employees were directing an
army of 170,000 unofficial informants to realize the SED’s fantasy of total
surveillance of the country.
The film takes place during the GDR’s final days. Again the question
returns: is it fiction or is it lived history? Did Wiesler’s change of heart and
his resistance have any significance for the fate of the GDR? Officers in the
MfS were members of the SED. As “guardians of socialism,” they possessed
a singular esprit de corps; they considered themselves elite. But even within
their ranks there were growing doubts about conditions in the GDR after
Gorbachev acceded to power in 1985. They experienced this in their work,
but above all in the paralysis of the SED leadership, which had seemed to
close its eyes to reality. Wiesler changes when he understands that the SED
functionaries no longer believe in communism either. They are concerned
with their privileges, their sybaritic lifestyle, and their personal power. He
does not have energy to resist; he can only refuse to serve.
This internal renunciation was quite prevalent within the SED by
1989. In the course of the peaceful revolution there was a series of resis-
tant actions taken by SED functionaries to thwart party dictates that ended
up promoting peaceful revolution. On October 9, 1989, when the SED
leadership in Leipzig tried to put a violent end to the Monday demonstra-
tions through the use of increased police force, three regional secretaries
of the SED, together with the director Kurt Masur, resisted the measure
and signed an appeal against the use of violence. One day earlier the lord
mayor of Dresden, Wolfgang Berghofer, received a group of demonstra-
tors to discuss the situation in the city. His colleague in East Berlin acted
in similar fashion; he involved the opposition in the city’s investigations

into police actions against demonstrators on October 7–8, 1989. Thanks to
such measures, the SED power monopoly began to crumble on the spot in
cities and communities throughout the GDR. Finally, one should mention
the opening of borders in Berlin on the night of November 9–10, 1989. The
borders were secured by an officer of the border police, who was respon-
sible for their military protection, and by the passport control unit of the
MfS, which supervised the flow of traffic. On that night, Major Manfred
Sens of the border police and Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger of the MfS
shared command over the border crossing on Bornholm Street. At 23:30,
both men decided to stop their controls, allowing people free access from
East to West. The Wall was open.
With the character of Wiesler, the film focuses on one man’s broken biog-
raphy from the days of the GDR, and it convincingly shows the mechanisms
of repression in the SED-controlled state. The Lives of Others reveals how a
single communist during the final days starts to understand that he is not
chasing after enemies to realize a dream of humanity but is instead spying
on people who wish only to fashion their own lives. He has been manipu-
lated to act in the interest of a cynical clique at the top of party and state.
Donnersmarck frequently sought out advice in making this film. He
accepted that advice, but the script is his own labor. His questions served
the purpose of self-enlightenment; they were not meant to confirm a prede-
termined verdict. His goal was to produce a film that would have a fictitious
story but would incorporate accurate historical details. The material for his
narrative was based on the final phase of the second German dictatorship
in the last century. Through his efforts, he was able to create an authentic
film that leaves an indelible impression.
Notes
This essay was published in German as “Fiktion oder erlebt Geschichte? Zur Frage der
Glaubwürdigkeit des Films Das Leben der Anderen,” in German Studies Review 2008, Vol.
31, No. 3. Reprinted by permission.
1. This infamous quotation from Mielke can be found in Jens Gieseke, Die hauptamt-
lichen Mitarbeiter der Staatssicherheit (Berlin: Links, 2000), 385. Mike Dennis renders it
slightly differently in The Stasi: Myth and Reality (Harlow: Longman, 2003), 39.
2. This reference and those that follow to the criminal code of the GDR can be found,
in English, in Penal Code of the GDR of January 12, 1968, vol. 2 of Law and Legislation in the
German Democratic Republic (Berlin: Association of German Democratic Lawyers, 1968).
182 Manfred Wilke
3. See Karl Wilhelm Fricke, Die DDR-Staatssicherheit: Entwicklung, Strukturen, Aktions-

felder (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1982).
4. See Dennis, The Stasi, 114.
5. See Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971), 94.
6. Translator’s note: This was the initial name for the Soviet state security organization
that later took on various other names: GPU, OGPU, and KGB.
7. “Das Manifest des Bundes Demokratischer Kommunisten Deutschlands,” in Domi-
nik Geppert, Störmanöver: Das “Manifest der Opposition” und die Schlieβung des Ost-Berliner
“Spiegel”-Büros im Januar 1978 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1996), 164, 172, 177, 174–75.
8. Though appearing in the published screenplay, this line is not spoken in the actual
film.
9
The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows

Wolf Biermann
Translated by Lucy Powell
There are increasing numbers of West people in Germany who dilettant-

ishly play the role of the noble procrastinator. In an argument about the
involvement of East people in the crimes of the GDR regime, they prefer
to opt out for the worldly-wise option of holding their tongues. This sort of
eloquent silence always sets a twisted Hamlet soliloquy ringing in my ears:
To be or not to be . . . No . . . to get involved or better not . . . that is

the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to keep stubbornly
quiet about the Stasi troubles of the Ossis, or to dive headlong into
a sea of slanging matches . . . No! I’m a Wessi, who has never had
to suffer that sort of repression and who has never lived under the
weight of a dictatorship. So I won’t take an inflated moral stand; I
prefer to confess modestly to being one of the little people, with
fears and weaknesses. Whether I would have been courageous in the
GDR or cowardly, whether I would have gone along with everything
or at least cautiously refused, or whether I might even have dared
oppose the regime—I cannot say. And this is why I’d rather not
judge these things, not to mention judging the people who—who
knows—only swam with the tide or, in good faith that they were
doing the right thing, collaborated with the secret police or, simply
in ignorance or fear, and with great sadness in their hearts, inflicted
misery on others. I’ll keep out of all this. I thank providence that I
183
184 Wolf Biermann
was never forced to denounce, inform on, or torture anybody, and

I’m very thankful that I never had to find out. Luckily it’s all over,
it’s all in the past.
You come across this bogus declaration of bankruptcy more and more.
But this sort of shabby modesty is nothing but a cowardly flight to what
Immanuel Kant called “self-imposed immaturity.” Anyone who says, “Who
knows if I would have become a pig?” is only issuing themselves a precau-
tionary whitewashing coupon for swinishness. No matter how you might
have behaved back in the days of fear and danger, all that matters in the here
and now is that you don’t deny or downplay the wretchedness of others.
Two months ago, I was sitting in the formerly East German Kollwitz Platz
in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district with five friends. Marianne Birthler gave
us a sneak DVD preview of a film from a young unknown director about
the GDR: The Lives of Others. All of us watching the film had opposed the
regime; some of us were even its scarred jailbirds. When I read the name
of the director, it occurred to me that this Florian Henckel von Donners-
marck had sent me the draft script for his film about the GDR secret police
(the Stasi) two years or so ago. At the time I had flicked through it irritably.
I wanted nothing to do with a project like this. I was convinced that this
novice, this naïve upper-class kid who had been graced with being born so
late in the West would never ever be capable of tackling this sort of GDR
material, either politically or artistically.
When we’d finished watching the film, I was astounded, confused, pleas-
antly disappointed, and cautiously enthusiastic. A heated argument ensued.
Two of my friends thought the film was full of inaccurate details. A minister
of culture could never have had so much influence on the Stasi apparat as the
film showed. After all, the MfS, or Ministry for State Security, was strictly and
staunchly what it was set up to be and what it wanted to be: “the shield and
sword of the party”—no more, no less. A lieutenant colonel in Erich Mielke’s
company would never ever have taken marching orders from some comrade
minister! The decisions were always made by the party leadership; the state was
only the executive organ. And there was absolutely no way that the Stasi would
have been drawn into exercising its powers at the behest of a cultural func-
tionary just because this flaccid individual had got the elderly hots for some
GDR starlet who lived with her ambitious and successful GDR playwright.
And another inaccuracy: the film portrayed the young writer as some-
one who conformed to the system. But only truly oppositional writers were
The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows 185
“operatively handled,” informed on, tapped, and followed to that extent.

And and and! And young officers of the MfS would never ever have goofed
about in plain clothes in their academy lecture hall! These and other details
are just plain wrong. And! And! And anyway the film put a soft pedal on
the totalitarian reality.
I was among those in our friendly circle of experts who considered
these fuzzinesses beside the point. The basic story in The Lives of Others is
insane and true and beautiful—by which I mean really very sad. The politi-
cal tone is authentic; I was moved by the plot. But why? Perhaps I was just
won over sentimentally because of the seductive mass of details, which look
like they were lifted from my own past between the total ban on my work in
1965 and denaturalization in 1976. So uncertainty and suspicion linger on:
if such Saul-Paul conversions of Stasi officers really did take place, where
were similar shining examples after the fall of the Wall? No one explained
themselves publicly or privately to me or my “degenerate” friends, still less
apologized for a crime, which only onlookers in the East and West ring seats
of the historical boxing ring could waive off blithely . . .
When I watch this film through the eyes of my dead friend the writer
Jürgen Fuchs, of course it rings home that in the Hohenschönhausen remand
prison things were a lot more brutal than they are in this film. The mild-
tempered Jürgen Fuchs would have had a fit had he been sitting there with
us. He would presumably have said: “Now the myrmidons of the dictator-
ship are being humanized! GDR life grew more brutal, more gray, and more
terrible by the day. Are Stasi criminals like Mielke and Markus Wolf being
softened in the wash like poor old Adolf in the last days in the Führerbunker
under the Reich’s chancellery?”
I cannot know whether the wonderful conversion of the Stasi chief is a
historical lie or an artistic understatement. We are all addicted to evidence
of people’s ability to change for the good.
I know that decades ago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was out to achieve the
greatest effect, but it was not in one of his thick books where all the horrify-
ing mass murders and systematic horrors in The Gulag Archipelago are truth-
fully described and listed with encyclopedic meticulousness. No, it was in his
very first novella, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, that he tried to achieve
the strongest effect in the world. Here Solzhenitsyn does nothing more than
describe one of the more pleasant days of an ordinary prisoner in an ordinary
labor camp in the Stalin era, with no attractive torturing: a refined piece of
underexaggeration. And it was precisely this age-old device that succeeded in
186 Wolf Biermann
breaking down people’s inhibitions in East and West about facing unbearable
truths. And Solzhenitsyn even managed to reach people in the USSR who
knew the blow-by-blow details firsthand because there too, after the Twenti-
eth Party Congress following Khrushchev’s secret speech about the crimes of
the Stalin era, this little book went into print—sadly, only for a brief period.
However, the effect was long lasting and in a back-to-front way it took effect
in the GDR, back to front because it was printed only in West Germany.
Back to our film, The Lives of Others. This is the story: a professional
people “corroder,” a bull-headed “fighter on the invisible front,” gets corroded
himself. The MfS captain Gerd Wiesler is a tough cookie but he softens up.
He eavesdrops via phone bugs on lovers and then after hours he sneaks back
to the “actually existing socialist”–tiled coffin of his modern flat and creeps
into his empty bed. Another time in his sterile room, he answers the call of
nature with a fifteen-minute rent girl from the MfS sex service. This man is
at least as lonely as his victims in solitary confinement and incomparably
worse off than the actress and her writer, whom he and his subordinates
have to listen in on and shadow round the clock.
In the attic above the bugged flat he transcribes word for word the dis-
cussions and the silences of the intellectuals he is “operatively handling.”
And he is increasingly seduced by their liveliness. By the end of the story
he is ruined for this wretched job as a “people corroder.” With a beautiful
twist he goes kaput while professionally making others kaput, and this is
the fairy-tale variation of the “deformation professionelle.”
I have similar stories to tell involving two women when I lived at
Chauseestraβe 131. I lay in the clutches of two brave fighting ladies who
were working in Mielke’s service and who had the special mission of defeat-
ing the “songwriter” and people’s enemy with erotic weapons, and who then
de-conspired and deserted Mielke’s erotic brigade.
This film was able to convey things to me that I could never have imag-
ined “being real.”
In the ten thousand pages of my Stasi files, I found around 215 aliases
of a number of unofficial employees, vulgo: Spitzel, or informers. Of course
I know many of their faces. The documents are also strewn with the real
family names of umpteen official employees, all officers: in other words,
higher-ranking pen pushers, like comrades Reuter and Lohr, in other words,
characters like those in the film. The artwork lends these faceless scoundrels
the facial expressions of the actors, which I can now read. Lohr and Reuter
worked for many years as part of the Central Operative Operation “Poets”
The Ghosts Are Leaving the Shadows 187
on systematically “corroding” me—as the chemical terminus technicus of

Stasi jargon phrases it. Two of the twenty or so measures against dissidents
stand there, typed in a long list by two Stasi index fingers on the office
typewriter: “Destruction of all love relationships and friendships.” Another:
“Faulty medical treatment.”
I have never attempted to get personally acquainted with any of these
high-ranking criminals since the collapse of the GDR. These ominous appari-
tions are almost all still alive and they are drawing pensions as civil servants
of the reunified Bundesrepublik Deutschland. And it’s clear that hardly any
of these perpetrators have ever forgiven their victims. And what’s more,
these senior lackeys of the GDR who got off the hook so comfortably have
certainly never sought out a discussion with the people they systematically
pursued for decades on end.
Certainly, they were somewhat altered as film characters, but for the
first time I saw these phantoms as human beings, right down to their inner
contradictions. The ghosts are stepping out of the shadows. Sometimes a
work of art can have more documentary clout than actual documents, whose
truth is doubted both by the perpetrators—of course—and, more painfully,
by readers of the documents who bore easily.
Captain Wiesler’s superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz, is played
by the actor Ulrich Tukur. This strong character actor lends the ideologically
encrusted silhouettes in the cave of my mind human features at last, behind
which the remains of a face even emerge. And so the cardboard cutout vil-
lains in my life are finally given the experience of real flesh and blood, and
I can even make out in each ravaged human countenance the flashing of all
the colors in the black-and-white rainbow.
Ulrich Tukur rose to fame when twenty or so years back in Peter Zadek’s
production of Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus, he
gave a brilliantly brutal performance as a young SS man—in other words, the
more interesting villain. I saw the controversial play back then—all skepti-
cal, eyes squinted together. In a television feature, Tukur mentioned that he
perhaps enjoyed playing difficult, cynical, and cruel characters because in his
own life he’d never had anything to do with that sort of suffering, conflict,
or adversity. His private life had so far been without any real catastrophe or
profound desperation or disappointments.
Yeah, right! I thought, Tukur, you philosophical clown, you don’t need
the experience of being imprisoned in a ghetto. A brilliant actor like you
doesn’t need an SS father and doesn’t need to have been a real Stasi man.
188 Wolf Biermann
An artist so loved by the muse doesn’t first have to wade through vile neth-
erworlds and bloodbaths.
I can’t get over it that such a West-born directing greenhorn like Don-
nersmarck and a handful of established actors are able to deliver such an
unbelievably realistic genre study of the GDR with what is probably a purely
invented story. He didn’t go through any of it! And yet a young man like this
can have his say! This West boy is obviously quite adequately equipped to
judge and even condemn. Not only can he have his say, he has something
to say. And he doesn’t need any whitewashing coupons.
Every life, even the so-called easy, well-protected ones, sharpen the way
you look at things. Even a conflict-lite CV provides the most protected child
from a good home with the capacity to know misery and what is crooked
and what is straight. In the darkest reaches of our hearts, we all know what
heartache and bliss mean, treachery and cowardice, uprightness and bravery.
Which is why this director succeeded, without the painful lessons of a
GDR socialization, in conveying what it felt like to be subjected to a Kaf-
kaesque dictatorship. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck shows us what a
crazy and complicated mix of good and evil is contained within the human
breast, and in what dreadful disarray. The most disconcerting things about
pigs are their human traits. But despite all the complicated complications in
human affairs, what Father God said in the Bible to all his earthly children
still holds: “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.”
In the past, my ass! We obviously carry this deep in our soul-genes:
nothing is really completely over. And nothing is all in the past.
A lot of people in both the East and West are sick to the teeth of the
discussions about the Stasi and the GDR dictatorship, and between you and
me: I’m just the same. After my Stasi ballads from 1966, my lampoons of the
corrupt old men in the Politburo, and my polemical essays after the fall of
the GDR, I don’t need any more. But I don’t trust myself on this issue. This
debut film makes me suspect that the truly deep-reaching confrontation
with Germany’s second dictatorship is only just beginning.
And perhaps those who never experienced all the misery should take
over now.
Note
The English translation of this essay originally appeared at signandsight.com, March 29,
2006, and is reprinted with permission.
10
Against Forgetting
A Conversation with Joachim Gauck
Paul Hockenos
Joachim Gauck, born in 1940 in the Baltic Sea port city of Rostock, was a
Protestant pastor in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He was a
staunch proponent of democracy and human rights, though not a member of
an oppositional group. When the Berlin Wall fell, he was one of the cofounders
of the New Forum alliance and was elected on its ticket in January 1990 to
the first (and last) democratic parliament in East Germany. Mr. Gauck was
also chairman of Gegen Vergessen—Für Demokratie (Against Forgetting—
For Democracy), an NGO that fights left- and right-wing extremism and
promotes coming to terms with the legacy of the two totalitarian regimes in
German history. He remains a prominent voice in Germany on these issues,
appearing regularly in the media and in public.
This interview (conducted for this volume) took place on September 29,
2011, in Mr. Gauck’s offices in downtown Berlin. Paul Hockenos conducted
the interview and subsequently translated it into English.
Paul Hockenos: When did you first see The Lives of Others and what
was your initial reaction?
Joachim Gauck: I saw the film before it opened to the public since I
was asked to write a review for the German magazine Stern. I was greatly
impressed from the get-go, not least because the film had an incredible cast,
from the lead roles all the way to the smaller supporting roles. Donners-
marck succeeded brilliantly in inspiring this cast, which included some of
189
190 Paul Hockenos
Germany’s most famous actors and actresses. But above all I was moved
by the atmosphere of fear that it conveyed. The film was a haunting expedi-
tion into a bygone world. I titled the review “Ja, so war es!” (Yes, It Was This
Way!).1 The film revisits a time when people’s everyday lives were blighted
by fear and conformity. I call this the “fear-conformity syndrome.” The film
portrays the audacious, arrogant attacks of the state against “the others,” in
this case artists. Everyone who sees the film understands why the past for
so many isn’t really past. The injuries or even just the impressions that we
carry around are evident even today, long after the demise of the dictator-
ship. So intensive was the pressure to conform, so omnipresent was the fear.
PH: But not everybody was as impressed as you were, particularly many
of those who had lived in the East. In fact, the film provoked a good deal
of fierce criticism.
JG: I knew from the beginning that there’d be resistance and from three
very different corners: from the former dissidents, from part of the old estab-
lishment, and from the broad ranks of the conformists (die Angepassten).
The former anticommunist dissidents inevitably retorted, “Here comes a
Wessi trying to tell us an East story.” They pointed out that there’s a lot that’s
not strictly factual, as if the film were a documentary. So they latched onto
inaccuracies in certain scenes, like the construction of the surveillance sys-
tem in the attic of an apartment building. This was indeed a bit bizarre. It
never happened that way. But the scene provided a great, evocative image,
and after all it’s a feature film. Yet many took scenes like that one as proof
somehow that the director and the scriptwriter hadn’t engaged adequately
with the material, which simply wasn’t the case. They had prepared very
thoroughly, in fact for several years.
This reaction from the ex-dissident circle is a protest against what they
understand as an expropriation of their experiences. They were victims and
now they’re concerned they’re no longer in possession of their own narrative.
They feel like they’re just ingredients in a larger-than-life story that others
are telling regardless of the facts.
Because a feature film is not a historical documentary, it can be freer
with the historical facts. It can portray the Stasi protagonist as better than
this type really was, as long as it doesn’t sugarcoat the whole story and end
up an outright falsification. But the opposite is the case with this film: it
unmasks; it doesn’t sweeten. Take the figure of the culture minister who
Against Forgetting 191
must have the beautiful actress. He gets her. Where allegiance comes up
short, fear and the prospect of losing her career make her act.
Then there’s the former establishment. They don’t like any kind of docu-
mentation, any retelling, or any scholarly research into the brute facts of the
dictatorship. They’re not even sure that it was a dictatorship.
The final group, always the largest in any dictatorship, is those who
lived quite well by conforming. This included the cultural elite. They say,
“Oh, it wasn’t like that at all. If it had been, then we would have noticed it
and we’d have resisted it in a very different way.” A well-known Berlin actor
said, “How should I explain this to my children? It simply wasn’t this way!”
In terms of remembering dictatorships, it is incredibly important to
recognize the milieu from which certain memories emerge. Almost always
in the immediate aftermath of dictatorships there is a nostalgic wistfulness
about the days of the dictatorship. This happened right after World War II:
there was a classic expression then in Germany, “Not everything was bad
under the Führer.” Hitler divided human beings into those whose lives were
worthy and those whose were not and brought so much destruction and so
much suffering and terror, yet still people didn’t think about these brutal facts
but rather said, “Well, we didn’t notice anything and everybody had work.
There was the war and this with the Jews, but not everything was bad.” This
“not everything was bad” motif obstructs an inner reckoning—it prevents
shame, guilt, mourning, all of these things.
In West Germany there was a vigorous debate and discussion about
memory and the Nazi years. The “guilt question” was integral to the 1960s
student movement in the Federal Republic. Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich’s 1967 book, Die Unfähigkeitzutrauern (The Inability to Mourn)
had a huge impact, even though I think this book should have been read a
bit more carefully.2 Some of its theses are certainly open to critique, but it
prompted many Germans to think more deeply about the end of the dictator-
ship. The mass movements and an array of publications like the Mitscherlich
book enabled West Germany, as civil society grew stronger, to bring elements
of guilt, recognition of guilt, the ability to mourn and express shame, into
the public consciousness.
And this was so strong that by the 1970s it was no longer a healthy self-
consciousness. The West Germans became too self-conscious. In the 1950s
they repressed it, proud of their economic miracle, then came the student
movement and a new narrative began about the German who could never
be trusted. Many Germans didn’t even want to be “Germans” at all but
192 Paul Hockenos
rather saw themselves as “Hamburger” and “European” or “Bavarian” and

“European.” That’s what you heard then. But this has changed somewhat
since reunification and we’re on the road to a healthy normalization. That’s
very welcome.
PH: Does the film accurately portray everyday life in the GDR?
JG: Yes, generally, although again there are some who think otherwise.
Take those people who weren’t part of the communist leadership but were
functionaries of one kind or another, who may never have had any contact
with the Stasi. They think this portrayal of everyday life in the film is exag-
gerated. In fact, they simply didn’t notice it. Such a stratum is not uncom-
mon in tyrannical regimes. In despotic Arab regimes, in China, in the Nazi
era, there are people who had relatively apolitical jobs and managed to live
their lives and get by without problems.
This film is so remarkable because it takes the perspective of the
oppressed to explain this period in history. As a pastor, I come from circles
in which the relationship to the regime ranged from standoffish to outright
oppositional. In these circles the presence of the state security was palpable
at all times. I experienced how in our youth groups sixteen- and seventeen-
year-olds were recruited to act as informants. They came right to me and
told me about it. I was so furious that even minors were being recruited that
I marched into the city hall and asked the person responsible for church
issues whether this was in the spirit of their party, to recruit teenagers as
informants? Anyone who belonged to these kinds of religious circles or even
anyone who had an opinion of their own knew very well how intensively
the Stasi worked.
Of course, there were those who didn’t know exactly, those who had
made their peace with the regime and had internalized it so thoroughly
that their conformity was simply a given aspect of the way things were. This
existence isn’t akin to the life of a citizen but rather to the life of an obedient
subject. In premodern societies it was quite normal to be a subject. Likewise,
many people in the GDR didn’t even recognize their own powerlessness.
Under kings and queens, if you’re upstanding and loyal, then nothing can
happen to you.
But there is one scene that illustrates perfectly how fear can be used as
an instrument of power even among this category of people. It is the scene
in which the neighbor of the playwright Georg Dreyman, an older woman,
happens to witness the Stasi searching Dreyman’s apartment. She’s told by

the Stasi officer that she “hasn’t seen anything” and that the state security
knows very well that her daughter studies medicine. The woman then knows
exactly what is at stake. She won’t say anything to anybody about it. This latter
period of the GDR dictatorship was different than the Stalinist period, when
dissenters were abducted, tortured, and murdered. In this later period the
regime had on kid gloves. Its instruments were softer and clearly on display:
we can lift you up; we can bring you down. The old woman reacts at once
because she knows this without thinking. This scene is priceless because it
stands for a vast array of intimidations and similar measures relied upon
by the regime.
Those people who claim that they were never intimidated by these
kinds of measures—well, it’s only because they’ve forgotten. For example,
even putting the Stasi aside for a minute, there was a phenomenon called
Kadergespräche, or “cadre talks.” Say you’re a teacher at a school and you’re
supposed to be promoted, or a professor who wants to become head of
the department. Inevitably comes the question: “Are you a member of our
party?” And at that moment one feels enormous pressure to conform. Some
intellectuals are so flexible that they act as if they are genuinely convinced
socialists when in fact they’re just bending to the pressure. It is a humili-
ating experience and people don’t want to remember humiliating experi-
ences—neither the perpetrators nor the victims. That’s why they often black
out their own powerlessness as they experienced it. They remember it as if
they were normal professionals in their fields like, say, professors anywhere
else, and then maybe add as an afterthought, “Oh, well, yes, one had to be a
member of the party.” But this person doesn’t talk about the moment when
he had to join the party.
I have a brother who is a sailor, a ship’s engineer. He eventually gained the
qualification required to be a ship’s chief engineer. His superior congratulated
him and asked, “So are you already in the party?” Those who didn’t want to
join would often say, “Oh, I’m really not mature enough yet for these kinds
of important issues.” This response gave the impression that there could be
hope he’d join at some point in the future, just not at the moment. It might
work. Or the response might be, “Yes, well, if you’re not mature enough for
the party then you’re not mature enough to be in charge on a ship.” So you
remain as second or third in command. My brother didn’t join the party and
then a couple of years later they wouldn’t even let him on board a ship at all.
This happened a million times over, and whoever says he doesn’t know it is
194 Paul Hockenos
either lying or repressing it. For example, every single school had a principal
who was in the SED [Socialist Unity Party, the communist party], every one,
even in such a little country like ours.
PH: And is the work of the Stasi portrayed accurately in the film?
JG: Yes, very much so. The film starts with a very interesting scene: a
taped interrogation is played in front of a class of cadets at the Stasi’s officer-
training facilities, where they’re taught the techniques of the state security.
This includes perfidious and scurrilous methods that violate people’s most
intimate space, in this case the capturing and preserving of their per-
sonal body odor. This scene is in the film because Donnersmarck saw how
astounded visitors to the archives were when they saw these little yellow
strips of cloth bottled up in sealed jars and stored away there. It is a small
example of how arrogant a regime can be in a dictatorship: people’s most
intimate spaces aren’t off limits; civil liberties count for nothing.
The communist model could be established only with the help of a strong
repressive apparatus, including a strong secret police. Contrary to democra-
cies, in communist states the intelligence service and the secret police are
one, like the Gestapo was in the Third Reich. In the Federal Republic, an
example of a Rechtstaat [a state based on the rule of law], the Federal Office
to Protect the Constitution does not have policing responsibilities. When
the basic liberties of the individual are not protected, when there are nei-
ther administrative courts (Verwaltungsgerichte) nor constitutional courts,
and where power is absolute, then there is nothing to stop the state from
breaching the private sphere.
The film shows this at a number of levels: the covert searching of apart-
ments, the coercion of informants, the bugging of the bedroom, the black-
mailing of people in difficult situations. Take the case of the leading lady,
who has a drug addiction. The Stasi knows this and uses it: “We can take
care of this for you. Yes, it’s criminal but if you’re with us we’ll help you out.”
It is extremely realistic. This happened all the time. This means of recruit-
ing IMs [inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, nonstaff informants] wasn’t the rule, but
neither was it uncommon. It wasn’t the rule because it could also trigger a
defensive reaction. The rule was to talk and talk and talk until eventually
the person in question caved in.
The German writer and playwright Carl Zuckmayer wrote a play called
The Devil’s General in 1946,3 which became a popular film in the 1950s. It’s
not a historical work, but Zuckmayer reaches out to begin a discourse about
Nazism with Germans after the war. The Lives of Others does this in much
the same way, but with communism. Of course, many of our former human
rights activists complained that it was a fairy-tale Saul and Paul story, the
transformation of a perpetrator to a helper. They rightly point out that this
type doesn’t appear anywhere in the archive’s files. But the story is fiction
and the author poses the question to those who had power twenty years ago:
could you have acted this way? So it invites them to ask themselves what
was possible within the parameters of their individual situations. This is the
film’s greatest accomplishment. The Stasi officer’s actions were not outside
the realm of the possible.
Moreover, there were examples of people within the system who wanted
out. For example, the last death sentence in the GDR was carried out in 1981
against a Stasi officer convicted of treason for making plans to escape the
country. So there were people in the Stasi who were prepared to question. But
such a transformation as in The Lives of Others didn’t happen. The film under-
scores that we always have a choice, even in dictatorships. We don’t have every
choice, but we can act in many different ways. The film portrays this well. The
theater director changes his mind; the Stasi officer changes his mind; Dreyman
changes his mind. There are people who want to help the truth come to life.
And one has more allies than one thinks when one looks around closely. The
film poses the stark question: is civil courage something for you too?
PH: Did the film provoke an important debate in Germany?
JG: Looking back on it today, I’d say this wasn’t the case. The important
debates, at least among those involved in the issues, were already well under
way. The real accomplishment of the film was the portrayal of a serious
political issue in the form of a popular cultural product. As a feature film in
movie theaters everywhere in Germany in 2006 and 2007, it disseminated a
certain judgment about the dictatorship that had already been established
through scholarship, books, conferences, and media debates in the 1990s.
So the film enabled our rejection of the dictatorship to be reflected by a
much broader public, one that usually isn’t interested in political discourses.
In Germany we have experience with narrative elements of film or other
cultural products that pick up a topic anew. Take, for example, the 1970s
American TV series Holocaust, which tells the story of the Holocaust like
in a soap opera through a single family, the Weisses. Serious historians like
196 Paul Hockenos
Claude Lanzmann and Raul Hilberg probably rolled their eyes and said,
“Oh, God! How banal!” But the series was on television at a time when
everyone could watch it. It thus had enormous reverberations and impact.
My parents, who lived in the northern city of Rostock, cried when they
saw it. As a young person I had asked them whether they had noticed the
persecution of Jews in Rostock. They said, “No, not at all.” They couldn’t tell
me anything. But after they had seen the TV series, thirty years after the
events, suddenly I heard names of Jewish classmates of my father, names
of Jewish lawyers from my hometown. I witnessed my parents moved in a
way I had never seen before.
Germany’s experience with this film is so fascinating because it was
after the waves of political education and well after the student movement
discourses. But then came the series—a generation after the war—and with
it another wave of introspection, not with new analysis or facts but with an
emotional element and comprehensible in a different way because ordinary
people’s personal histories were tied up with a political theme. That’s why
I’m always skeptical when political discourses—even those delegitimizing
a dictatorship—are confined to scholars and pedagogues. That’s one of the
greatest assets of this and other such films: through tragedy or even some-
times through comedy, people can distance themselves from the subject
matter and recognize something for the first time.
PH: One of the essays in this book addresses the issue of moral corrup-
tion. Does the film correctly portray the difficulty of living a moral life in a
dictatorship like the GDR?
JG: A feature film naturally has to spice things up and condense the
passage of time. But we are, for example, confronted with the question of
how one goes about publishing a critical text in a dictatorship. What do I
have to do as a playwright or theater director in order to continue to work
as such? We see this in the character of Jerska, a blacklisted director and
typical resident of the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, who says, “No, I’m
simply not going along with this charade any longer.” He’s an artist and has
crossed the Rubicon: he won’t make compromises anymore. There were
these people—and his character takes his own life in the film. Others simply
picked up and left the country. Our greatest poets left the GDR, figures like
Sara Kirsch, Peter Huchel, Reiner Kunze, Günter Kunert, and many, many
others. They left; others disappeared into suicide. This kind of brutality isn’t
always immediately visible in the late phases of a dictatorship. But you see
this very clearly in the film, as if through a magnifying glass.
This very realistically reflects a time when the regime is no longer Stalin-
ist but is nevertheless ready and willing at all times to break people. And if
people don’t go along with it, then their life space is restricted or their futures
snuffed out. And that’s why in such societies there are different grades of
conformism, from unconvinced minimal loyalty to ultra-conformity. The
ultra-conformist is not only a member of the state party but also a secret
police informant who spies on his peers. That’s the highest form of betrayal:
a snitch who’s not even a professional snitch, but rather does it for a higher
good. An excellent example of this type is one of Germany’s current editors
in chief, Arnold Schölzel, who runs a dubious communist newspaper called
Junge Welt. He clearly betrayed many of his colleagues in the GDR period,
yet he won’t admit even today that it was wrong. His loyalty at the time was
elsewhere, he says. This is one of the tricks of dictatorships: they manage to
win the loyalty of such people by transforming the values of the past into
the highest values of the party that rules the country.
PH: Some critics charge that The Lives of Others is a typical West Ger-
man take on the GDR. Is it?
JG: It is sometimes the case that a picture becomes clearer when viewed
from a distance. We’re still writing books about the Roman Empire and
ancient Greece. We weren’t there and nevertheless we make judgments and
win new insights. Of course, eyewitnesses will always be important. But the
first-person participant may not be in the best position to abstract from the
event, sometimes because he is still so shocked and traumatized by it. Thus
they are also easily offended when they feel that the source of their trauma
is being trivialized. “This wasn’t like that!” they say. “This officer could never
have existed! Only a Bavarian count could concoct such a figure! Life was
much worse than that!” They simply don’t grasp the artistic endeavor behind
the attempt to explain how brutal it really was by transforming it into a work
of fiction. A cooler, distanced perspective is often very, very important.
PH: The first wave of films about life in the GDR were comedies. I think
of Sun Alley, Good Bye Lenin! and Heroes Like Us. And then with The Lives
of Others came the tragedies. Why? Does it reflect a shift in the process of
remembering the GDR?
198 Paul Hockenos
JG: Perhaps it’s actually good that the tragedies didn’t come out first.
There were plenty of TV documentaries and other products that were duly
hardnosed on topics like forced adoptions, prison conditions, political jus-
tice, etc. As for these comedies, well, they weren’t always comedies. Sun Alley
isn’t really a comedy. There are fantasy and humorous elements in it, but a
tough message comes through. Take the boy who because of a record album
becomes a victim of border troops. That’s terrible. Or in Good Bye Lenin!
where the mother constructs this cozy socialist world upon a lie, namely,
that the father abandoned the children. In fact, he wrote one letter after
another but they landed behind a kitchen cabinet. That’s not funny at all. I
know people who cried watching Good Bye Lenin! What’s interesting about
this approach is that it didn’t try to shock people. You can also get distance
from something by laughing at it. With humor you can unpack something
that you hadn’t dared to touch before. So you can’t say this approach is
undemocratic. It’s another artistic form to get to the heart of the matter at
hand. And this is often not recognized by our political activists. Of course,
there are also nostalgic products, too, the likes of which you can find on
television these days. But these films don’t fall into that category. They’re
serious films and deserve to be taken seriously.
PH: Are you satisfied with the way that Germany has addressed the
GDR legacy?
JG: Essentially, yes, though we also created a serious problem for our-
selves. The agents of the regime party, namely, the state security, were treated
more rigorously than the regime’s actors themselves. We managed to remove
Stasi informers, even some who were relatively unimportant, from public
service while important leading party officials—from the district, munici-
pal, and central committee levels—remained uncontested in top positions.
Thus we didn’t have a decommunization analogous to denazification in
postwar Germany.
The postcommunist forces claimed there was a witch hunt, which is
nonsense. The renewal of the public service in eastern Germany wasn’t
driven by ideological criteria. The ultra-conformists who actively worked
against their fellow countrymen were deemed “less trustworthy” and this
was an impediment for them to serve in the public sector. An autonomous,
federal authority was established to administer these files and then share
them with eligible persons according to legal norms. We also shared rel-
evant files with the public institutions when it concerned civil servants. It
thus was sometimes the case that the rights of the former rulers and their
former subordinates were compromised. Admittedly, this kind of lustration
is an intervention into personal rights. But compared to the rights of victims,
who had no external confirmation they were oppressed, it was of secondary
consequence. And that’s why German lawmakers opened the secret police
files to our authority.
What we didn’t do—and what we should have done—is put the leading
strata of the SED on a par with the senior officers of the Stasi. The failure to
do so caused an imbalance. It was a mistake made by the democratic forces
that were in the parliament in 1989. It was a lack of will. We thought a general
declaration that the SED was a criminal organization didn’t reflect reality.
The SED wasn’t just the leadership but rather 2.3 million members, most of
whom entered the party to ensure themselves and their families economic
and political security. It wasn’t because they wanted to repress other people.
And that’s why it seemed unfair to undertake a full-scale de-communization.
The Czechs did this. But to us it looked disproportionate. We could, however,
have pushed through a limited form of de-communization that vetted the
operational representatives of the regime as we did their peers in the Stasi.
Here we failed.
PH: How is the legacy of totalitarianism still reflected in Germany’s

eastern states?
JG: Not only in Germany, but everywhere in the world where people are
powerless over an extended period of time, political relations are formed
the likes of which we know from premodern times. This subject mental-
ity has an impact on society. Sometimes different vocabulary is used: the
Nazis employed the term “allegiance” (Gefolgschaft) and the communists
wanted “conviction.” They wanted us convinced that we grasped the goal
of history and the party as the avant-garde, as the cutting edge of progress,
and so on. . . . This is a semantic trick to disguise the real power relations,
namely, an excess of power for the few and the powerlessness of the many.
This power is not invested by God’s grace as in the times of absolutism but
rather the Weltgeist [world spirit] evokes this specific form of rule. We are
the last phase of history’s progress. The cleverest and most important of us
are in this party and the leadership represents this progress. And who wants
to be against progress? So you have to approve this authority for eternity.
200 Paul Hockenos
This is the Leninist mantra—once communists have power, they should

never give it up.
This disrespect for the will of the majority is an explicit rejection of the
European and North American democratic project. All of those elements
integral to the evolution of this project—the rule of law, separation of pow-
ers, civil liberties, human rights—were disparaged or minimalized in order
to consolidate the power of the regime. Naturally, a lot of people can’t see
through this because they are apolitical, especially many artists and actors.
For the most part, actors are the type who when given good contracts will
say they didn’t notice anything. In the Nazi period it was the same way. And
it exists in every dictatorship. If you go to Chile there are a lot of people
who’ll say that everything wasn’t bad under Pinochet. They don’t discuss
how the military dictatorship secured its absolute power or what crimes it
committed. They experienced a certain security in their milieu and for this
they are thankful.
These kinds of divided discourses are typical. The real legacy of dic-
tatorships is not the “captive mind” that the Polish poet and Nobel Prize
recipient Czesław Miłosz describes—although there is this, too—but the
accommodation of powerlessness. Powerlessness becomes the norm. The
internalizing of the oppressor is a phenomenon we know from rape victims.
Kids say, “That can’t be wrong since it was Father” or an uncle. “They were
kind.” The soul protects itself by a loving internalization of the perpetra-
tor. We see this in societies in which powerlessness is denied. Supposed or
actual material security is posited as a fundamental value, but behind this
vanishes the basic rights and freedoms of citizens.
This accommodation of powerlessness leaves a kind of blight across all
postcommunist societies. All transitional societies are marked by a deep
division: some wake up, grasp the new situation, and relish being a citizen.
The others say it’s impossible, it’s all a pack of lies, it was always like that but
now has a new name. The fearfulness engendered by the dictatorship then
looks for new objects of fear. These feelings of inferiority can thus be per-
petuated. The psyche duplicates what it learned under the previous regime
in the new political process. This legacy of the dictatorship weighs heavily on
transitional societies: fewer people exercise their own initiative or creativity,
and they shirk self-responsibility. These are elements essential to civil society.
But when you’ve already learned in school how to adapt and conform—
no school newspaper, no class speaker; when you don’t have a proper trade
union in workplaces; when you have no vote; when universities have no
research freedom; and there is no media freedom—then this principle of

subjugation is normal. And the principle of resisting the system is abnormal.
The eastern German or Soviet populations lived this for forty-five or fifty-six
or seventy years—they ceased to be citizens in any meaningful sense. There
can be a minority who learns more quickly. You see this more strongly in
countries like Poland where there is a deeply rooted love for freedom and a
tendency to see the whole process more positively than in eastern Germany
or the former Czechoslovakia. Apart from the economic and environmental
disasters caused by communism, the most tragic legacy is this perpetuated,
internalized powerlessness.
PH: There’s a debate in Germany about closing the Stasi Archives and
winding down the processing of the GDR past. When will Germany finally
be finished with coming to terms with the GDR past?
JG: Look how grotesquely inaccurate the many predictions were that
Germany’s coming to terms with the National Socialist past was finally at
an end after the Wall fell, that the Germans would eventually forget about
it. On the fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries of the war’s end and the defeat
of the Nazi dictatorship there was a tremendous flood of scholarly publica-
tions and a rich debate over issues such as the war, war guilt, Nazi crimes,
and the Holocaust. That’s why it’s very hard to predict when a debate over
the past will be over.
But it could become marginalized and diluted for a very banal reason.
Four-fifths of today’s Germans are western Germans. And of the eastern
Germans only roughly half see any point in processing the GDR past.
Moreover, eastern Germany isn’t a closed niche. There is no special eastern
German discourse, but rather discourses like the delegitimation of dicta-
torship happen with western German scholarship and on a European level,
not in a little snow dome just for eastern Germans. Will western Germans
continue to examine this second failed German democracy project with the
intensity it deserves?
Moreover, there is a great danger it will be overshadowed by the domi-
nance of the Holocaust discourse. I’m a German and will always see Nazi
rule and the Holocaust as a black hole in history. But when the western Ger-
mans claim that it was only Nazi rule that devastated Europe, then they’re
making a serious historical mistake. In Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, and
elsewhere live people who dreamed of freedom, dignity, and human rights.
202 Paul Hockenos
Some of them experienced not only powerlessness but death. It is a grave

illusion to think that remembrance of the Holocaust is enough to secure
democracy. There are many very different ways that our democratic values
can be annulled. Western Europe lacks a feeling for the seriousness of this
narrative, something that we former inhabitants of the GDR share with the
Central and Eastern Europeans.
There are European intellectuals who say that anticommunism is some-
how uncool, and that it doesn’t belong in democratic political culture. But
you can only think this if you’re far enough away from the suffering that
Soviet communism inflicted. In fact, the West has to learn that there are
two kinds of anti-communism. One stems from conservative arrogance,
such as that in the United States and West Germany. This variety is useless.
The other variety stems from suffering, the deprivation of rights, and pow-
erlessness. And if you’re not able to feel this, then you lack something as a
human being. And, sadly, western Germany and western Europe still have
to learn this. The seriousness of the threat of communism to our democracy
project has to be respected.
Notes
1. See Joachim Gauck, “Ja, so war es!” Stern, March 25, 2006.
2. Available in English as The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New
York: Grove, 1975).
3. Available in English in the volume The Devil’s General and Germany: Jekyll and Hyde,
ed. Volkmar Sander (New York: Continuum, 2005).
11
E ast German Totalitarianism

A Warning from History
Peter Grieder
The Lives of Others is not a documentary but a movie. The purpose of a

movie is to entertain rather than to inform. So why debate its historical
accuracy? Because its screenwriter and director, Florian Henckel von Don-
nersmarck, claims that the film is fundamentally authentic.1 His “close
historical consultant,” the renowned historian Manfred Wilke, vigorously
defends its historical credibility in this volume and elsewhere.2 Furthermore,
the Oscar-winning blockbuster succeeded in renewing the debate about life
in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East
Germany, to which historians are particularly well qualified to contrib-
ute. Many ordinary people imbibe their history from motion pictures and
cultural artifacts rather than academic publications, making an investiga-
tion of historical reliability wholly legitimate. The first section of this essay
will focus on how truthfully The Lives of Others engages with the theme of
East German totalitarianism.3 In so doing, it will explore certain aspects of
where the movie reflects historical reality and where it does not.4 The second
section will advance an interpretation of the film as a salutary warning to
democratic societies in the early twenty-first century.
The Lives of Others and East German Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism may be summarized as “the concerted but disguised attempt
by a state to exercise total control over, coerce, integrate, manipulate, mobi-
lize, and seduce its population in the name of an ideology, regardless of the
203
204 Peter Grieder
extent to which this was actually achieved in practice.”5 As Friedrich and

Brzezinski explain, one of the basic features of a totalitarian dictatorship is
“the terror of the secret police systematically exploiting modern science,
and more especially scientific psychology.”6 It is this secret police control,
in the form of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security (MfS), or Stasi, that is
examined in The Lives of Others.
Despite winning seven Lolas of the German Film Prize in 2006, the film
received a somewhat mixed reception in Germany.7 On the one hand, “the
cultural and political establishment”8 hailed it as a powerful antidote to the
wave of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) that had been sweeping eastern
Germany since the 1990s. This was a result of a clever marketing strategy by
Donnersmarck, which somewhat unfairly compared The Lives of Others to
earlier, “less serious” movies about the GDR, the most famous being Good
Bye Lenin! and Sonnenallee.9 Writing in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel,
Reinhard Mohr described it as “the first German feature film to tackle
seriously throughout, without Trabant-nostalgia, Spreewald-cucumber
romanticism, and other folkloric tomfoolery, the kernel of the German
Democratic Republic that collapsed in 1989—the systematic intimidation,
oppression, and repression of its citizens in the name of ‘state security.’ ”10
On the other hand, The Lives of Others was criticized by some historians
and “professional film people” for having an “ostalgic” theme itself in that it
depicts a Stasi captain, Gerd Wiesler, protecting the celebrated playwright
Georg Dreyman and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, whom he
is supposed to be observing.
There is no evidence such a thing ever happened in the GDR. Of course,
this does not mean that it did not or could not have happened. If, like Wiesler,
the officer had successfully covered his tracks, the incriminating evidence
would either have been destroyed or never recorded in the first place. In any
event, the Stasi files are so voluminous that one cannot completely exclude
the possibility of such a documented case coming to light in future. Be
that as it may, Dr. Hubertus Knabe, director of the memorial at the former
Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen in Berlin, was so incensed by what he
saw as Donnersmarck’s artistic license that he denied him permission to
film there. According to Knabe, a strict division of labor and internal MfS
surveillance would have prevented a Stasi captain from exercising so much
control over a single operation.11 These factors would certainly have dis-
rupted Wiesler’s task but not rendered it impossible. Anna Funder, author
of the acclaimed Stasiland,12 supports Knabe’s objections: “to understand
East German Totalitarianism 205
why a Wiesler could not have existed is to understand the ‘total’ nature of
totalitarianism.”13 Moreover, she insists, Stasi officers were “true believers”
hardened by “institutional coercion.” They would never have wanted to save
those they were spying on.14
Yet Knabe and Funder miss a more fundamental point. A perfect totali-
tarian system has never existed and never will. While East Germany came
closest to realizing the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984, it still ranks as the
least inefficient of the Soviet bloc regimes. The “human factor” can never
be discounted, even in a police state as obsessive as the GDR. Hence the
main supposition of The Lives of Others, while unlikely, is not implausible.
There were Stasi employees and informers, the latter known as inoffizieller
Mitarbeiter (IMs), or “unofficial colleagues,” who engaged in dissent. Wilke
cites the cases of two officers, Major Gerd Trebeljahr and Captain Werner
Teske, who were executed in 1979 and 1981, respectively.15 At least ten MfS
personnel paid with their lives for attempting to change sides.16 Garton Ash
knew of “full-time Stasi operatives who became disillusioned, especially dur-
ing the 1980s.”17 As the GDR sank deep into crisis during its final decade,
the possibility of such disillusionment grew, despite or even because of the
ministry’s increasingly repressive modus operandi after 1987.18 With their
dense networks of informers, Stasi officers were well aware of the shortcom-
ings of what had become known as “really existing socialism”—a term used
to distinguish it from the coming communist utopia. Wiesler himself gives
an indication of this when he asks his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton
Grubitz, who heads the culture department at the MfS: ‘Don’t you sometimes
wish that Communism was already here?”19 By 1989 some Stasi employees
favored reform.20 Not all were hopelessly indoctrinated drones. To believe
that they were is to subscribe to a view of totalitarianism as an ideal type
rather than as a really existing historical phenomenon. If the Soviet leader,
Mikhail Gorbachev, could make the transition from hard-line communist
to supreme reformer within a few short years, then the much smaller trans-
formation being portrayed in The Lives of Others is certainly realistic. Unless
historians see Stasi officials as fallible human beings rather than mindless
automatons, they will not be able to empathize with them. In empathy lies
the key to historical understanding.
When Timothy Garton Ash interviewed the former Stasi major Klaus
Risse in the 1990s, he came away with the distinct impression that he was
a “good man.” By this he meant “a man with a real goodness of heart and a
conscience that is not switched off at the office door.”21 Risse’s father had died
206 Peter Grieder
“on active service” during the Second World War. The family had lost every-
thing it owned in the bombing raids. His mother, an agricultural laborer,
kept them alive. Then the East German state began to provide support. Klaus
was a bright pupil, and the government awarded him the highest scholarship
to attend a boarding school. Aged eighteen, he had to decide on a career.
He hoped “to study fishery at university.” But the Stasi said, “Do something
for the state which has done so much for you.” So he became an employee
of the MfS.22 Thus it came to be that this fatherless, destitute child of the
Second World War was pressured into working for one of the most sinister
secret police organizations of the twentieth century. Those state benefits he
had received as a vulnerable youngster provided the means for his recruit-
ment. The victim had become a victim again, this time by entering the ranks
of the main perpetrators.23 How Wiesler came to work for the Stasi is not
elucidated in The Lives of Others. But it is worth noting that Risse might not
have been so exceptional. Elsewhere, Garton Ash writes: “In many hours
of talking to former Stasi officers, I never met a single one whom I felt to
be, simply and plainly, an evil man.”24 One is reminded of this at the end of
the film. After the fall of the GDR, Dreyman discovers from his Stasi file
that Wiesler had been protecting him. By way of gratitude, he dedicates his
novel Sonata for a Good Man to the former Stasi captain, identified by his
MfS moniker HGW XX/7.
According to Mary Fulbrook, the doyenne of GDR studies in the United
Kingdom, totalitarianism theory entails adopting “an essentially dichoto-
mous approach in separating cleanly between repressive, totalitarian ‘state’
and innocent, oppressed ‘society.’ ”25 What she does not acknowledge, though,
is that totalitarian polities rule through rather than over society. Totalitarian-
ism is the invasion and occupation of society by the state—a state that has
itself been hijacked by and subjugated to a political party,26 in the GDR’s case,
the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Such dictatorships embraced
the “totality” of society, fusing it with party-state structures. Collaboration
and participation were essential prerequisites for a system that, by definition,
drew the entire population into its remit. As the anticommunist dissident
and future president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, perceptively observed
in 1978, the crucial “line of conflict” did not run between rulers and ruled
but rather “de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her way”
was “both a victim and a supporter of the system.”27 He drew attention to
the way that every person was, to a greater or lesser degree, implicated in
the regime: “Individuals . . . must live within a lie. They need not accept the
lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by
this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfil the system, make the
system, are the system.”28 Of course, none of this makes the Stasi any less
culpable for the evils of East German totalitarianism.
The Lives of Others departs from cold war stereotypes in that it explores
the complexity of state-society relations under the watchful eyes of the totali-
tarian MfS. The film cannot be written off as a tale of “heroes, victims and
villains,”29 a type of history writing that Fulbrook rightly warned against in
the 1990s.30 Stasi captain Wiesler is a perpetrator, a dissenter, and to some
extent a victim, in that he suffers demotion for protecting Dreyman and
Sieland. Dreyman is simultaneously a supporter of socialism, a critic of
the system, and a victim of its excesses. Sieland is also a loyal socialist, a
victim of the regime, and a perpetrator, in that she agrees to work (albeit
under duress) as an informer for the Stasi. To depict the film as a tale of “a
few good men” and one “bad” woman is therefore simplistic.31 Sieland is
victimized by the patriarchal MfS in the form of one of its former officers,
the predatory culture minister, Bruno Hempf, who wants to have a sexual
relationship with her, and Wiesler’s careerist superior, Grubitz. Both are
irredeemably malevolent characters. While “the two leading male figures
are given the chance to mature through the failing woman,” claims that the
film itself is misogynist because of the “weak, seduced and guilty” female
heroine can be taken too far.32 Sieland is not the only person in the movie
to be broken by the system.
The question then arises as to whether the film “steers uncomfortably
close” to “a moral relativism that ends up blurring the distinction between
perpetrator and victim,” as Garton Ash has claimed.33 Its portrayal of a “good”
Stasi captain has been criticized in some quarters for downplaying the evil
of the Stasi and distracting attention from the real heroes of the GDR, the
dissidents.34 Yet these objections are somewhat overstated. Wiesler’s ruth-
less record as MfS captain is made very clear at the start of the film, when
he interrogates a prisoner, identified only by his number, 227. Something
of what the founding mother of totalitarianism theory, Hannah Arendt,
memorably termed “the banality of evil”35 is evident here.36 By “banality of
evil,” Arendt meant the almost mechanical perpetration of immoral acts
by ordinary individuals who were in no way psychologically disturbed. As
Owen Evans argues, Wiesler’s chilling treatment of Prisoner 227 and use of
a recording of the interrogation to instruct students at the MfS university
in Potsdam converts “the obvious suffering of an individual into material
208 Peter Grieder
for supposed academic analysis.”37 When one of the students asks whether
depriving the prisoner of so much sleep did not amount to inhumane treat-
ment, Wiesler silently places a black mark next to his name. Shortly after
observing Dreyman for the first time at the theater, Wiesler suggests putting
him under surveillance, describing the playwright as “exactly the arrogant
type I always warn my students about.”38 The suffering and courage of all
the Stasi’s victims are treated with great pathos throughout the film. It is
important to remember that there are two heroes at the center of this story:
the first is Wiesler, the second is Dreyman.
According to Garton Ash, the “conversion” of Wiesler “seems implausibly
rapid and not fully convincing.”39 Yet this interpretation can be questioned.
First, as Mary Beth Stein perceptively points out, “Wiesler undergoes an
evolution, not a conversion. He does not defect but remains a (smaller)
cog in the machinery of surveillance until the opening of the Wall.”40 This
renders the plot much more believable, as the idea of a Stasi captain becom-
ing a fully fledged dissident in the context of the film might have stretched
the imagination too far. Second, Wiesler was a true believer in the Stasi’s
ideological mission to protect the SED. This was typical of an MfS officer,
immediately making him credible as a historical character. It is precisely
because he was a principled communist that he was genuinely appalled
by the abuse of ministerial surveillance powers to victimize a politically
reliable artist and his partner. Lunching in the Stasi canteen with Grubitz,
Wiesler insists on sitting with the rank and file rather than at the officer
table. When Grubitz queries this, Wiesler remarks: “Socialism must begin
somewhere, after all.” When Grubitz then tells Wiesler that the purpose of
Operation Lazlo is to help Hempf to sideline his rival, Dreyman, so that he
can have a sexual relationship with Sieland, Wiesler asks him: “Is that why
we joined up? Do you still know our oath ‘shield and sword of the party’?”41
Other Stasi officials would also have balked at such a rare form of corrup-
tion, convinced as they were of their own professionalism and the purity of
Marxist-Leninist ideology. Third, the emotionally impoverished existence
of Wiesler made him particularly vulnerable to the seductions of the forbid-
den world he was observing. He had no life at all outside spying and lived
merely to monitor the lives of others. The fourth and probably decisive factor
is Wiesler’s growing love for Sieland, which gains in poignancy throughout
the film because of its understated nature. Love can be a truly transformative
force, all the more so against the background of searing loneliness. When
love transforms, it often does so quickly. One is reminded of A. J. P. Taylor’s
observation, “Revolution is for society what a passionate love is for the indi-
vidual; those who experience it are marked for ever, separated from their
own past and from the rest of mankind.”42 Finally, there is the humanizing
impact of art, here in the form of a piano piece called “Sonata for a Good
Man” given to Dreyman by his friend the blacklisted theater director Albert
Jerska (which Wiesler overhears while eavesdropping) and a Bertolt Brecht
poem called “Memory of Marie A.” (an allusion to the heroine of the plot,
Christa-Maria Sieland), which he removes from the artists’ flat. Although
great art has been used to aestheticize totalitarianism, its ability to harvest
love and redemption is a central theme of the movie. Garton Ash’s criticism
that it would have taken “more than the odd sonata and Brecht poem” to
melt a Stasi man’s heart neglects the first four factors.43
The film accurately portrays some of the methods employed by the East
German police state. Wiesler spends much of his time in the attic of Drey-
man’s apartment block, wearing a pair of headphones and eavesdropping
on the lives of the playwright and his actress girlfriend. According to Evans,
“All of the equipment featured in the film was actually used by the MfS for
such operations.”44 Then there were the searches of Dreyman’s flat and the
preservation of smell samples from suspects so that they could be tracked
by sniffer dogs.45 The film is set in 1984, the year of George Orwell’s famous
novel by that name, when violence and physical torture were no longer
favored methods of the MfS. Instead, there was “what Hubertus Knabe has
called a system of ‘quiet repression’ (lautlose Unterdrückung)”46 that reflected
the ministry’s exploitation of “scientific psychology” in the manner outlined
by Friedrich and Brzezinski above. In the carefully honed totalitarian jargon
of the Stasi, this was known as Zersetzung (decomposition).47 The main vic-
tim of this in the film is Jerska, whose life has been rendered worthless by
the MfS. This is particularly evident at Dreyman’s birthday party when Paul
Hauser, a journalist friend of Dreyman’s, accuses one of the other guests of
working for the Stasi and thereby helping to destroy Jerska. A favorite Stasi
tactic was to spread false rumors of this nature in order to sow mistrust
and “decompose” the groups they were monitoring. Zersetzung also made
it easier for the regime to hide its human rights abuses in an era of détente
and Ostpolitik,48 when securing financial credits and international recogni-
tion from the West were top priorities.49
Some of the Stasi’s psychological techniques are on display during
Wiesler’s breaking of Prisoner 227 at the start of the film. First there is sleep
deprivation combined with endless interrogation. Then there are threats to
210 Peter Grieder
incarcerate his wife and send his children to a state orphanage, eerily remi-
niscent of Nazi Sippenhaft, a policy that held all family members responsible
for the crimes of one. Later in the film, Grubitz is shown enthusing over a
PhD thesis he supervised with the cumbersome title “Prison Conditions for
Political-Ideological Subversives of the Art Scene according to Character
Profiles.” Displaying the classic totalitarian mania for crude categorization,
the dissertation claimed there were only five types of artist. Grubitz labels
Dreyman type 4—a “hysterical anthropocentric”—who required nothing
more than ten months’ solitary confinement without trial to cure him of
his condition.50
The Stasi worked with carrots as well as sticks. When Wiesler enters
Dreyman’s apartment to install bugging equipment, he is seen by Mrs.
Meineke, the neighbor living in the flat opposite. “One word about this to
anyone,” Wiesler threatens the poor woman, “and tomorrow your Masha will
lose her place to study medicine. Understood?”51 Immediately afterward, he
orders his colleague to buy her a gift to reward her cooperation. The Stasi
was very adept at playing on people’s weaknesses. In Sieland’s case, this is
an addiction to drugs, for which she is arrested on a tip-off from Hempf. In
fear of losing her cherished career as an actress, Sieland agrees to become
an IM (“Marta”) and denounces Dreyman, who has anonymously published
an illegal article in the West German magazine Der Spiegel. Wiesler, who
wants to uncover the whereabouts of the subversive typescript so that he
can remove it and thereby save both Dreyman and Sieland, goes through the
motions of totalitarian blackmail: “Think of what the state has done for you
your whole life long. Now you can do something for the state. And it will
thank you.”52 As Sieland leaves the Stasi prison, Grubitz tells her: “Do not
forget. You are now an IM. That means duties such as complete conspiracy
and confidentiality. But also privileges.” He then slips her some narcotics.53
What The Lives of Others does so brilliantly is capture the possibili-
ties of secret police control in a totalitarian state. In the process, it helps
to illuminate a key aspect of “late totalitarianism” in the GDR. As the film
shows, the “tentacles” of “the Stasi octopus” were long enough to penetrate
the most intimate private sphere.54 After the regime collapsed, a number of
real-life cases came to light documenting how members of the same family
had been turned against each other. The most famous is that of the opposi-
tion activist Vera Wollenberger, who learned from her Stasi file that her own
husband, Knud, code-named IM Donald, had been informing on her for
years. Then there was the author Hans Joachim Schädlich, who discovered
that he had been spied on by his elder brother.55 The potentially devastating
consequences of secret police surveillance are vividly highlighted in the film.
This totalitarian control was imposed by the Stasi not just on society but
on the Stasi itself. So-called UMs were deployed to spy on the MfS.56 Again,
we see that the ministry was intertwined with the East German population,
not separate from it. The instance in the movie of a Stasi second lieuten-
ant, Axel Stigler, demoted for repeating a joke about SED general secretary
Erich Honecker, is completely believable. Political humor in the GDR was
no laughing matter as far as the authorities were concerned. Witticisms at
the expense of the regime could result in being blacklisted. In 1984, an East
German television presenter was debarred from his profession for making
political gags in public.57 Although they could do little to stop them,58 wise-
cracks about socialism were beyond a joke for the SED leaders.
Both Wiesler and Stigler end up working in a cellar of Department M,
the MfS division responsible for monitoring the country’s postal service.
There they steam open letters until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The letter-
steaming machine used in the film is authentic. Over the forty-year existence
of the GDR, the Stasi “opened up to 400 million items of mail using steam,
chemicals, irons and ultrasonic baths,” according to an exhibition in East
Berlin entitled An Open Secret: Postal and Telephone Surveillance in the
German Democratic Republic.59 Apparently, “women with ‘sensitive fingers’
were trained to handle sealed envelopes; if they sensed a photograph, the
mail was opened with a primitive dry-ice machine to prevent damage to the
print.”60 Despite a legal clause protecting “the inviolability of postal com-
munications,” Stasi officers were stationed at every post office in the land.61
Their surveillance was extremely thorough, with every piece of domestic
and foreign mail being inspected “at least to the extent of someone casting
an expert eye over the outside of the envelope, the name of the sender and
the addressee.”62 Anything that looked remotely suspicious was opened
and, if necessary, confiscated. In East Germany’s second city of Leipzig dur-
ing the 1980s, 120 MfS employees opened between 1,500 and 2,000 letters
each day.63 The 154 operatives assigned to Department M of Region Halle
scrutinized 15,779,715 items of postage in the first three months of 1989
alone, submitting 85,478 memos to various MfS departments concerning
their contents.64 To quote John O. Koehler, “All letters and parcels sent to
or received from a non-communist country were opened surreptitiously.
The operation was established to catch spies and enemies of the regime;
but over the years, it evolved into organized mail robbery. Money sent by
212 Peter Grieder
West Germans to their relatives in the East for the purchase of goods avail-
able only in hard currency shops was systematically removed.”65 Allan Hall
reports that “operatives were instructed to remove stamps from intercepted
mail for forwarding to the German Book Export and Import Company, a
Stasi firm that sold the stamps to Western collectors for hard currency.”66 In
Snowleg, a poignant and well-researched historical novel on the East German
secret police, the author, Nicholas Shakespeare, describes a visit to the Stasi
museum in Leipzig. On display are “an assortment of fake rubber stamps
from Brussels, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, to make it look as if letters had in fact
reached their destination and the Leipzig Post Office was simply returning
them to sender, ‘Name Unknown.’ ”67
The Lives of Others highlights the wooden totalitarian jargon of the
SED state and its Stasi protectors.68 Officially, there was neither censorship
nor blacklisting in a republic that purported to be “democratic.” Pseudo-
democracy is a defining characteristic of totalitarian regimes.69 When
Dreyman makes an appeal on behalf of his blacklisted friend Jerska, he is
chastised by the culture minister: “Blacklisting? Such a thing does not exist in
our country. You should choose your words more carefully.”70 The Orwellian
double-speak of the SED leadership was completely divorced from the real-
ity of life in the GDR.71
That said, the ideological work of the secret police could perhaps have
been explored more deeply in the film.72 The Stasi was above all an “ideology
police.”73 East Germany was more of an “ideological state” than its Warsaw
Pact allies. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania existed
as countries before the cold war started, whereas the GDR was born of that
conflict and died with it. This made it the archetypal cold war polity.74 In
November 1989, the famous East German writer Stefan Heym wrote that
“the raison d’être of the German Democratic Republic is socialism.”75 This
was the only Soviet bloc satellite to refer to itself as the Workers’ and Peas-
ants’ State76 or Workers’ and Peasants’ Power. Since it was an ideologically
saturated realm, the Stasi’s role as “shield and sword” of the Communist
Party could have been pointed up more strongly. One scene where Wiesler
spies on neighbors he suspects of “speculative hoarding of goods” (speku-
lative Warenhortung) was cut from the final version.77 If the question of
ideological conformity and nonconformity had been investigated in greater
depth, it might also have been possible to depict how some writers success-
fully pushed back the boundaries of official cultural discourse, as studies by
Karen Leeder and Helen Bridge have shown.78
Instead, the plot is built around the sexual lust of the culture minister
and SED Central Committee member Hempf. His abuse of unaccountable
power was undoubtedly easier in a totalitarian polity where the government
controlled so much of people’s lives. It also enables the film to probe the
connection between welfare and oppression in the GDR79 (the Stasi stops
a dentist from providing Sieland with semi-illicit drugs because of the lat-
ter’s refusal to have a sexual liaison with Hempf). In a liberal democracy,
such corruption might have been exposed by a free press, fond as it is of
prying into politicians’ private lives. Moreover, a minister for culture in the
West would never have enjoyed such overwhelming power over an actress’s
career in the first place. In communist countries, artists were supposed to be
servants of the state and “engineers of the human soul” (a quotation attrib-
uted to Stalin and recapitulated by Hempf);80 in the West they are free to
criticize the state, whether it subsidizes them or not. The totalitarian reach
of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Power is encapsulated in Sieland’s exclama-
tion to Dreyman: “Don’t I need this entire system? . . . But you get into bed
with them, too. Why do you do it? Because they can destroy you as well,
despite your talent and your faith in it. Because they determine what we play,
who is allowed to act, and who can direct.”81 Significantly, the Stasi denies
Dreyman’s close friend Hauser permission to travel to the West to address
a cultural conference.82 As Hempf himself puts it: “The party in fact needs
artists but the artists need the party far more.”83
The Lives of Others focuses on the cultural intelligentsia. Paradoxically,
given the latter’s ideological proclivity toward socialism, it was heavily
penetrated by the MfS.84 This makes Dreyman and Sieland, who are both
idealistic socialists, credible characters. East German intellectuals enjoyed
a privileged existence compared to their fellow countrymen so long as they
toed the party line. Many artists and writers had contacts in the West, making
them both useful and suspect to a regime that craved international recogni-
tion. Stasi surveillance of this milieu was stepped up after the expatriation of
the dissident communist balladeer Wolf Biermann on November 16, 1976,
ending Honecker’s “no taboos” policy in the realm of art and culture. Only
ten days later, the scientist and philosopher Professor Robert Havemann,
a close friend of Biermann’s and the country’s most distinguished com-
munist dissident, was placed under house arrest.85 Artists and writers who
signed open letters of protest against Biermann’s treatment were subjected
to an array of state reprisals. Many, like Jerska in The Lives of Others, were
blacklisted. Others were ejected from the state-controlled Writers’ Union,
214 Peter Grieder
incarcerated, or expelled from the GDR.86 During the 1980s, East Berlin’s
alternative “Prenzlauer Berg scene” was significantly steered by the Stasi,
using the performance artist and “perfect spy” Sascha Anderson.87 When
the MfS was abolished in 1989–1990, Department XX/7, which oversaw
important areas of cultural life in the GDR, employed about forty full-time
staff and the highest number of IMs, totaling 350 to 400.88 According to
Mike Dennis, “In 1989, 49 out of 123 members of the executive of the Writ-
ers’ Union had been or still were Stasi collaborators, and 12 out of the 19
members of the Presidium were former or current IMs.”89 Even Hermann
Kant, president of this official body, was unmasked as a Stasi informant (IM
Martin).90 Christa Wolf, one of the GDR’s most celebrated authors, wrote a
book about her experiences under MfS surveillance91 but was later revealed
to have served briefly as an IM herself under the alias Margarete.92
Another question the film raises is the high suicide rate in East Ger-
many. The GDR was certainly a world-beater in this respect, something the
country’s leaders were desperate to conceal. The Lives of Others contains one
certain suicide, that of the blacklisted theater director Jerska, and another
suspected one, that of Sieland. When Jerska hangs himself after a seven-year
ban on practicing his profession, Dreyman writes his anonymous Spiegel
article in which he addresses the taboo subject of suicide in the “workers’
and peasants’ paradise.” The article is composed on a typewriter smuggled
into the GDR from West Berlin in order to prevent the Stasi from tracing its
typeface. Its argument is that the high suicide statistics are a consequence of
political repression under state socialism. Yet according to a seminal study
by Udo Grashoff,93 this was not generally the case. Decisive reasons, accord-
ing to him, were the area’s traditions and Protestant heritage. Thuringia and
Saxony had displayed high suicide rates since the mid-nineteenth century.
For cultural and religious reasons, Protestant regions tend to record more
cases of suicide than Catholic ones. Certainly the SED dictatorship failed to
improve the situation. As The Lives of Others makes clear, when the figures
rose in 1977, the party forbade their dissemination.94
In causing Jerska’s suicide and harassing Sieland, the Stasi inadvertently
turns Dreyman into the very “hostile-negative force” (to use the ministry’s
jargon) it was supposed to “render harmless.” This is emblematic of the ulti-
mately self-defeating nature of GDR totalitarianism. The SED’s punishment
of critical but generally sympathetic cultural figures undermined its own
support base, a point conceded to me by the Politburo’s former ideologi-
cal spokesman, Kurt Hager, when I interviewed him in the early 1990s.95
Biermann’s expatriation permanently blighted relations between the party

and key members of the cultural intelligentsia. As Martin McCauley notes,
“Until 1976 there had been a net inflow of writers and artists into the GDR
but after that date it became an exodus.”96 Prior to that year, Biermann had
not even been popular among his compatriots; afterward he was feted as “a
political martyr.”97 According to Garton Ash, the Stasi kept a total of forty
thousand pages on the singer.98
The MfS undermined domestic support for East Germany because most
of the population regarded it “as a hostile element.”99 This is illustrated in
The Lives of Others when a little boy asks Wiesler in the lift of his apartment
block: “Are you really with the Stasi?” “Do you even know what that is, the
Stasi?” comes the reply. The child gives an answer that could have had seri-
ous consequences for his family: “They are bad men, who imprison others,
says Daddy.” Wiesler deliberately refrains from asking the boy to give him
his father’s name, something he was required to do as a Stasi captain.100
According to Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, the “bloated, inefficient and
expensive Stasi apparatus harmed the GDR more than all the opposition
groups put together.”101 Obsessive-compulsive state control was therefore one
of the main reasons for the GDR’s ultimate failure, although not collapse,
which could only occur once the Kremlin had withdrawn its backing.102 This
is made clear in the film as Gorbachev becomes Soviet leader just as Wiesler
is being demoted in March 1985. Within five and a half years, Gorbachev’s
liberalizing reforms in the USSR had led to the downfall of the “first ‘Work-
ers’ and Peasants’ State’ on German soil.”103
One of the fundamental debates about The Lives of Others among Ger-
mans is whether it accurately depicts everyday life in the GDR. According
to Cheryl Dueck, “Viewers were attracted to the look of the film, that is, the
recognizable aesthetic of the décor, clothing, and social groups within the
German Democratic Republic, as well as the familiarity of the East Berlin
cityscape.”104 At a symposium in Washington, DC’s, German Historical
Institute on April 30, 2007, “several panellists thought that the film had done
well in capturing the atmosphere of the place and time.” They particularly
commended its rendering of “the repressive political climate in the GDR,
one of suspicion and mistrust that permeated nearly all levels of society.”105
However, by his own admission, Donnersmarck deliberately accentuated the
drab colors of East Germany, thereby heightening the oppressive atmosphere.
As a commentary in the newspaper Die Zeit observed: “Donnersmarck does
not want realism, but a metaphorical hyperrealism.”106
216 Peter Grieder
It is no criticism of The Lives of Others to say that another film is needed

that captures the impact of the Stasi on the wider population in the Workers’
and Peasants’ State.107 This would enable a deeper examination of Arendt’s
“banality of evil” concept. As Garton Ash has pointed out, “Nowhere was
evil more banal than in the net-curtained, plastic-wood cabins and caravans
of the German Democratic Republic.”108 When Wiesler threatens Dreyman’s
neighbor Mrs. Meineke, it is one of the few scenes in the film to engage
with the world of ordinary East Germans, even if it does speak volumes. A
single movie cannot be expected to portray all aspects of state surveillance
without losing focus.
According to Stein, since only 1 to 2 percent of GDR inhabitants were
involved in spying on another 1 to 2 percent of their compatriots, the absence
from the film of ordinary people “who neither supported nor resisted the
regime” exaggerates the repressiveness of the GDR.109 This is to underesti-
mate somewhat the impact of the MfS, which touched the lives of everyone
to a greater or lesser degree, whether they were under direct surveillance
or not. As Gary Bruce puts it, “One can no more place a boundary around
the Stasi than one can encircle a scent in a room.”110 The fear of the secret
police was pervasive, and many East Germans behaved as if the Stasi was
omnipresent, even though it was not.111 David Childs noted this fear when
visiting the GDR in 1978; Timothy Garton Ash kept coming up against it
while living there during the early 1980s.112 In 1990, 72.6 percent of East Ger-
mans believed that there was “complete surveillance” in the GDR, although
five years later the figure had declined to 42 percent.113
At the start of The Lives of Others, the viewer is told that the Stasi con-
sisted of 100,000 staff and 200,000 informers.114 Garton Ash maintains that
in 1988 the MfS had more than 90,000 full-time personnel and over 170,000
IMs.115 In 1989, the number of informers was between 174,000 and 176,000.116
All this to control a population of approximately 16.4 million.117 Dennis has
determined that “in any given year throughout the 1980s, about one in 50
of the country’s 13.5 million adults were working for the Stasi on the home
front, either as an officer or as an informer.”118 According to Koehler, if one
includes people who supplied information on a part-time basis, the ratio is
one informer per 6.5 citizens.119 Since many MfS records did not survive the
1989 revolution, the precise number of IMs may never be known, although
500,000 has been given as a credible estimate.120 As Dennis points out, there
was one full-time MfS employee per 180 citizens in the GDR, which made it
“the largest secret police and secret security apparatus in the Soviet empire
and probably in world history.”121 It is often forgotten that Stasi surveillance

was augmented by other organizations. These included the official trade
union (FDGB), the communist youth movement (FDJ), SED factory cells
(GO), the People’s Police and their collaborators, neighborhood associations,
“educators,” the printed media, and the Agitation Commission of the SED.122
Margot Honecker, wife of the party’s general secretary and the GDR’s min-
ister for people’s education between 1963 and 1989, “ordered every teacher
to report all incidences of deviation by pupils from the communist line.”123
Paradoxically, given the extent of state monitoring, most East Germans,
according to Fulbrook, could still “experience their everyday life as ‘perfectly
normal.’ ”124 Jeannette Madarász concurs, stating that between 1971 and 1987
“life in the GDR was ordinary for the majority of the population.”125 Bruce
takes a different view: “It would not be an exaggeration to state that every
East German citizen has a ‘Stasi story,’ either personally or that of a close
acquaintance. Some of the brushes with the secret police were mild, some
were harrowing, but all of them reveal a life that was anything but ‘ordi-
nary.’ ”126 Of course, notions of what is “normal” and “ordinary” are relative,
and memories can be misleading. Even if people genuinely believed that
their lives were normal in the context of 1984, this was sometimes a mis-
conception. Many East Germans were ignorant of exactly what the Stasi was
doing until after the regime collapsed. In The Lives of Others, Dreyman finds
out that he had been under surveillance only in November 1991, some two
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is even more incredulous when he
is told that this surveillance was of the “comprehensive” variety.127 Others,
consciously or unconsciously, blotted out the repressive aspects of the sys-
tem by concentrating on their work, pursuing hobbies, or building families.
However, Fulbrook is undoubtedly correct when she writes that although
“many East Germans lived with a sense of oppression and fear . . . the climate
of fear was the outer parameter of existence” in this police state; “it did not
have to be a feature of everyday life.”128 In any case, most citizens were too
busy with other things to worry incessantly about the Stasi. Thus the debate
between those who stress the normality of daily existence in the GDR and
those who emphasize its repressive nature is unnecessarily polarized. The
film cannot convey this widespread perception of normality because the
plot is built around a small group of dissident artists.
Funder rightly points out that the fate of Wiesler after 1990—he is shown
delivering junk mail to people’s homes—was not typical of erstwhile MfS
officials, who generally did far better out of German reunification than their
218 Peter Grieder
victims.129 Neither are reconciliations between Stasi spies and their quarries
very common, although they are surely possible. While in various respects
The Lives of Others is stylized history, the film cannot be dismissed simply
as a “fairy tale.”130 After all, it does shed light on certain totalitarian practices
in the GDR. Garton Ash gives a characteristically cogent assessment of its
historical authenticity: “It uses the syntax and conventions of Hollywood
to convey to the widest possible audience some part of the truth about life
under the Stasi, and the larger truths that experience revealed about human
nature. It mixes historical fact (several of the Stasi locations are real and
most of the terminology and tradecraft is accurate) with the ingredients
of a fast-paced thriller and love story.”131 The GDR has been dead for more
than two decades now but many of its former inhabitants are still alive.
Small wonder, then, that the movie sparked off such a “vigorous debate”132
in Germany. Nevertheless, as Dueck observes, “most critics and audience
discussions end on a positive note.”133 In dramatizing history for the pur-
poses of catharsis and redemption, the film can help heal the wounds of the
“second German dictatorship.”134
A Warning from History

The Spanish-born philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist George Santayana
once warned: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.”135 While The Lives of Others should serve to educate post–cold
war generations about the dangers of dictatorship and overweening state
control, for the general public outside Germany rarefied discussions about
the film’s historical accuracy with regard to everyday life in the GDR are
beside the point. Here we have to guard against a variant of what might be
called Ostphobie (phobia toward the East) that pours scorn on the Work-
ers’ and Peasants’ Power, with the clear implication that such malign state
intrusion could never occur in a Western democracy. “The past is a foreign
country,” we tell ourselves comfortingly. “They do things differently there.”136
Yet at the time of writing, the British government is consulting on a
draft Communications Data Bill137 which, if passed into law, would monitor
all the electronic correspondence, social networking activity, and Web site
visits of everyone resident in the UK. Furthermore, this monitoring would
take place in real time. Although the content of telephone and e-mail mes-
sages is apparently to remain hidden (at least for the time being), there are
some doubts about whether this is even technologically feasible. Be that as
it may, it is possible to construct a very detailed profile of somebody by ana-

lyzing his or her browsing history and who he or she communicates with
over the telephone and Internet. To quote Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of
the Worldwide Web: “The amount of control you have over somebody if you
can monitor internet activity is amazing. You get to know every detail, you
get to know, in a way, more intimate details about their life than any person
that they talk to because often people will confide in the internet as they find
their way through medical websites . . . or as an adolescent finds their way
through a website about homosexuality, wondering what they are and whether
they should talk to people about it.”138 Berners-Lee has even gone so far as to
describe the government’s plans as a “destruction of human rights.”139 Accord-
ing to N02ID, a pressure group set up to “stop the database state”: “Traffic
data tells a different story to reading mail. And a much more detailed one:
who you contact, how, where from, for how long, what you read and watch,
what games you play, what you search for; all your online and telephone
habits and most of the technical details of your equipment and software.”140
The policy was first mooted by Gordon Brown’s Labour administration
in 2008, which proposed storing all the information on a single database
owned by the government.141 Its Orwellian connotations were not lost on
the general public and the idea had to be abandoned in April 2009.142 Three
years later, the proposal is to give the intelligence services the right to access
existing databases without a warrant, which effectively amounts to the same
thing. Communication service providers (CSPs) would be required to store
“records of billions more communications.”143 Such a monstrous extension
of state monitoring could never have been contemplated by the Stasi, which
operated in an offline world. Although the MfS went in for general as well
as targeted surveillance,144 it never quite achieved the maxim of “blanket
surveillance” (flächendeckende Ūberwachung). The 6 million paper files the
ministry left behind (2 million of which were on West Germans)145 ran to
185 kilometers,146 not including all those others it managed to destroy. Yet
this vast data mountain now seems somewhat less remarkable given the
surfeit of information being collected on the “free” citizens of the West.147
Since the terrorist atrocity of 9/11, Western democracies have become
surveillance societies far more sophisticated than that of the GDR. This has
been made possible by revolutionary technological advances since the end
of the cold war. Another factor is the move toward a culture in which most
people have become accustomed to being observed in some form or other.
Indeed, they are hardly conscious of it. One need only mention the ubiq-
220 Peter Grieder
uitous closed-circuit television cameras in Great Britain, which is now the

most watched nation on Earth.148 In 2006, there were as many as 4.2 million
CCTV cameras in the UK—approximately “one for every 14 people.”149 As
early as August 2004, Britain’s information commissioner, Richard Thomas,
warned that the country risked “sleepwalking into a surveillance society.”
According to the Times, he said “that there is a growing danger of East Ger-
man Stasi-style snooping if the State gathers too much information about
individual citizens.”150 Two years later, Thomas declared: “Today I fear that
we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around
us.”151 On the same day, one of the writers of an academic report compiled
by the Surveillance Studies Network averred that the United Kingdom was
“the most surveilled country” among Western industrialized nations.152 In
2007 the respected human rights organization Privacy International classi-
fied Great Britain and the United States as “endemic surveillance societies,”
in the same league as Russia and the People’s Republic of China.153 The
organization also found that Britain was “the worst Western democracy at
protecting individual privacy.”154 It would not be an exaggeration to claim
that the UK is metamorphosing from a liberal into an illiberal democracy.
Nonetheless, most British citizens, like many ordinary East Germans before
them, believe that they live “perfectly normal lives.” This is because notions
of normality have evolved and surveillance is deemed to be benevolent, its
encroachments occurring only incrementally or invisibly.
What has all this got to do with The Lives of Others, you might ask? A
great deal. The Lives of Others is not a film primarily about ideological sur-
veillance but about the abuse of surveillance powers by the government.
Now, of course, while all totalitarian states are surveillance societies, not all
surveillance societies are totalitarian states. But even in putatively demo-
cratic polities where the purposes of monitoring are generally benign, such
extensive powers are bound to be misused, particularly as those doing the
snooping have to work in secrecy. To quote Tim Berners-Lee again: “The idea
that we should routinely record information about people is obviously very
dangerous. It means that there will be information around which could be
stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators,
and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government
or people in the military. We open ourselves out, if we store this informa-
tion, to it being abused.”155 Confidential personal data collected under the
last Labour government in Britain was repeatedly lost or leaked, regardless
of the safeguards.
Neither will panoptic surveillance be very effective at deterring crimi-

nals, who can encrypt their data or find alternative means of communication.
Those primarily affected will be the overwhelming majority of people who
never commit any crimes. The proposed legislation will simply add moun-
tains of irrelevant information to existing stockpiles, making it even more
difficult to find all-important “needles” in a vastly enlarged “haystack.”156
According to James Ball, “More than a trillion emails a year are sent from
the UK.”157 Stasi officials drowned in masses of minutiae, becoming victims
of their own attempts at omniscience. The ears of the MfS were long, but
the space between them was often rather limited.158 Even with the wonders
of modern computer technology, Western intelligence services run the risk
of being unable to see the wood for the trees. In the end, it is human beings,
not computers, who will have to sift and evaluate all this new material.
East German officials used to quip that “trust is fine but surveillance
is better” (Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser).159 Originally attributed to
Lenin, the quote is also said to have been used by the GDR’s minister for
state security, Erich Mielke.160 Whatever its provenance, the motto could
just as well have been adopted by the governments of Tony Blair, Gordon
Brown, and David Cameron. “Trust” is supposed to come entirely from the
innocent citizens being put under surveillance, who are sometimes accused
of paranoia if they object to being watched. Yet the government refuses
to trust its own population, turning everybody into potential suspects. If
creating a “suspect society” is not paranoid, then what is? One is reminded
of Brecht’s observation after the popular uprising of June 17, 1953, in East
Germany: “The people had forfeited the confidence of the government and
could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case
for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”161 In Britain,
we are fundamentally altering the relationship between state and society in
favor of the state, when in a free society it should be exactly the other way
round. The state should be accountable to the people, not the people to the
state. “Nothing to hide, nothing to fear” goes the mantra. Theoretically, in
a perfect world, those with nothing to hide would have nothing to fear. But
we do not live in a perfect world and hopefully never will because perfect
worlds exist only in the minds of totalitarians. Putting people who have
nothing to hide under surveillance is not just an unnecessary violation of
their privacy but also a gigantic waste of resources. An all-encompassing
surveillance apparatus is being constructed that, if it falls into the wrong
hands, could resuscitate the totalitarian monster of the twentieth century.
222 Peter Grieder
Nobody should be complacent enough to think that liberal democracy

could never again slip into existential crisis. If and when it does, there is
a surveillance system already in place for the unscrupulous regimes that
might follow. Their misuse of the “database state” would make the Stasi seem
tame by comparison. Italy was a democracy in 1922. By 1925 it was a fascist
dictatorship. Germany was a liberal democracy in 1932 and a totalitarian
state by 1933. People should ask how the Nazis managed to round up so
many communists within a few short weeks of coming to power. Part of the
answer lies in their use of police records collated by the Weimar Republic.162
Of course, the risk of a totalitarian resurgence in the West is extremely
remote at present. The real and extant danger is that of “sleepwalking” into
a comprehensive surveillance state by a series of small steps. There is no
totalitarian design here. Mielke’s dystopian objective “to know everything
and to report on everything worth knowing”163 is not being pursued by the
current British government. That said, we should not take our civil liberties
for granted. Information is power. Whatever the intentions behind it, blan-
ket surveillance is wholly inappropriate in a democratic society. The road
to hell is paved with good intentions and the most powerful law in history
is the law of unintended consequences. Big Brother is already watching the
people of the United Kingdom, even if it is not the Big Brother of George
Orwell’s 1984 or 1984 in East Germany. The Lives of Others should serve as
a timely warning from history.
Notes
1. “Audio Commentary on Feature and Deleted Scenes by Writer and Director Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck,” The Lives of Others DVD (Lionsgate, 2007); Jens Gieseke, “Stasi
Goes to Hollywood: Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others und die Grenzen der Authentizität,”
German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 581.
2. Manfred Wilke, “Wiesler’s Umkehr,” in Das Leben der Anderen: Filmbuch von Florian
Henckel von Donnersmarck (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), 205–17; Manfred Wilke, “Fiktion
oder erlebte Geschichte? Zur Frage der Glaubwürdigkeit des Films Das Leben der Anderen,”
German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 589.
3. The term “totalitarian state” to describe the GDR is used by Donnersmarck himself.
See “Audio Commentary on Feature and Deleted Scenes.”
4. See also Owen Evans, “Redeeming the Demon? The Legacy of the Stasi in Das
Leben der Anderen,” Memory Studies 3, no. 2 (2010): 164–77; Timothy Garton Ash, “The
Stasi on Our Minds,” in Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name
(London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 328–41; Daniela Berghahn, “Remembering the Stasi in a
Fairy-tale of Redemption: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen,”
Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 321–33; Gieseke, “Stasi Goes to Hollywood”; Thomas
Lindenberger, “Stasiploitation—Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s Historical Creativity in The
Lives of Others,” German Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 557–66; Mary Beth Stein, “Stasi
with a Human Face? Ambiguity in Das Leben der Anderen,” German Studies Review 31, no.
3 (2008): 567–79; Anna Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” Guardian, May 5, 2007, http://www.
theguardian.com/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview12 (accessed April 23,
2012); Neal Ascherson, “Beware, the Walls Have Ears,” Observer, March 11, 2007, http://film.
guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329741495–3181,00.html (accessed April 23, 2012).
5. Peter Grieder, “In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory as a Tool of Historical Scholar-
ship,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 3 (2007): 565.
6. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 10.
7. Evans, “Redeeming the Demon?” 164.
8. Lindenberger, “Stasiploitation—Why Not?” 558.
9. Ibid., 559.
10. Reinhard Mohr, “Das Leben der Anderen: Stasi ohne Spreewaldgurke,“ Der Spiegel,
March 15, 2006, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/0,1518,druck-406092,00.html (accessed
April 23, 2012).
11. Funder, “Tyranny of Terror”; also see Stevan Pfaff, “The Lives of Others: East Germany
Revisited?” German Historical Institute Bulletin 41 (Fall 2007): 111.
12. Anna Funder, Stasiland (London: Granta Books, 2003).
14. Ibid.
15. Wilke, “Wiesler’s Umkehr,” 205. On informers who switched sides, see Lindenberger,
“Stasiploitation—Why Not?” 560; and Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” 335.
16. “Das war die DDR. Teil 4: ‘Schild und Schwert,’ ” in Eine Dokumentation über die
Geschichte und den Zeitgeist der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (video, 1993).
17. Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” 335.
18. Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 236.
19. “Drehbuch,” in Das Leben der Anderen: Filmbuch von Florian Henckel von Donners-
marck, 35. These lines appear in the original screenplay but have been cut from the DVD
version.
20. Edward N. Peterson, The Secret Police and the Revolution: The Fall of the German
Democratic Republic (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 268.
21. Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (London: Flamingo, 1997), 177.
22. Ibid., 172–73; quotes on 173.
23. Grieder, “In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory,” 579. See also Grieder, The German
Democratic Republic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 5–6.
25. Mary Fulbrook, “The Limits of Totalitarianism: God, State and Society in the GDR,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997): 49.
26. Grieder, “In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory,” 569.
27. Václav Havel, Václav Havel; or, Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the
224 Peter Grieder
Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber
and Faber, 1989), 53.
28. Ibid., 45. This paragraph has been drawn from Grieder, The German Democratic
Republic, 10–11. See also Grieder, “In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory,” 570.
29. Jennifer Creech, “A Few Good Men: Gender, Ideology, and Narrative Politics in The
Lives of Others and Good Bye, Lenin” Women in German Yearbook 25 (2009): 101, 103–4, 117.
30. Mary Fulbrook, “Heroes, Victims and Villains,” in Rewriting the German Past: His-
tory and Identity in the New Germany, ed. Reinhard Alter and Peter Monteath (Amherst,
MA: Prometheus Books, 1997).
31. Creech, “A Few Good Men.”
32. Lindenberger, “Stasiploitation—Why Not?” 562.
34. Anna Funder, “Eyes without a Face,” Sight and Sound 17, no. 5 (2007): 16–20, cited
in Evans, “Redeeming the Demon?” 168.
35. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Penguin, 1963).
37. Ibid.
38. The Lives of Others DVD.
40. Stein, “Stasi with a Human Face?” 571.
41. “Drehbuch,” 59–60.
42. A. J. P. Taylor, Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 40.
45. Garton Ash, The File, 16.
46. Mike Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality (Harlow: Longman, 2003), 112.
47. Ibid.
48. West Germany’s policy of rapprochement toward the Soviet bloc in general and the
GDR in particular, introduced during the late 1960s.
49. Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, 70.
51. “Drehbuch,” 43.
53. Ibid.
54. John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1999), 9.
56. Fulbrook, Anatomy of a Dictatorship, 49.
57. “Das war die DDR. Teil 4: ‘Wir sind das Volk,’ ” in Eine Dokumentation über die
Geschichte und den Zeitgeist der DDR.
58. See Die besten Witze aus der DDR (Vienna: Tosa Verlag, 2003). For an excellent study
of humor under communism, including the GDR, see Ben Lewis, Hammer and Tickle: A His-
tory of Communism Told through Communist Jokes (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008).
59. Allan Hall, “A Sneak Preview of How Stasi Made GDR a Nation of Spies,” Times,
March 25, 2002, 17, Times Digital Archive (accessed April 25, 2012).
60. Ibid.
61. Koehler, Stasi, 143.
62. John C. Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword of the Party (London: Routledge, 2008), 21.
63. David Childs, The Fall of the GDR: Germany’s Road to Unity (Harlow: Longman,
2001), 38.
64. Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010), 6.
65. Koehler, Stasi, 143–44.
66. Hall, “A Sneak Preview.”
67. Nicholas Shakespeare, Snowleg (London: Vintage, 2005), 253.
68. See Wolfgang Bergsdorf, “Politischer Sprachgebrauch und totalitäre Herrschaft,”
in Die totalitäre Herrschaft der SED: Wirklichkeit und Nachwirkungen, ed. Wolfgang-Uwe
Friedrich, 23–36 (Munich: C. H.Beck, 1998).
69. Eckhard Jesse, “War die DDR totalitär?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte,October 7,
1994, 15.
71. Stein, “Stasi with a Human Face?” 573–74.
72. Ibid., 569–70.
73. Siegfried Mampel, Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit der ehemaligen DDR als
Ideologiepolizei: Zur Bedeutung einer Heilslehre als Mittel zum Griff auf das Bewußtsein für
das Totalitarismusmodell (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1996).
74. See also Peter Grieder, “When Your Neighbour Changes His Wallpaper: The ‘Gor-
bachev Factor’ and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic,” in The 1989 Revolu-
tions in Central and Eastern Europe: From Communism to Pluralism, ed. Kevin McDermott
and Matthew Stibbe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 76–77; Grieder, The
German Democratic Republic, 129.
75. Quoted in Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich, “Bürokratischer Totalitarismus—Zur Typologie
des SED-Regimes,” in Friedrich, Die totalitäre Herrschaft der SED, 17.
76. John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish
Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 284.
77. See “Extended and Deleted Scenes,” The Lives of Others DVD.
78. Karen Leeder, Breaking Boundaries: A New Generation of Poets in the GDR (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1996); Helen Bridge, Women’s Writing and Historiography in the GDR (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, 118.
79. For a conceptualization of East Germany as a totalitarian welfare state, see Grieder,
The German Democratic Republic, particularly 2–6.
80. “Drehbuch,” 31, 32.
81. Ibid., 82. See also Stein, “Stasi with a Human Face?” 572.
82. “Drehbuch,” 74, 80.
83. Ibid., 33. See also Stein, “Stasi with a Human Face?” 572.
84. Mike Dennis, The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1990
(Harlow: Longman, 2000), 145–46.
226 Peter Grieder
85. Hermann Weber, DDR: Grundriß der Geschichte, 1945–1990 (Hannover: Fackel-
träger, 1991), 324.
86. Martin McCauley, The German Democratic Republic since 1945 (London: Macmil-
lan, 1983), 186. See also Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, 75.
87. Schmeidel, Stasi, 90–91.
89. Dennis, The Stasi, 117.
91. Christa Wolf, Was bleibt: Erzählung (Frankfurt: Luchterhand, 1992).
93. Udo Grashoff, “In einem Anfall von Depression . . . ” Selbsttötungen in der DDR
(Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2006).
94. Ibid., 470. See also Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, 117.
95. Author’s interviews with Kurt Hager, December 1, 1992, and April 6, 1994.
96. McCauley, The German Democratic Republic, 186.
97. Jeannette Madarász, Conflict and Compromise in East Germany, 1971–1989: A Pre-
carious Stability (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 120. See also Grieder, The German
Democratic Republic, 75–76.
99. David Childs and Richard Popplewell, The Stasi: The East German Intelligence and
Security Service (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 177.
101. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, Untergang auf Raten: Unbekannte Kapitel der DDR-
Geschichte (Munich: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1993), 538.
102. See Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, chaps. 5, 6.
103. See Grieder, “When Your Neighbour Changes His Wallpaper.”
104. Cheryl Dueck, “The Humanization of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen,” German
Studies Review 31, no. 3 (2008): 599.
105. Pfaff, “The Lives of Others,” 111.
106. Cited in Dueck, “The Humanization of the Stasi,” 601.
107. See Lindenberger, “Stasiploitation—Why Not?” 565.
111. John Burgess, The East German Church and the End of Communism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 106.
112. Childs, The Fall of the GDR, xii; Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” 329.
116. See Schmeidel, Stasi, 26; and Dennis, The Stasi, 6.
118. Ibid., xi.
119. Koehler, Stasi, 9.
120. Ibid., 8.
122. Bruce, The Firm, 184. See also Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, 114.
123. Kate Connolly, “No Remorse: Margot Honecker Defends East German Dictator-
ship; Wife of Erich Honecker Breaks 20-Year Silence to Lament Demise of GDR,” Guardian,
April 3, 2012, 15.
124. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker
(London: Yale University Press, 2005), 8.
125. Madarász, Conflict and Compromise, 195.
127. “Drehbuch,” 150.
128. Fulbrook, Anatomy, 55.
130. Berghahn, “Remembering the Stasi in a Fairy-tale of Redemption.”
132. Dueck, “The Humanization of the Stasi,” 600.
133. Ibid.
134. See ibid., 607.
135. George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, the Phases of Human Progress: Introduction
and Reason in Common Sense (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 284.
136. This famous quotation is the opening sentence in: Leslie Poles Hartley, The Go-
between (London: Hamilton, 1953), 9.
137. See “A New Era for Privacy—No Snoopers’ Charter: Policy Officer Sophie Farthing
Looks at the New Draft Communications Data Bill—How Low Will the Government Stoop
and How Far Will It Snoop?” Quarterly Newsletter of Liberty (Summer 2012): 6–7. This bill,
dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” by its critics, was shelved in April 2013 following protests from
privacy campaigners and the opposition of the Liberal Democrats within the Conservative-
led coalition. However, in June 2013 former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that secret mass
surveillance of e-mails, telephone calls, and Internet traffic was already happening through
the PRISM and Tempora programs of the NSA and British Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ), respectively. Some argue that the NSA’s capture and storage of ordi-
nary citizens’ metadata violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but
upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
138. Ian Katz, “Tim Berners-Lee Urges Government to Stop the Snooping Bill. Exclusive:
Extension of Surveillance Powers ‘A Destruction of Human Rights,’ ” Guardian, April 17, 2012,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/17/tim-berners-lee-monitoring-internet/
print (accessed April 25, 2012).
139. Ibid.
140. “The State Isn’t Going to Read All Your Email—It’s Worse than That,” N02ID News-
letter, 2nd ser., no. 5, April 25, 2012.
228 Peter Grieder
141. “Giant Database Plan ‘Orwellian,’ ” BBC News, October 15, 2008, http://news.bbc.
co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7671046.stm (accessed May 3, 2012).
142. “UK Government Drops ‘Orwellian’ Database Plans,” Neowin, April 27, 2009, www.
neowin.net/news/uk-government-drops-orwellian-database-plans (accessed May 3, 2012).
143. “A New Era for Privacy,” 6.
144. Bruce, The Firm, 91–93.
145. “Das war die DDR. Teil 4: ‘Schild und Schwert.’ ”
147. See Timothy Garton Ash, “Our State Collects More Data than the Stasi Ever
Did: We Need to Fight Back,” Guardian, January 31, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
commentisfree/2008/jan/31/immigrationpolicy.politics/print (accessed April 23, 2012).
148. Ibid.
149. “Britain Is ‘Surveillance Society,’ ” BBC News, November 2, 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm (accessed April 26, 2012).
150. Richard Ford, “Beware Rise of Big Brother State, Warns Data Watchdog,” Times,
August 16, 2004, 1, Times Digital Archive (accessed April 26, 2012).
151. “Waking Up to a Surveillance Society,” press release from the information
commissioner’s office, November 2, 2006, http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/
pressreleases/2006/waking_up_to_a_surveillance_society.pdf (accessed April 26, 2012).
152. “Britain Is ‘Surveillance Society.’ ”
153. Anthony B. Newkirk, “The Rise of the Fusion-Intelligence Complex: A Critique of
Political Surveillance after 9/11,” Surveillance and Society 8, no. 1 (2010): 1,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/fusion/
fusion (accessed April 26, 2012).
154. “Britain Is ‘Surveillance Society.’ ”
155. Katz, “Tim Berners-Lee Urges Government to Stop the Snooping Bill.”
156. James Ball, “Triumph of Surveillance: Vows to Protect Online Privacy Are Exposed
as Hollow by a Plan to Vastly Extend Online Monitoring,” Guardian, April 3, 2012, 28.
157. Ibid.
158. Grieder, The German Democratic Republic, 91.
159. Childs, The Fall of the GDR, 36.
161. See “The Solution,” in Bertolt Brecht Poems, 1913–1956, ed. John Willet and Ralph
Manheim, with the cooperation of Erich Fried (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), 440.
162. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin, 2004), 331.
163. Dennis, The Stasi, xii.
Part 5
The Stasi in the GDR
Ulrich Mühe (as Gerd Weisler).

12
The Stasi
An Overview
Jens Gieseke
Translated by Mary Carlene Forszt and David Laurence Burnett
Editors’ note: The following is an abridged version of an essay on the

Stasi that first appeared in the indispensable volume A Handbook of the
Communist Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944–1989, edited
by Krzysztof Persak and Łukasz Kamiński, published by the Institute of
National Remembrance in Warsaw in 2005. Gieseke’s contribution, like the
others in that volume, is truly comprehensive and extraordinarily detailed.
For reasons of space, the present version has been reduced in size. We have
also included an abbreviated version of Gieseke’s extensive bibliography so
readers can direct themselves to this literature. Gieseke’s in-text citations
refer to works listed there.
1. Organization and Structures of the Security Apparatus

The inner security apparatus in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
was divided into two ministries: the Ministry of the Interior (MdI), with
the German People’s Police (Deutsche Volkspolizei—DVP) as the regular,
“public” police force, and the Ministry for State Security (MfS) as the
political secret police and intelligence service. For a brief period, from
July 1953 to November 1955, State Security was formally subordinate
to the Ministry of the Interior in the form of a permanent secretary’s
231
232 Jens Gieseke
office, though in reality it was always independent. This contribution

deals systematically only with the Ministry for State Security as the core
institution of the communist security apparatus. The People’s Police is
dealt with only where it was directly involved in politically motivated
repression.
By its origin and design, the Staatssicherheit (or, more colloquially,
Stasi) was a secret police organization that watched over and fought
against opponents of the party dictatorship—or those it held to be such.
It could arrest people and keep them prisoner in its own interrogation
and detention facilities until they could be brought to trial. Additionally,
it strove to bring the whole of society under its control. At the same time,
the GDR’s State Security Service was one of the world’s most successful
intelligence services for espionage and counterespionage. Over the dec-
ades the apparatus grew into a large-scale bureaucracy with numerous
additional tasks: it provided bodyguards to protect leading East German
functionaries and operated the Politburo settlement in Wandlitz (near
Berlin); it placed passport inspectors at border crossings and monitored
the flow of traffic between East and West Germany; it monitored and was
involved in weapons and technology trade; and finally, it ran a sports
club, FC Dynamo Berlin, which won the national football championship
on numerous occasions.
In the cold war context, it saw itself as part of the global system conflict
between socialism and “imperialism” that was being waged on German soil
between two separate states. Due to this situation, inner political and social
conflicts were viewed in principle as being controlled by West German or
other “imperialistic” secret services and “enemy” organizations. Accord-
ingly, internal “counterintelligence” and external “reconnaissance” closely
cooperated, thereby blurring the boundaries between intelligence service
activities and domestic repression.
It goes without saying that the paradigm for the MfS was the Soviet
secret police, founded by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and developed under
Stalin into institutions (State Political Administration [GPU], All-Russian
State Political Administration [OGPU], People’s Commissioner for Inter-
nal Affairs [NKVD], People’s Commissioner for State Security [NKGB]) of
mass terror within society and the party. Like all members of the socialist
“brother organs,” MfS employees liked to describe themselves as “Chekists”
in the spirit of the legendary Extraordinary Commission for Combating
Counterrevolution and Sabotage of 1917.
The Stasi 233
2. The Methods of Security Apparatus Operational Work

(Surveillance Techniques and Technologies)
The main methods of the State Security Service during the early years con-
sisted of arbitrary arrests and extorting confessions using unceasing nightly
interrogations and other torture methods. These aimed to prove that the
person under arrest was involved in espionage activities for Western intelli-
gence services and underground organizations such as the Task Force against
Inhumanity, the Association of German Youth, or the Eastern offices of the
Western political parties and trade unions. Nor did the Stalinist mindset
adopted during industrialization accept production stoppages as a result
of worn-out or overloaded machines, wanting to expose them instead as
hostile acts of sabotage.
In the course of de-Stalinization in 1956–1957, the standard practice of
continuous interrogation and other types of torture was eventually called
into question. From spring until autumn of 1956, the number of arrests made
by the MfS substantially decreased. Only after the closing of the sector bor-
der in Berlin did the MfS resume drastic measures, arresting East German
citizens who protested against the construction of the Wall as well as other
personae non gratae previously spared in order to avoid unrest (and thus
a further increase in the number of flights to the West). Direct compulsion
therefore remained at the core of MfS practice, backed by the equally effec-
tive use of the unspoken threat. However, other methods of intelligence
service surveillance took on greater importance. Following the consolida-
tion of political power after the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961
and the new de-Stalinizing impulses of the Twenty-second Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in October 1961, the MfS’s
frame of reference shifted somewhat. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany
(SED) leadership under Ulbricht was looking to expand its remit.
On the one hand, the changes affected secret police practices: investiga-
tors and prison warders less frequently committed open brutalities against
prisoners; prison conditions, while still degrading, were eased somewhat.
The repertoire of criminological and intelligence-gathering techniques was
expanded; the permanently increasing number of full-time employees and the
quantitative and qualitative improvement of the informant network made it
possible to extend secret police operations into the main battle lines of oppo-
sition activities. On the other hand, preventive reconnaissance of potential
trouble spots became a field of operations as important as direct persecution.
234 Jens Gieseke
From 1964 onward, the MfS established a network of “security repre-

sentatives” headed by the inspection division of the Council of Ministers. In
the head offices of the economic bureaucracy (ministries, public offices) of
the centrally regulated organizations of the state-owned factories as well as
in the 459 most important combines, enterprises, and institutions, the secu-
rity representative positions were filled with officers on special assignment
(OibE). After 1968 the top economic OibE was the head of the Inspection
Department in the Council of Ministers, Harry Möbis.
The efforts of the GDR leadership to establish an international reputation
and the “hostile” influences that entered East Germany through Western
contacts, which were growing by leaps and bounds, curtailed the leeway of
the MfS to use openly forceful measures. Nevertheless, the State Security
did not take these changes as an opportunity to limit its activities—on the
contrary, it increased the degree of concealed surveillance and modified its
methods. With the help of the considerably expanded network of unofficial
informers, not only was every “hostile” activity to be exposed in its incipient
stages, it was to be combated by conspiratorial means (means that would
not be recognizable to the person targeted by the Stasi).
Arrests could arouse the interest of Western journalists accredited in the
GDR. Therefore, everything had to be done first to “switch off ” human rights
activists and people wanting to defect. Among other things, along with the
“operational psychology” methods increasingly integrated into MfS work in
the 1970s, covert “demoralization measures” were taken up to cause or stir
up conflicts between group members, to weaken or thwart their connection
to church institutions, and to limit or squelch the opposition’s commitment.
It was decisive that the State Security was not recognizable as the real
wire puller in these operations. Such measures were supposed to be used
when “due to political and political-operational reasons in the interest of
realizing a greater social benefit, the respective operational procedure was
not to be concluded with criminal prosecution” (directive 1/76)—for exam-
ple, if direct repression would have caused too much outcry and thereby
endangered German-German negotiations.
Even in the 1970s and 1980s the State Security Service did not limit
itself to such methods but also arrested citizens when this seemed neces-
sary and it had gathered sufficient “evidence.” Then Main Department IX
came into action, the so-called examination organ of the MfS. This depart-
ment also took proceedings out of the hands of the People’s Police if they
were “politically-operationally” relevant for other reasons, for example, if
The Stasi 235
full-time employees or unofficial informers were involved too. The inter-

rogators and watchmen only rarely used physical force, but they used the
whole gamut of “white torture” (emotional pressure) to induce the inter-
rogated person to make statements or confess to crimes. In the course of
preferring charges and court proceedings, the examination organ of the MfS
had a significance that far exceeded its formal position. In effect, the State
Security Service directed the scene in political trials right up to the verdict;
in prominent cases it asked state and party leader Honecker for a “sugges-
tion” about the sentence.
The MfS reserved for itself the right to seal up sections of inquiry files that
contained “unofficially” gained information. The public prosecutor’s offices
and courts responsible for political trials were under the cadre policy control
of the MfS. They were infiltrated by unofficial informers and, in important
positions, by officers on special assignment. They maintained intensive per-
sonal contacts with the leaders of the MfS inquiries. Not least of all, in some
cases the State Security Service worked together with the defense lawyers.
During preliminary proceedings the prisoners were detained in the
interrogation/detention centers of line XIV. There they were exposed
to various types of torment: the cells could be bugged; in addition, the
MfS employed fellow prisoners as “cell informers.” They were supposed
to spy on prisoners in exchange for privileges. While sentenced political
prisoners normally served their sentences in other East German deten-
tion centers, the State Security in special cases (such as those involving
MfS employees who had deserted) kept prisoners in their interrogation/
detention centers, where some of them were imprisoned as so-called
numbered prisoners.
Apart from the methods of arrest and direct persecution, the MfS had the
entire secret service and criminological system at its disposal. This included
the collaborative work of unofficial informers (see below) as well as diverse
methods of technical surveillance.
Division M and its territorial offshoots monitored post and package
shipments. They had their own rooms in the main post offices of the GDR,
in which MfS employees (in this case mostly women) checked the post by
both random and targeted sampling. Postal monitoring played a pivotal role
as early as the 1950s due to the high volume of letter and parcel post cross-
ing over the German-German border. By the 1980s, MfS postal inspectors
could handle around ninety thousand letters and sixty thousand packages a
day. During holiday seasons such as Christmas and Easter the figures were
236 Jens Gieseke
considerably higher. The MfS even invented its own machines, enabling it
to automatically open and reseal large quantities of letters.
Department 26 was responsible for audio and visual surveillance mea-
sures of every kind, including telephone surveillance and observation of
rooms using “bugs” and cameras. This branch of the MfS grew alongside
the expansion of the private telephone network in the GDR. Department 26
at MfS headquarters alone grew from 65 employees in 1955 to 436 in 1989.
Added to this were corresponding units in the regional administrations and
district offices. In 1989 the district offices each had sixteen to one hundred
and the regional administrations two hundred to five hundred bugged lines
available for simultaneous use. In East Berlin alone, twenty thousand tel-
ephones could be tapped at the same time.
Shadowing and, if necessary, arresting individuals fell under Main
Department VIII’s area of responsibility. In 1989 nearly forty-five hundred
staff members were employed in this line at the central and regional admin-
istrations. A “dovetailing” service unit that was aimed more at external tasks
was Main Department III. It was supposed to monitor radio traffic in the
GDR and also, at the same time and with considerable effort, the line-of-
sight radio links between West Berlin and the Federal Republic as well as
conversations via radio telephone in the Bonn area. It is said that between
thirty thousand and forty thousand telephone connections were tapped
in the West. Technical equipment and related items were provided by the
Operational-Technical Sector (OTS) and the Department for Weapons and
Chemical Services (BCD). The MfS even secretly took body scent samples
of supposed dissidents and marked objects with radioactive substances.
Finally, the paths of “official” influence and information via the SED party
machinery, the People’s Police, the government administrations and eco-
nomic apparatuses, the cadre sections, army district defense commands, and
mass organizations were equally important. This all added up to a policy of
“total surveillance”—with bugs and cameras, telephone, radio and postal
surveillance, searches of flats and workplaces, and shadowing of suspects.
3. The Main Focuses of Security Apparatus Activities:

Stalinism, 1950–1956
In the early years—until February 1956—the Stasi established itself as an
instrument of “bureaucratic terror” in SED social politics and in the Ger-
man-German conflict of systems. Top priority was given to the struggle
The Stasi 237
against enemy organizations working out of the West: the Eastern offices
of the Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and the Liberal Democratic
Party as well as the German Federation of Trade Unions, the Investigating
Committee of Free Lawyers (a shelter for judges, public prosecutors, and
administrative officials purged from their positions), and the militant Task
Force against Inhumanity. Added to this were offices such as the American
radio broadcaster in Berlin, RIAS, and—of course—the secret services,
including the West German Gehlen Organization (precursor of the Federal
Intelligence Service). Also considered as “hostile organizations” were con-
cerns and enterprises based in the Federal Republic whose assets had been
expropriated in the GDR.
It goes without saying that all of these offices had sources in the GDR.
Yet the SED and State Security did not content themselves with finding
merely these. The fateful logic of Stalinism meant that, in principle, anyone
and everyone holding a deviating opinion or position or those who, even
through no action of their own doing, became an object of scrutiny were
declared to be secret agents, saboteurs, and bandits in the service of these
“enemy headquarters.” In actual fact, the SED was waging a cold civil war on
the home front and beyond the demarcation line with the aim of carrying
through its course of political and social transformation.
The Stasi arrested, for instance, politicians of the “bourgeois” parties
that had been forced into line, such as Foreign Minister Georg Dertinger
(Christian Democrat) in December 1952, accused of being a spy, and the
minister for trade and supply Karl Hamann (Liberal Democrat) on charges
of being a saboteur. Numerous Social Democrats who refused to accept the
course of the Unity Party or were to be removed from their posts for other
reasons also became victims. Many young people were also arrested: for
example, for distributing leaflets protesting the political course. All of these
persons arrested were given long prison sentences. Nearly twenty-eight hun-
dred Jehovah’s Witnesses were likewise arrested between 1950 and 1955 for
allegedly being American agents. With the remilitarization of the GDR in
1952 (creation of the Barracked People’s Police) the Protestant youth group
Junge Gemeinde—which with its open atmosphere of pacifism offered a
sanctuary for many young people still traumatized from the Second World
War—likewise came under pressure.
The inner terror reached its pinnacle in the wake of the Second Party
Conference of the SED in July 1952. It was here that Walter Ulbricht pro-
claimed the “Construction of Socialism” in the GDR, thereby ushering in a
238 Jens Gieseke
new stage of the transformation process. The party conference resolved: “One
should bear in mind that the intensification of the class struggle is inevitable
and that the working people must break the resistance of hostile forces.”
Many farmers, craftsmen, and merchants were brought to court for
alleged “economic crimes.” At the same time the GDR adopted from the
Soviet Union the draconian disciplining of workers. The “Law for the Pro-
tection of National Property” prescribed tremendous penalties for minor
offenses: workers were sentenced to a minimum of one year imprisonment
for stealing a coal briquette or a pound and a half of sauerkraut. In more
serious cases of theft one ran the risk of being sentenced to the “twenty-five
years” notorious in Soviet law—spent there in a “work-reform camp” and
in the East German case in a penitentiary.
Moreover, during the Stalinist purges in the early 1950s the MfS carried
out, together with the Central Party Control Commission, investigations
against purported “elements hostile to the party” as well as alleged Trot-
skyites and Titoists. Among the most prominent victims were the deputy
chairman of the West German Communist Party (KPD), Kurt Müller, and
the East German railways director, Wilhelm Kreikemeyer, whose death
while in MfS custody remains unclarified even today. Even the leading
functionary Paul Merker, a Politburo member since 1927, was expelled
from the SED in 1950 and arrested by the MfS in 1952. Because of his
contacts to the alleged American spy Noel Field, he was at first slated to
become the main defendant in a show trial. In 1955 he was sentenced to
eight years in prison. The court acquitted him in July 1956 as a result of
the subsequent political thaw.
During the uprising on June 17, 1953,1 the MfS had to prove its useful-
ness in the face of inner disturbances. The guard units protected party and
government buildings, including the House of Ministries in Berlin, while the
employees of other service units formed task forces to arrest the “ringleaders”
or tried to protect MfS buildings. Since Wilhelm Zaisser (first minister for
state security, 1950–1953) had forbidden shooting at demonstrators and the
MfS employees had not been suitably trained, only the Soviet troops saved
the secret police from disaster. Demonstrators stormed the district offices
in Bitterfeld, Görlitz, Jena, Niesky, and Merseburg and shot an employee in
front of one Magdeburg prison. In Rathenow an irate mob lynched a man
well known in the town as a former K-5 (Branch 5 of the Criminal Investi-
gation Department) member.
The Stasi reacted to the June crisis by building up its own information
The Stasi 239
system and taking greater precautions for a potential civil war. It began set-
ting up independent information groups that were supposed to combine their
collected reports into “mood reports.” Due to the small size of the groups and
the lack of qualified personnel, however, their usefulness remained limited.
With defeat on June 17, 1953, being averted only by the Soviet army,
the SED leadership prepared more intensively for the eventuality of mili-
tary conflict or domestic unrest in the GDR. In 1954, with this aim in view,
the leadership formed a Security Commission as well as district and local
operational staffs in which the State Security was also represented. MfS guard
units in the former provincial capitals (except for the Berlin Guard Regi-
ment) were combined with some of the stand-by police units, which had
previously been under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, to form
the “domestic troops.” Together with the border and transport police, they
were subordinated to Deputy Minister Gartmann in 1955. Because Ernst
Wollweber (minister for state security, 1953–1957) regarded these large
newly formed units as a foreign body in the MfS, they were put under the
authority of the Ministry of the Interior in the spring of 1957. This meant
that the Berlin Guard Regiment was the only military unit left in the MfS.
In November 1956, with the Hungarian Revolution and the June crisis in
mind, the Politburo approved a multistage plan to suppress civil unrest using
armed East German troops as well as Soviet troops if necessary. According
to the “first stage,” the People’s Police, armed MfS units, and the paramilitary
task forces of the working classes (Kampfgruppen) would suppress distur-
bances using “simple police means” such as water cannons and by sealing
off areas. NVA (National People’s Army) units would only be called into
action in exceptional situations.
Foreign espionage, now part of the ministry, began to increase in
importance as of 1955, when a slight détente emerged in East-West rela-
tions. The East European secret services “compensated” accordingly with a
course correction. Secret activity aimed at the West was to be substantially
expanded, with regard both to espionage and to subversive actions in the
opposing camp. The MfS district administrations formed their own espio-
nage departments and the Western assignments of the counterintelligence
lines were expanded. In line III (national economy), for example, working
groups were set up for activities against Western manufacturing concerns.
Among other things, they were supposed to engage in industrial and military
espionage. The work against “internal enemies” was to take second place to
this new main area of emphasis.
240 Jens Gieseke
De-Stalinization and Recovery, 1956–1971

With the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU in Feb-
ruary 1956 Ulbricht endeavoured to limit the repercussions. Numerous
political prisoners were released (see below) and uncertainty spread as to the
future tasks of State Security. Secret police in general became the target of a
wave of criticism. The “specter” lasted little more than half a year, however.
The inner disturbances in Poland and Hungary, combined with the revolt
of party intellectuals and students in the GDR, gave Ulbricht cause for a
renewed change in policy: he shifted the main emphasis from direct actions
against Western intelligence services and underground organizations to the
internal opposition forces in the GDR, which had been influenced, “softened
up,” and “subverted” by “imperialist” ideology. Erich Mielke (minister for
state security, 1957–1989) willingly took on this change in policy, having
demonstratively rejected the criticism of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress
of the CPSU. Nor did he later make any secret of his admiration for the
“great Soviet leader.”
In 1957–1958, following the new party line of the Thirty-fifth Plenum
of the Central Committee, Mielke further developed the MfS definition of
the enemy under the concept of “political-ideological subversion” (politisch-
ideologische Diversion—PID). He traced all forms of domestic opposition in
socialist countries back to the influence of “imperialistic enemy headquar-
ters,” whether there were direct, provable intelligence incursions or only
intellectual influence. The Stasi trained its sights particularly on positions
both within the SED and outside the party supporting democratic social-
ism critical of Stalinism. These were castigated as “social democratism [sic],
opportunism, revisionism.” The “PID doctrine” was the State Security’s
justification for its constantly growing presence in all areas of life in the
following decades.
Between the Fifth Party Conference of the SED in 1958 and the con-
struction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the main task of the MfS lay in the
fight against illegal border crossing. Those who inspired and organized
such actions were to be arrested. In addition, in 1959–1960 a large number
of employees were engaged in the recruitment of fighting brigades push-
ing forward the collectivization campaign in agriculture. Farmers were put
under pressure through interrogations and threatened by drumhead courts
with punishment for real or fictitious offenses if they were not prepared to
join the collective farms. The fight against allegedly omnipresent “political-
The Stasi 241
ideological subversion” provided Mielke with a legitimate reason to build

up State Security into a “government office authorized to exercise control
over the rest of the apparatus of state,” as senior SED functionary Hermann
Matern complained in 1962.
At this point the future role of the Stasi in the walled republic had by
no means been decided by the party leadership: the important KGB role
model was having to reorient itself during the thaw under Khrushchev;
Ulbricht was propagating the “socialist human community” and had ini-
tiated reforms; the army and police had to accept budget cuts. But just as
Honecker succeeded in mobilizing the “conservative” interests of the party
against any spirit of reform, so Mielke succeeded after 1963–1964 with his
ideas for the development of State Security. In the 1960s the MfS system-
atically enlarged both its internal analysis and its secret official reporting
to the SED leadership. The MfS took the economic reforms of the “New
Economic System” after 1963 as an opportunity for amplified activities in
the national economy. Already it had jealously guarded the surveillance of
the ambitious and politically sensitive buildup of an aviation programme
in the GDR, riddled with purportedly “unreliable” engineers, as its own
pilot project. Nevertheless, the scheme was abandoned by the Politburo in
1962—even the MfS had been unable to prevent its failure. Exposing hostile
activities in the economy was, according to Mielke, the main task of the MfS
in contributing to an increase in productivity.
In the spirit of prevention, the Stasi not only strove to be broadly present
in every area of society but also expanded into personnel-intensive police
tasks that only indirectly concerned secret police activity. These included
passport controls at the border crossings of the GDR in 1962 and the super-
vision of holiday traffic crossing the intra-German border in 1963–1964.
The working groups formed for these purposes were united in 1970 in Main
Department VI. This additional area of responsibility arose from the expe-
rience gained during 1963–1966, when a limited border pass agreement
had been in effect, enabling inhabitants of West Berlin to cross over to the
Eastern part of the city for the first time since 1961. The MfS had set itself
the task of surveilling the onslaught of approximately 1.2 million visitors
during the Christmas season of 1963. To this end it had obliged all employ-
ees to work on special task forces. Additionally, the border intelligence unit
of the border police (already under the leadership of a covert MfS officer
on special assignment since 1959) was placed under MfS authority, while
a division of labor was determined with the military espionage unit of the
242 Jens Gieseke
National People’s Army. The State Security Service thereby consolidated its
position vis-à-vis the other armed forces.
“Personal protection” was an area of influence that took on a special
meaning and atmosphere when it involved state and party functionaries:
the MfS provided not only bodyguards but also the complete staff of the
Wandlitz Politburo settlement, right down to the sales personnel in the
special supermarket supplied with Western products. The total care and
provision of functionaries and their families living there was dispensed
from the hand of the MfS.
The Stasi discovered a broad field of activity in the propaganda war
against the Federal Republic in the 1960s. It used the collection of Nazi
materials it had been building up since the 1940s to denounce actual or
supposed Nazi perpetrators who held office in Bonn: for example, in poli-
tics, business, and law enforcement. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem 1961
as well as the Nazi trials in the Federal Republic provided the occasion
to tap a continuous-observation pool of former concentration camp staff
tracked down in the GDR, providing stool pigeons but also, if required, the
accused. Party and MfS staged trials in absentia against politicians in Bonn
and released incriminating documents (forged if necessary) in the West.
On the other hand, they kept investigative reports to themselves about the
whereabouts of Nazi perpetrators, such as Erich Gust, the alleged murderer
of KPD leader Ernst Thälmann, in order to be able to accuse the West Ger-
man judicial authorities of inaction and lack of zeal.
Finally, the Stasi prepared itself more intensively for possible actions
involving civil unrest or national defense. All employees received mili-
tary training. The sabotage unit of the MfS (which had existed since 1953)
received reinforcements from the NVA’s special forces for “partisan opera-
tions.” These had also trained West German Communists as underground
fighters and had built up a logistic network in the Federal Republic. In 1964
Mielke ordered special training for individual military specialists (radio
operators, divers, parachutists, and explosives specialists). In addition,
from 1959 on the first indications can be found for plans to intern “hostile-
negative” forces in the case of unrest. The mobilization directive 1/67 thus
contained a detailed system for the creation of isolation camps. Moreover,
the MfS guard regiment was developed substantially, in 1967 receiving the
honorary name Feliks E. Dzierzynski after the founder of the Extraordinary
Commission for the Battle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Cheka),
and by 1970 numbering approximately seventy-nine hundred.
The Stasi 243
In a nutshell, the State Security Service during the 1960s developed into
a post-Stalinist, large-scale bureaucracy, a “general enterprise for security,
securing power and oppression” (Henke et al. 1995–). The “Prague Spring”
in 1968 and its violent end at the hands of Warsaw Pact troops proved to be
a test case for the efficiency of the apparatus. This (historically final) attempt
at reforming communism along humane, democratic lines corresponded
in almost textbook fashion to the MfS’s perception of the enemy and its
“political-ideological subversion.” The Stasi took part with its own forces
in turning the course of events in Czechoslovakia; after the successful sup-
pression it helped the Czechoslovakian secret police to purge its apparatus
of reformers and reconsolidate it. In the GDR itself there was a wave of
over twenty-one hundred protests and more than five hundred investiga-
tive proceedings, mainly for “propaganda hostile to the state,” against East
German citizens who had publicly shown their solidarity with the cause of
the Prague Spring. But the MfS could sum up: “There was no serious dis-
cord or unrest nor were there any occurrences, involving larger population
groups, which could have expanded into political actions against the GDR
and the measures taken by the five Warsaw Pact states” (quoted in Tantzscher
1994, 35). In this respect the State Security Service had absolutely fulfilled
its repressive function. Preventive surveillance, however, had been shown to
have gaps: not even a quarter of all registered protest cases had been solved,
and in those in which the MfS was successful, it turned out that they mostly
involved individuals who had not previously attracted negative attention.
The Honecker Era, 1971–1989

The foreign policy of the GDR in the 1970s, which concentrated on inter-
national recognition and thus required a partial opening to the West, con-
fronted the Ministry for State Security with an “extraordinarily crucial test.”
The aim of the state and party leadership, to break through the foreign-policy
isolation of the GDR and to draw legitimacy from the creation of this inter-
national reputation, demanded concessions with regard to the social open-
ing of the GDR. The domestic consequences of this development were to be
offset by the State Security. The SED reacted to the German-German Basic
Treaty of December 21, 1972, with extensive security measures in order to
keep the contacts of East German citizens to West Germans, which greatly
increased after this time, under control.
The international debate about the observation of human and civil rights
244 Jens Gieseke
and above all the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki in 1975 also became challenges.
This guarantee of freedom of expression and freedom of domicile, officially
recognized by the GDR, was used by many East Germans as an occasion to
demand changes in domestic policy. In addition to the quantitatively rather
small but politically significant civil rights initiatives, citizens wanting to
leave the country became a central target of MfS persecution. The “driving
back of unlawful migration requests” became one of its most important tasks.
In the view of the party and MfS leadership, the consequences of tol-
erating “political-ideological subversion” could be witnessed in one of the
GDR’s neighbors and allies. As in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the MfS attempted
in 1980–1981 to influence the conflict in Poland, which had been triggered
by the founding of the independent trade union Solidarity and culminated
in the imposition of martial law. In 1980 an MfS operational group had
been set up in Warsaw, with branches in four additional Polish cities, and
had built up its own informer network in this neighboring country. The
Disinformation Department of the Foreign Espionage Directorate carried
out extensive propaganda operations to discredit Solidarity activists. From
the viewpoint of the MfS, Poland had for a time crossed over the threshold
between socialist brother country and “operational area.”
Among the operational branches of the apparatus, Main Department
II (counterespionage) profited the greatest from this expansion: in 1982 it
had almost four times as many employees as in 1968. They were supposed
to infiltrate the diplomatic representative offices of Western countries and
the permanent representative of the Federal Republic and keep them under
surveillance. They were also supposed to observe all journalists accredited
in the GDR and to track down all GDR citizens who made or sought contact
with any of the aforementioned. Thus the seemingly classic system-neutral
“counterespionage” developed into a means of reinforcing the MfS function
of domestic repression. The reason for this was the basic belief of the party
and the State Security Service that dissidence and divergent behavior among
the population of the GDR could be traced back to the direct or indirect
influence of “imperialist” intelligence services.
However, the expansion of the “long 1970s” (1968–1982) was not at all
limited to counterespionage. Based on the principle of the division of labor,
all branches of the apparatus profited from the constant influx of staff. The
degree and intensity of penetration of all spheres of East German society
thereby took on a new quality. The guiding question with respect to “Chekist
The Stasi 245
prevention” that Mielke asked time and again could be reliably answered for
an ever-increasing number of GDR citizens: “Who is who?”
In the political security climate of that time, the MfS large-scale bureau-
cracy was able to become considerably more independent. Branches like
cadre and financial administration and the “rear” service units were given
considerably more personnel. The Berlin central offices grew continually at
a faster pace than the district and area offices. This trend was not unusual
for the state and economic apparatus of “bureaucratic socialism.” However,
it was reinforced by the fact that the secret apparatus was, to a great extent,
factually excluded from the planning mechanisms of the national economy
and the budget, and not externally supervised. For this reason, cost-use
analyses played no role in strategic perspectives during the 1970s.
The most important branches of the MfS apparatus in the 1970s and
1980s will be presented in a brief portrait in order to illustrate the variety
of areas of responsibility and the way they worked together.
Main Department I supervised the area of responsibility of the Ministry for

National Defense, particularly the National People’s Army and the border
troops of the GDR. It operated there under the name Administration 2000,
and its head was a “permanent participant” in the staff meetings in the Min-
istry of Defense. In the army and the border units it ran a tight network of
inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (IMs). Under the pressure of military discipline it was
easier to enlist young recruits for informer services; furthermore, particular
security regulations were in force. Additionally, Main Department I also had
reconnaissance tasks to fulfill: the military espionage service of the Ministry
of National Defense was closely connected to the MfS by liaison officers and
IMs. The reconnaissance unit of the border troops, who did espionage work
in the immediate area of the GDR’s national border, consisted exclusively of
full-time MfS employees (the departments Reconnaissance Border Detach-
ment North/Central/South of Main Department I).
Among the tasks of Main Department II (counterespionage), in addi-
tion to surveillance of diplomatic missions and foreign journalists, were
counterespionage in the Foreign Ministry of the GDR as well as at any other
“target” of enemy intelligence services. It maintained operational groups in
Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Sofia. As a special assignment area
it also secured, using intelligence service methods, the cooperation of the
SED and the FDGB (the official association of labor unions in the GDR) with
the West German Communist Party (DKP) and the Socialist Unity Party of
246 Jens Gieseke
West Berlin (SEW). Moreover, the DKP had a secret military organization
at its disposal, with approximately two hundred members who had been
trained by the MfS. Main Department II grew rapidly in the 1970s; in its
Berlin office alone, it had approximately fifteen hundred employees in 1989.
In 1970 the units for passport control and “safeguarding holiday traffic”
were combined into Main Department VI. In the area of responsibility of
this service unit, close dovetailing developed with the border troops who,
among other things, were in command at the border crossings of the GDR,
and the customs administration of the GDR. The head of customs from 1963
on was customs chief inspector Gerhard Stauch, who was at the same time
MfS colonel on special assignment. Besides the immediate border controls
and the accompanying intelligence service activities, all matters regarding
holiday traffic control to and from the GDR, including surveillance of the
“Interhotels,” fell within the competence of Main Department VI.
Similar to the function of Main Department I for the GDR’s armed
forces was the function of Main Department VII for the People’s Police
and other institutions under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior.
These included not only the paramilitary “combat groups of the working
class,” the civil defense staff, but also the State Archive Administration.
Supervision and cooperation played similarly important roles here. The
police frequently served as an auxiliary support organ in the context of
“political-operational interaction” (POZW). Assignment Sector I of the
criminal investigation department (political crime) already cooperated
permanently with the MfS and ran its own informer network. In addition
there existed the People’s Police section assignees with their intermediaries.
Finally, there were close relations to the Penal System Administration of the
MdI, to which the detention centers of the GDR were subordinate. The most
important prison used by the MfS—in addition to its own interrogation/
detention centers—was the Bautzen II prison. This was formally under the
supervision of the Ministry of the Interior but factually controlled to a great
extent by the MfS. Prominent political prisoners who had been pursued by
the MfS served their sentences here.
Further operational service units to be mentioned are the Main Depart-
ments XVIII (national economy) and XIX (traffic, post, telecommunica-
tions), which monitored the national economy and the infrastructure of the
GDR. In the monitoring area of the Main Department (HA) XVIII (until
1964 HA III) and its district branch offices were not only the enterprises and
the collective combines, the planning bureaucracy up to and including the
The Stasi 247
numerous ministries for industry and other economic areas, the apparatus
of the Council of Ministers and that of the State Planning Commission but
also the various scientific academies. In the area of responsibility of Main
Department XVIII, six site offices (Objektdienststellen—OD) were estab-
lished (in the chemical collective combines Buna, Leuna, and Bitterfeld, the
gas collective combine Schwarze Pumpe, the collective combine Carl Zeiss
Jena, and the nuclear power station in Lubmin/Greifswald); an additional
OD could be found at the technical university in Dresden, which belonged
to line XX. In addition, two site offices were established in the 1970s in the
oil refineries of Schwedt and Böhlen. The competence of Main Department
XIX included the transport police in addition to the Reichsbahn (East Ger-
man national railways), the postal system, and airports.
Main Department XVIII was given an important function due to the
central organization of the national economy and its significance for SED
policy. The spectrum ranged from providing protection to enterprises and
industrial counterespionage to security checks in militarily relevant high-
technology areas to stopgap functions in the planning process and technical
modernization help through espionage. The effects of MfS influence on the
East German economy seem contradictory. On the one hand, there are cases
in which State Security, through its parallel apparatus, was able to uncover
and remedy economic mismanagement. On the other hand, for example,
the rigid doctrine of secrecy contributed to the removal of innovative spe-
cialists “for security reasons.”
Main Department XX is often described as the real core of the Ministry
for State Security. In view of its comparatively small size (about 460 employ-
ees in 1989 and about twice this number in the district administrations),
this is of course exaggerated, but it was nonetheless of central importance in
the battle against opposition movements in the GDR. This is where the sec-
tions against PID and the exacerbated form thereof, “political underground
activity” (PUT), were located. The Christian churches and other religious
communities as well as the entire areas of culture and media were monitored
from here. Additionally, Main Department XX was responsible for supervi-
sion of the bloc parties and social organizations of the GDR, the health and
education systems, and sports groups. Leaving aside the SED, which the
MfS was prohibited from monitoring systematically, the Main Department
XX and its branches in the districts and local areas covered practically all
areas of public life in the GDR. Intelligence service “processing” of “PID/
PUT centers” (“centers of subversion and underground activity”) in West
248 Jens Gieseke
Germany and West Berlin was also part of the monitoring of opposition
activities by Main Department XX. Among these centers were German
political institutions and research institutes as well as dissidents who had
left the GDR or been expatriated. In some cases they were tormented with
psychological intimidation and assassination attempts.
It was particularly important to the State Security Service to penetrate
the churches using intelligence service methods because they were the only
social institutions that remained ideologically estranged from the system.
They were not subject to the principles of democratic centralism and thus
also not subject to the direct intervention of the Unity Party. In the 1970s
and 1980s, a great deal of opposition potential converged in the freedom
made possible by these circumstances. With the help of so-called influence
agents, the MfS was supposed to enforce SED policy and interests by con-
spiratorial means. Particularly great importance was attached to the theo-
logical faculties of the state universities and to church lawyers. How far the
influence of the MfS on the leading church committees actually reached is
disputed, but not how intense the efforts were: in 1988–1989 the MfS had
at least eight hundred unofficial informers on the “church line.”
A main area of focus of the Main Department XX in the 1970s was the
penetration of the literature and theater scene in the GDR, which had the
important function of articulating social moods and criticism that could not
be formulated in a directly political manner. Because of the public reputation
of these intellectuals, who for the most part were critically loyal to the GDR,
the State Security Service placed emphasis on preventive surveillance of the
literary scene, making use not least of all of numerous artists and cultural
functionaries serving as unofficial informers. Parallel to the state and SED
cultural bureaucracy and the artists’ associations, the MfS Cultural Depart-
ment functioned in the background as a censorship authority. It endeavored
to do everything in its power to hinder the production of critical literature
and to criminalize authors who had fallen out of favor—for instance, using
the pretext that they had breached exchange control regulations by publish-
ing their works in the West.
In addition to these large main departments, which had essentially
existed since the founding of the MfS (partly under other structural names),
some important service units should be mentioned that rounded off the
range of responsibilities of the MfS in the 1970s and 1980s (or had reached
such a magnitude by then that they eventually became areas of responsibil-
ity in their own right).
The Stasi 249
In 1972 the Working Group XVII was created, which ran the so-called
visitors’ offices in West Berlin, where West Berlin residents had to apply
for entry to the GDR. The staff of the visitors’ offices consisted of full-time
employees and unofficial informers of the MfS. After 1975, as a reaction to the
worldwide increase in terrorist attacks, the State Security Service built up its
own “Terror Defense” unit (Department XXII). The range of responsibilities
of this unit soon reached far beyond the original one of hindering terrorist
attacks against the GDR. This unit observed not only the entire spectrum of
left- and right-wing extremists in the Federal Republic (as long as they were
not closely connected to the DKP, the German Communist Party) but also
numerous other West German organizations and institutions from which
activities critical of the GDR could be expected. Special attention was given
to the attempts of these organizations to extend their sphere of action to
the GDR. Thus, in the 1970s, the attempt of the Maoist, later pro-Albanian
Communist Party of Germany/Marxist-Leninists to set up an East German
section was thwarted with the use of considerable resources.
Above and beyond this “repulsion of danger,” Department XXII soon
played an active role in the international terror scene. Among other things,
it kept surveillance on Arab terrorists who (with the department’s knowl-
edge) used the GDR as a “safe area” and for transit purposes. One of the
most spectacular operations of Department XXII was the accommodation
of ten “dropouts” of the West German terrorist group Red Army Faction
(RAF) at the beginning of the 1980s. They were equipped with new identi-
ties and integrated professionally into the GDR. Between 1980 and 1982,
RAF members made repeated visits to the GDR, where they were trained
in the use of weapons by the MfS. Until now, the logic behind these strictly
secret operations, which were connected to a high foreign policy risk, has
not been conclusively established. Apparently, motives of “anti-imperialist
solidarity” mingled with endeavors to keep the terrorist activities under
control and to influence them.
In 1976 the Central Coordination Group (ZKG) and the corresponding
district coordination groups began their work of battling against escapes to
the West and emigration. Originally the ZKG was supposed to coordinate
MfS activities against the flight of East Germans and the Western organiza-
tions aiding them in their escape efforts. As of 1977, it was also responsible for
the applications for legal exit, which had risen dramatically after the signing
of the final agreement of the Helsinki accords. Together with the People’s
Police and other government agencies, the ZKG was supposed to cut down
250 Jens Gieseke
the number of applications by means of reprisals against applicants, to fight

against Western institutions and organizations that supported those seek-
ing an exit visa, and to thwart attempts within the GDR to pressure for the
support of exit visas through public campaigns and the formation of groups.
Although the number of escapes and attempted escapes declined
constantly until 1985, the number of applicants for “permanent exit” rose
inexorably. In 1984, when a level of 50,000 applications was reached, the
East German leadership opened the sluices for a short time and let almost
30,000 East Germans leave. But the calming effect it had hoped for failed to
materialize; the undertow effect was stronger. Already by the end of 1985
there were 53,000 applications for exit; by the summer of 1989 the number
had increased to 125,000. Thus the “exit movement” became one of the
most important spheres of action for the MfS. Yet the “sword” of the party
proved too dull: neither with repression and criminalization nor by approval
of emigration for particularly stubborn applicants was it able to keep the
problem under control.
Furthermore, in 1983 an independent working group of the sector
“Commercial Coordination” (AG BKK) was formed. The AG BKK took
over (from Main Department XVIII) the intelligence service control and
monitoring of the Commercial Coordination (KoKo) sector, which had been
set up in 1966 in the Ministry for Foreign and Inner-German Trade. KoKo
was initially headed by MfS officer Horst Roigk. Then, in 1967, Alexander
Schalck-Golodkowsi was named head after first being given the rank of
colonel and being sworn in as OibE. Other leading positions were also filled
by OibEs. This sector had the task of improving the foreign currency situa-
tion of the GDR “outside the plan” by weapons sales and other commercial
activities and of secretly acquiring products that were subject to Western
embargo regulations. In Kavelstorf near Rostock the MfS and the KoKo
firm IMES had an extensive weapons depot for transactions with weapons
dealers and countries at war. In the 1980s they delivered weapons to both
Iran and Iraq—then at war with each another.
The practice of “ransoming prisoners,” which had already begun in 1963,
and other humanitarian efforts by the Federal Republic became more and
more significant in this context. The GDR’s negotiator, lawyer Wolfgang
Vogel, led the talks under the close supervision of the MfS. Within the
framework of the German-German agreements, a total of 33,755 political
prisoners were discharged to the Federal Republic, 2,000 children who had
been separated from their parents by the construction of the Berlin Wall
The Stasi 251
were handed over to them, and 250,000 other moves to the West were organ-
ized. For this the GDR received goods and foreign currency to the tune of
about 3.5 billion DM.
In addition to prosecution, the State Security had instructions to keep the
SED Party leadership in East Berlin and the local party leadership informed
about dissidents’ endeavors and the public mood. To do so, it had evaluation
and control groups at its disposal in all branches of the apparatus whose
reports were gathered in the Central Evaluation and Control Group (ZAIG).
The heads of the district offices had to file reports frequently, for the most
part weekly, with the first secretary of the SED district office. In 1988, for
example, the party leadership around Erich Honecker received about three
hundred individual reports from the ZAIG about events, moods, and devel-
opments in the country: for example, travel statistics; private visits by West
German politicians to the GDR; increased efficiency in industry; meetings
of groups of dissidents, rebellious artists, and young “rowdies”; hard cur-
rency income from the required minimum exchange by visiting West Ger-
mans; actions planned by people wishing to leave the country; and internal
matters from the leadership of the Protestant Church. It is possible that the
same amount of information was gathered by foreign espionage. Thus the
MfS had the chance to contribute quite fundamentally to the information
level of decision makers in the GDR. The reports described facts and events
relatively broadly and precisely but abstained from analyzing the causes. A
“concept of the enemy” was ultimately established, which invariably sought
the reason for discord and unrest in the influence of the “imperialistic” West.
The MfS was, then, potentially very well informed through its unofficial net-
work, its cooperation with other agencies, and its surveillance techniques.
Nonetheless, the compulsion to report only successes and the ideological
disciplining of the involved employees hampered its effective function as
a “substitute public.” And if the MfS did supply the Politburo bureaucracy
with negative reports, it frequently met with ignorance. Looking back, SED
Secretary General Erich Honecker said for the records: “I paid little atten-
tion to the reports, because everything that was in them could be learned
from the reports of the Western media”(Andert and Herzberg 1990, 312).
In addition to these most fundamental “subject” and dovetailing lines,
the MfS had a number of further operational and operational-technical
service units at its disposal—for example, the government news/informa-
tion connections. A “backup” apparatus had taken shape behind it in the
course of the 1970s that considerably contributed to its immense size. The
252 Jens Gieseke
Main Department for Cadre and Training alone increased its size fivefold
from 1968 to 1982.
Preparation for possible scenarios regarding defense or domestic distur-
bances was also one of the tasks of the MfS in the 1970s and 1980s. Among
other things, the Minister’s Working Group (AGM) built and maintained the
protective bunker installations for the state and party leadership. A special
troop with military or paramilitary training also belonged to the AGM, the
Central Specific Forces of the AGM/S (“S” for its head, Heinz Stöcker). Until
1987 the AGM/S, together with Department IV, carried out, among other
things, activities in preparation for acts of sabotage in the “Operational Area.”
Traveling agents of these service units scouted, for example, high-tension
masts that the MfS planned to blow up in an emergency. Large “dead letter
boxes” were set up near the masts as depots for detonators and explosives,
which were stocked with the necessary materials by West German citizens.
In cooperation with the Foreign Espionage Directorate, the AGM/S trained
the appropriate cadre from third world countries as well.
How the planned isolation camps would have been used could be seen
in Poland in 1981, when the government there imposed martial law: the
security organs interned a large number of activists of the independent trade
union Solidarity in such camps. However, the East German planning of a
“preventive complex” went substantially further. In 1988, on the lists of the
MfS service units, updated regularly, about three thousand “hostile-negative”
East German citizens were noted down for arrest, eleven thousand were
supposed to be locked up in the planned isolation camps, and more than
seventy thousand were to be kept under heightened surveillance.
The MfS guard regiment Feliks E. Dzierzynski grew from barely eight
thousand in the early 1970s to about eleven thousand, thereby achieving
division strength. In contrast to the rest of the MfS apparatus, the major-
ity of the soldiers serving here did so for only a limited time: in 1989 there
were about twenty-five hundred professional soldiers, as opposed to more
than eighty-five hundred soldiers serving temporarily. These were subject
to a strict recruiting procedure and were bound to serve for three years.
The guard regiment was kept separate from the MfS apparatus in organi-
zational terms; military counterespionage (Main Department I) and the
cadre administration even recruited unofficial informers for surveillance
from among the regular soldiers. These were at the same time an important
source of cadre for the MfS service. The military core of the guard regiment
consisted of the five command areas, with altogether four motorized rifle
The Stasi 253
regiments, ten rifle regiments, and four rifle companies. In periods of peace
they primarily guarded the buildings of the MfS as well as the buildings of
the state and party leadership, and they served as standby reserves at large
events or for economic purposes, such as helping with the grain harvest. In
the event of war or domestic tension, the guard regiment was supposed to
militarily protect the government and party sites under its care. In view of
its considerable size, it can be assumed that this responsibility would have
also included offensive operations if necessary.
The guard regiment had, among other things, armored personnel carri-
ers and mortars at its disposal, but no heavy military equipment. As a rule,
the MfS employees of the other service units were equipped with pistols, in
addition to which large numbers of submachine guns were available. The
immense scope of military preparedness clearly indicates that the Ministry
for State Security was to be equipped for a civil war. It was to be ready to
defend the central positions in the power structure in the event of a new
“June 17,” the experience of which was always the point of reference of such
planning.
In the end phases of the SED regime, the Stasi became less and less suc-
cessful in keeping things under control in its main areas of responsibility.
The constantly increasing number of individuals applying for exit visas to
the West became a fundamental problem. Increasing private and official
contacts wore holes in the Iron Curtain. From the end of the 1970s a politi-
cal opposition had formed among peace, human rights, and environmental
groups under the umbrella of the Protestant Church. The latitude of the MfS
to fight against activities critical of the system was narrowed by the great
public response in the Western media to direct repression of dissidents. Even
using the perfidious psychological intimidation of covert “demoralization
measures,” coercive deprivation of citizenship, and the excessive deployment
of unofficial informers, who stirred up as much conflict as possible in the
opposition groups, the MfS did not succeed in breaking this movement. It
turned out again and again that the mobilization potential was substantially
greater than the originally small core of activists, which had at first consisted
of only a few individuals.
With respect to the economy, the MfS increasingly assumed the role
of a dogsbody forced to bear the results of misguided investment policies
and to find the “guilty ones” responsible for losses, which were steadily pil-
ing up due to antiquated means of production. Criticism of the economic
policy decisions of the Politburo bureaucracy was not permitted, however,
254 Jens Gieseke
not even by the State Security. On the other hand, many economic function-
aries in the State Security, as the head of Main Department XVIII already
complained in 1983, wanted “sheet anchors” in order to “get the chairman
of the State Planning Commission to free up additional funds” (Haendcke-
Hoppe-Arndt 1997, 97).
In addition, many other individuals in the economy faced with constant
bottlenecks and supply shortages tried to use the ostensibly all-powerful secret
apparatus as “grease in the wheels of the economy,” expressing their concerns
and difficulties directly to State Security. Yet they overestimated the capacities
of the MfS, failing to understand its instructions and modus operandi.
The accumulation of system deficits and the additional checking and
surveillance tasks resulting from it were a burden above all to the district
offices: while only 13 percent of the full-time employees worked in these
offices, they monitored more than half of the network of unofficial inform-
ers. “Because of the changed political situation,” Mielke explained at a
service conference in October 1988, the tasks of the district offices were
fundamentally expanded. He cited the most important problems: fighting
“political underground activities,” “repelling applications for emigration,”
security checks in connection with the “enormously increasing holiday
traffic,” analysis of the population’s reactions to political decisions, and the
“carrying out of measures to encourage stability” in important sectors of
the national economy. Given these burdens, many employees had come to
think that a large portion of their activities had “hardly anything to do with
work against the enemy” and “had reached the limits of their operational
capacity” (Süß 1996, 117f.).
Note
1. Editors’ note: What started as a strike of East Berlin construction workers on June 16
became a major political demonstration on the following day. Upward of twenty thousand
people gathered in Berlin near government buildings while a much smaller number actually
stormed the seat of government. The uprising was violently suppressed by Soviet troops.
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Acknowledgments
The chapters by Cantor, Scott, and Taylor first appeared (in somewhat dif-
ferent form) in Perspectives on Political Science, April–June 2011, Vol. 40,
No. 2. We thank Perspectives for permission to reprint here. The chapter by
Wilke first appeared in German as “Fiktion oder erlebt Geschichte? Zur Frage
der Glaubwürdigkeit des Films Das Leben der Anderen,” in German Studies
Review 2008, Vol. 31, No. 3. We thank German Studies Review and Johns
Hopkins University Press for permission to publish an English translation
here. The chapter by Biermann first appeared in German in Die Welt on
March 22, 2006, and then in English at signandsight.com on March 29, 2006.
We thank signandsight.com and Pamela Biermann for permission to reprint
here. The chapter by Gieseke first appeared in A Handbook of the Communist
Security Apparatus in East Central Europe, 1944–1989, edited by Krzysztof
Persak and Łukasz Kamiński (Warsaw, 2005). We thank Jens Gieseke and
the Institute of National Remembrance for permission to reprint here.
The costs associated with permissions, translations, photographs, and
the interview with Gauck were all covered by a generous grant from Skid-
more College. Many thanks are due to Paul Hockenos for his willingness to
undertake the interview and his persistence in securing it. Thanks also to
Dirk Johnson for his translation of the Wilke chapter. We are also grateful
to Peter Grieder for his expertise on East Germany. We benefited from the
wisdom of Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz on many questions related to the
film and this volume.
We also thank the anonymous reviewers for the University Press of
Kentucky both at the proposal stage of the project and after the submission
of the manuscript. Their suggestions have improved the volume immensely.
Steve Wrinn and Allison Webster at the press are models of professional-
ism. We are very grateful for Steve’s patience and guidance throughout the
process. We can’t imagine a better editor.
257
Contributors
Wolf Biermann is a prominent German singer-songwriter and poet. At
the age of seventeen, Biermann emigrated from West to East Germany to
fulfill his attachment to communism. He was later refused membership in
the Socialist Unity Party of the GDR, publicly denounced, and then stripped
of his East German citizenship while on tour in West Germany. Living in
exile, he became a fierce critic of the GDR.
Paul A. Cantor is the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English and

Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia. He is the author of
Shakespeare: Hamlet (1989), Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of
Globalization (2003), and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture (2012). He
writes regularly on film and popular culture.
Joachim Gauck is currently the president of Germany and was the first
federal commissioner for the Stasi Archives, serving from 1990 to 2000. So
integral was Mr. Gauck to administering the archives and investigating the
past crimes of East Germany’s state security that the office was nicknamed
the Gauck Commission. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declara-
tion on European Conscience and Communism. Since 2003 he has been the
chairman of the association Gegen Vergessen—Für Demokratie (Against
Forgetting—For Democracy).
Jens Gieseke is a senior researcher at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische For-

schung in Potsdam. He is the author of Mielke-Konzern: Die Geschichte der
Stasi, 1945–1990 (2001), The GDR State Security: Shield and Sword of the
Party (2002), and Die Stasi, 1945–1990 (2011), among other works.
Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz is professor emerita in the central, eastern, and

northern European studies department at the University of British Colum-
bia. She is the author of The Silenced Theatre: Czech Playwrights without
a Stage (1979) and editor of Goodbye Samizdat: 20 Years of Czechoslovak
259
260 Contributors
Underground Writing (1992). She is currently editing, with Paul Wilson, a

collection of Václav Havel’s writings on the theater.
Peter Grieder is lecturer in twentieth-century history at the University of

Hull, United Kingdom. He is the author of The East German Leadership,
1946–1973: Conflict and Crisis (1999) and The German Democratic Repub-
lic (2012). The latter was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic
Title of 2013.
Paul Hockenos is a journalist based in Berlin. He is currently Germany

and Central Europe correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
His works include Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An
Alternative History of Postwar Germany (2008) and Homeland Calling: Exile
Patriotism and the Balkan Wars (2003).
Dirk R. Johnson is professor of German in the department of modern

languages at Hampden Sydney College and the author of Nietzsche’s Anti-
Darwinism (2010).
James F. Pontuso is Charles Patterson Professor of government and foreign

affairs at Hampden Sydney College. He is the author of Václav Havel: Civic
Responsibility in a Postmodern Age (2004) and editor of Political Philosophy
Comes to Rick’s: Casablanca and American Civic Culture (2005).
Carl Eric Scott has taught at Hampden-Sydney College, Skidmore College,

Washington and Lee University, and Christopher Newport University. He
writes on politics, philosophy, film, and music for the blog Postmodern
Conservative and currently is working on a book about American concep-
tions of liberty.
F. Flagg Taylor IV is associate professor of government at Skidmore Col-

lege. He is the editor of The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Appraisals of Ide-
ology and Totalitarianism (2011) and coauthor of The Contested Removal
Power, 1789–2010 (2013). He is writing a book on the political thought of
the Czech dissidents.
Lauren Weiner, who has contributed articles and reviews to such publica-

tions as the American Interest, Policy Review, First Things, the Weekly Stan-
Contributors 261
dard, American Communist History, and the Wall Street Journal, is writing
a book on communism and American popular culture.
Manfred Wilke, external project leader at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte

Munich/Berlin, was professor of sociology at Fachhochschule für
Wirtschaft Berlin and codirector of the Forschungs-verbund SED-Staat at
the Freie Universität Berlin until his retirement in 2006. He is the author
or coauthor of over a dozen books and numerous articles on East and West
German labor unions, communism, party rule, opposition, and resistance
in East Germany.
Inde x
aesthetics, 145 Blair, Tony, 221
Akhmatova, Anna, 35 bohemian, 42
Alltag film genre, 145 Bolshevik Revolution, 175, 232
Anderson, Sascha, 214 Brecht, Bertolt, 90, 97, 114, 162; and
angst, 143–44 compassion, 44; criticism of GDR,
anticommunism, 202 45–46, 90; and ethics, 100–101;
apparatchiki, 59–60, 117 exile of, 45; on June crisis, 106n16,
Arendt, Hannah: on “banality of evil,” 221; and Life of Galileo, 112, 166–
207–8, 216; on Bertolt Brecht, 67; and Memory of Marie A., 209;
45, 47; on loneliness, 29; on and moral absolutism, 126; and
totalitarianism, 29, 207 Mother Courage and Her Children,
Aristotle, 86, 111–12, 123; Poetics, 112, 93, 100–101, 112; rejection of
128n2; and the tragic, 111–20 realism, 93; and social satire, 93;
art: and politics, 79 support of communism, 36, 44,
Ash, Timothy Garton: on The Lives 47, 90; and The Caucasian Chalk
of Others, 2, 20, 104n2, 105n7, Circle, 66; and The Good Person of
160, 207–9, 218; on Stasi, 205–6, Szechwan, 66, 80n9, 91–98; and The
215–16; on totalitarianism, 22 Threepenny Opera, 100–102; use
Auden, W. H., 97 in The Lives of Others, 91; views on
National Socialism, 42–43
Bautzen II prison, 246 Brockmann, Stephen, 7
beauty, 30, 70–71, 79 Brown, Gordon, 219, 221
Benjamin, Walter, 43 Bruce, Gary, 4–9, 216
Berg, Hermann von, 177–78 bureaucratic terror, 236–37
Berghofer, Wolfgang, 180
Berliner Ensemble, 114 Cameron, David, 221
Berlin Wall, 7, 172–73; construction Central Coordination Group, ZKG,
of, 233, 240, 250; fall of, 69, 87–88, 249–50
123, 138–39, 181, 189 Central Party Control Commission,
Bernstein, Matthew, 2 238
Besançon, Alain, 32; on communist central planning, 140
moral corruption, 58–59, 76 Charter 77, 36
Biermann, Wolf: as dissident, 12, Cheka (All-Russian Commission to
160–61, 188, 213–15; on The Lives Combat Counterrevolution and
of Others, 13, 50–51, 183–88 Sabotage), 175–76, 232, 242
263
264 Index
collaborator, 156 Eisler, Hanns, 46

Communications Data Bill, 218. See epic theater, 112
also United Kingdom Esther, John, 2
communism: moral corruption, 58–60, Euro-socialist, 42
76–77; role of intellectuals in, 42; Evans, Owen, 207
symbols of, 43, 67, 80n10, 115. See
also Third Way FC Dynamo Berlin, 232
Communist Party, 4. See also Federal Republic of Germany, 30, 37;
communism foreign service of, 237; and guilt,
compassion, 44–45, 125, 151 191
corruption, 72, 84, 118 Feinstein, Joshua, 145–46
Czechoslovakia, 156, 165; secret police Field, Noel, 238
of, 243; under Nazi occupation, 157 Freud, Sigmund, 48–49
Fries, Rudolf Fritz, 36
Delsol, Chantal, 60–61 Fuchs, Jürgen, 177, 185
denazification, 6 Fulbrook, Mary, 5; on totalitarianism,
Dennis, Mike, 21, 214 206, 217
Dertinger, Georg, 237 Funder, Anna, 7; criticism of The Lives
de-Stalinization, 223, 240 of Others, 8, 9, 20–21, 31–32, 85,
détente, 209, 239 204–5
Deutsches Theater, 173–74
Divided We Fall, 156 Gauck, Joachim, 6, 189; on
Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel von: everydayness, 192; interview of,
and art, 78; and Brecht, 109n31; 189–202
DVD commentary, 2–3, 43; on Gedeck, Martina, 40, 169, 229
ethics, 99–100; inspiration for The German Book Export and Import
Lives of Others, 24, 44, 57, 147, 174; Company, 212
response to criticism, 86–87; usage German Democratic Republic: art
of Brecht, 91 in, 71, 89; criminal code of, 176–
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 162 77, 179, 238; economy of, 140;
Dreyman, Georg: as Brechtian, 43, foreign policy of, 243; founding
52n23, 66, 90; moral corruption of, 42; and human rights, 234,
of, 72–76; political views of, 37, 41, 243–44; emigration from, 36,
65–67 38; intellectuals in, 213, 240; as
Dueck, Cheryl, 215, 218 post-totalitarian, 21; prisons
of, 235; suicide in, 177, 214;
Eastern bloc: regimes of, 67; security theater’s role in, 115; and West
services in, 4 Germany, 234
East Germany. See German German People’s Police, 231–32,
Democratic Republic 234–35, 239, 246
Eichmann, Adolf, 242 Gestapo, 4, 40, 48, 194
Index 265
glasnost, 69 Huchel, Peter, 196

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 90 Hungarian Revolution, 239
Good Bye Lenin!, 7–8, 83, 198, 204; and Huxley, Aldous, 159
Wolfgang Becker, 8, 11; as post- hypocrisy, 29
totalitarian, 137; as reaction to
Alltag, 146; summary of, 138–40 ideocratic logic, 60–61, 76
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 68–69, 123, 180, ideology, 156, 160
215 inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (IM), 38–39,
Gorky, Maxim, 24, 44, 174 49, 119, 177, 194, 205, 245; amount
gray zone, 156–57 of, 80n3, 180, 216
Grieder, Peter, 20 intellectuals. See German Democratic
Grossman, Vasily, 35 Republic; communism
Grubitz, Anton, 163. See also Iron Curtain, 40, 253; intellectuals
apparatchiki behind, 35
Hager, Kurt, 145, 214 Jäger, Harald, 181

Hamann, Karl, 237 Jähn, Sigmund, 139
Hauser, Paul, 37–39, 65; effect on Jehovah’s Witnesses, 237
Dreyman, 72, 77–78 Jerska, Albert, 39, 44, 67, 70, 196;
Haussmann, Leander, 7 blacklisting of, 68, 115, 212;
Havel, Václav, 4, 19, 21–22, 28–29, effect on Dreyman, 73, 126; and
146; on Czechoslovakia, 20; as loneliness, 29; suicide of, 40, 61, 64,
dissident, 70, 167; on ideology, 32; 74–75
The Power of the Powerless, 23; on June 17, 1953, uprising (June Crisis),
secret police, 141; on socialism, 32; 42, 221, 238–39, 254
on totalitarianism, 206–7. See also
post-totalitarianism Kadergespräche, 193
Havemann, Robert, 177 Kant, Herman, 36
Heidegger, Martin: and authenticity, Kant, Immanuel, 184
142–43; and being, 142; Khrushchev, Nikita, 186, 241
and empathy, 150–51; and Kirsch, Sara, 196
everydayness, 142, 150 Kleinert, Volkmar, 39, 51
Hell, Julia, 36–37, 42 Klíma, Ivan, 155, 161
Helsinki Accords, 249 Knabe, Hubertus, 204–5
Hempf, Bruno. See apparatchiki Koch, Sebastian, 37, 55, 90, 229; on
Hermann, Even, 214 Bertolt Brecht, 52n23
Hohenschönhausen, 39, 172, 177, 179, Koestler, Arthur: Darkness at Noon, 3
185, 204 Kohout, Pavel, 167
Honecker, Erich, 21, 69, 213, 235, Kreikemeyer, Wilhelm, 238
251 Kunert, Günter, 196
Hřebejk, Jan, 156 Kunze, Reiner, 36, 41, 51, 196
266 Index
Lee, Tim Berners, 219–20 and Margarete: Die

Lehmann, Guenther K., 145 Unfähigkeitzutrauern, 191
Leipzig: demonstrations in, 180 Möbis, Harry, 234
Lengsfeld, Vera, 40 Mohr, Reinhard, 204
Lenin, Vladimir, 24, 44, 57, 62, 147; Mrożek, Sławomir, 155–56, 168
and being, 148; as hero, 140–41; Mudarasz, Jeannette, 217
and revolution, 149 Mühe, Ulrich, 40; awards for, 173;
Lewis, C. S., 159 career of, 174
liberal democracy, 213 Müller, Heiner, 37
Lives of Others, The: authenticity of, 3, Müller, Kurt, 238
8, 172, 181, 188, 190; awards for,
1–2, 204; criticism of, 8, 20–21, 30, naïveté, 78, 114, 159, 184
84–86, 99; as post-totalitarian, 19, National Socialism, 42. See also Third
25; praise for, 2, 84; public debate Reich
from, 2, 195; as reaction to Alltag, Neues Deutschland, 177, 180
146; summary of, 2; as tragic, 114, nostalgia. See Ostalgie
123, 126. See also postproduction
Loest, Erich, 36, 41, 51 O’Brien, Mary-Elizabeth, 15
loneliness, 119. See also Arendt, operativer Vorgang (OV), 173, 178. See
Hannah also Stasi
Lysenko, Trofim, 46–47 orientalist, 96
Orwell, George, 84, 205, 209, 212, 219,
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 40 222; 1984, 3
Mandelstam, Osip, 35 Ossis, 6
Marx, Karl, 143; and angst, 143–44; Ostalgie, 7, 204; through film, 7–8, 83
and materialism, 149–50 Ostphobie, 218
Marxism, 20; ideals of, 141; ideology Ostpolitik, 177, 209
of, 175
Masur, Kurt, 180 participatory dictatorship, 50
McCauley, Martin, 215 Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS),
Merker, Paul, 238 49, 88
Mielke, Erich, 172, 184–86, 221–22, Pasternak, Boris, 35–36, 69–70
240–42, 245, 254 Podhoretz, John, 2, 84
Miłosz, Czesław, 8, 20, 22, 200; The Poland, 244; Stasi influence in, 244
Captive Mind, 3; and socialism, 39 Politburo: of GDR, 232, 238
Ministry for State Security (MfS), postproduction of The Lives of Others,
36, 38, 49, 171, 173, 231; decision 14n12, 215
making of, 184; spying on the, 211. post-reunification Germany, 89–90,
See also Stasi; state security 123
Ministry of the Interior, 231 post-totalitarianism, 9, 19, 22, 28, 33,
Mitscherlich, Alexander 146, 151–52n1
Index 267
Prague Spring, 67–69, 81n15, 165, 243; Circle, 40; The GULAG Archipelago,
Warsaw Pact intervention in, 243 60, 185
Pravda, 177 Sonnenallee, 7–8, 197–98, 204
Prenzlauer Berg, 214 Soviet Union (USSR), 6, 177, 215;
and June crisis, 238–39; security
reciprocal rescue, 58, 78 services of, 232
Red Army Faction, 249 Sperber, Manès, 157
“reform communism.” See Third Way Sperling, Stefan, 141
Revel, Jean-François, 6 Spiegel, Der, 30, 41, 121; and
Rodden, John, 6 dissidents, 177
Spiegel Manifesto, 177
samizdat, 70 Staatsdichter, 45
Santayana, George, 218 Staatssicherheitsdienst. See Stasi
Schädlich, Hans Joachim, 210–11 Stalin, Joseph, 19, 35–36, 47, 148; on
Schölzel, Arnold, 197 artists, 175
Schwarz, Ulrich, 177 Stalinism, 20, 47, 140, 177, 223
SED. See Socialist Unity Party Stasi, 4–5, 40, 43; and artists, 248;
self-censorship, 165; as political as bodyguards, 242; as Chekist,
correctness, 165–66 175; and the church, 192,
Sens, Manfred Major, 181 247–48; after de-Stalinization,
Shakespeare, Nicholas: Snowleg, 212 233; disillusionment of officers,
Shalamov, Varlam, 35–36 104–5n7; and economic security,
Sieland, Christa-Maria: betrayal 253–54; employees of, 216–17;
of Dreyman, 120–21; moral former agents of, 48, 187; ideology
corruption of, 63–65; suicide of, of, 61, 212; methods of, 4–5, 38,
122; as tragic, 113, 121–22 49, 173, 209, 223, 233–36; mission
“slactivist,” 41, 52n14 of, 232; and postal service, 211–12,
socialism: bureaucratic, 245; Marxist, 235–36; and prisons, 235; specific
13; “real existing,” 1, 13, 13n1, 31, departments of, 245–52; success
115, 174 of, 216, 219, 232; and telephone
socialist realism, 45. See also Zhdanov, tapping, 236; and the Thaw, 240–
Andrei 43; in West Berlin, 249
Socialist Unity Party (SED), Stasi Archives, 201
49–59, 171, 173, 194, 233, 237; state security, 4, 21–22, 111, 173,
membership in, 199; and Christa 194; and borders, 232, 241; and
Wolf, 49 counterintelligence, 232, 239,
solidarity, 36 244–45; organization of, 231–32;
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 20, 35, 137, and passports, 246
157, 185–86; and art, 79; and Stauch, Gerhard, 246
beauty, 70, 79; and collaborators, Stein, Mary-Beth, 208
40; and spiritual faith, 41; The First sympathy, 102
268 Index
Teske, Werner, 172 Warneke, Lothar, 154

Thälmann, Ernst, 242 Wessis, 6, 183–84, 190; and The Lives of
Third Reich, 6, 45. See also National Others, 197
Socialism West: surveillance in, 219–20, 222
Third Way, 47, 67–68 western Germany, 183
Thomas, Richard, 220 West Germany. See Federal Republic of
Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 140 Germany
totalitarianism, 3–5, 19, 111, 128, 157, white torture, 235
204–6; historiography of, 5; suicide Wiesler, Gerd, 135, 208–9; compassion
under, 122 of, 125; partial redemption of,
tragedy/the tragic. See Aristotle 60–63; political views of, 61;
Trebeljahr, Gerd, 172, 205 transformation of, 20, 31–32, 61–62;
Truman, Harry, 77 after reunification, 124, 217–18
Tukur, Ulrich, 187 Witt, Katarina, 7
type 4 artist, 31, 72–77, 210 Wolf, Christa, 37, 49, 214
Wolf, Markus, 185
Ulbricht, Walter, 36, 172, 233, 237–38 Wollenberger, Vera, 210
United Kingdom: surveillance in, Wollweber, Ernst, 172, 239
218–22, 227n137
Zaiser, Wilhelm, 172, 238
Verfremdungseffekt, 94–95, 112. See Zersetzung, 141. See also Stasi
also Brecht, Bertolt Zhdanov, Andrei: “Zhdanovism,” 45–46
Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 13, 123; Žižek, Slavoj: criticisms of The Lives of
regarding GDR, 198–99, 201; Others, 85–86, 101
regarding Nazi Germany, 191 Zuckmayer, Carl, 194–95; The Devil’s
Vogel, Wolfgang, 250 General, 194

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Totalitarianism On Screen

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Totalitarianism on Screen

Copyright © 2014 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

Photographs courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics/Photofest © Sony Pictures Classics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of

Part 1. Truth and Dissent

Part 2. Art and Politics

Part 3. The Lives of Others and Other Films

Part 5. The Stasi in the GDR

The brilliance of Donnersmarck’s film is that it brings the utter strange-

any literary medium about the nature of communism in general. Third, it

function of ideology in a totalitarian regime. A communist party in power

An accurate view of the GDR is of course significant not simply for

ing Sonnenallee in 2003 was Wolfgang Becker’s enormously successful Good

The Contents of This Volume

seemingly nonpolitical area and claiming rejection of any political stance,

It is our hope that Donnersmarck’s achievement will inspire other artists to

Ulrich Tukur (as Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz).

movie must fail in its portrait of totalitarianism, according to Funder, insofar

The “Post-totalitarian” Terrain

of the state combined with the myriad of societal collaborators exerted

Wiesler in the Post-totalitarian World

well as defenders of the plausibility of Wiesler’s transformation, by focusing

quite a contrast with Wiesler. He enters and starts applauding—“Good,

Disgust, Loneliness, and Longing

think the allusion to Wiesler’s longtime friendship with Grubitz allows us

He knows he cannot be who he really is. He is quite literally prevented

Christa-Maria. The strangeness of real human feeling for Wiesler is made

under his arm. However, Grubitz immediately shows Wiesler a dissertation,

acquiescence in—really, complicity with—their own oppression. After all,

comes to the character of Dreyman, the layering proves rather maddening.

in Brecht’s words.27 Their dictatorship of the proletariat, however messy in

of the achievements of this film is that it helps us recognize the difficulty

Communist Moral Corruption and

Communist Moral Corruption

At first, a significant portion of the population welcomes the teach-

In comparing Nazism with communism, Besançon concludes that the latter

the former probably brought crime to a greater “level of intensity.” What is

By moral destruction, I do not mean the breakdown of mores in

Among these acts would be convincing a significant portion of a country’s

and socio-psychological types. Those who control the organizations that

Wiesler’s Partial Redemption from Communism’s Moral

The Moral Corruption of Christa-Maria Sieland

Georg Dreyman’s Creed and Situation Prior to Writing the

in and a rebel against the socialist regime. His belief in it is reflected by

and it is predicted by a vision, a dramatic device perhaps out of place in a

gravely threatened the authority of all communist states, just as occurred

Dreyman’s Path into Moral Corruption

necessarily also in terms of morals. Immorality does not consist simply of

A Typology of Communist Moral Corruption

the power of art to ultimately overcome communist oppression and to par-

nism’s moral corruption points to an unavoidable conclusion: Dreyman

2. Alain Besançon, A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness

Long Day’s Journey into Brecht

regime. He is a staunch and committed supporter of the DDR and a cold-