In the wake of recent revelations
in the news about National Security Agency surveillance and government
monitoring of phone records, the ominous terms “Orwellian” and “Big Brother” have
been thrown about so often that Amazon.com sales of 1984, George Orwell’s classic tale of a totalitarian dystopia, jumped
nearly 10,000%. Personally, the scandal doesn’t remind me so much of 1984 as it did of a gripping and
affecting 2006 movie called The Lives of Others.
[Mild spoilers ahead]
The debut directorial effort by a
young German with the rather Monty Python-esque name of Florian Henckel von
Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others is
a Cold War drama set in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the years prior to the earth-shattering
fall of the Berlin Wall. The story centers on Capt. Wiesler, an agent of the Stasi,
the ruthless secret police, who is conducting surveillance on state-approved playwright
Georg Dreyman and his actress lover. Wiesler has been assigned to dig up subversive
dirt on them and their circle of artist friends; instead, the Stasi agent
gradually finds himself becoming sympathetic to their passionate appreciation
of art and beauty, their yearning for self-expression, even their resistance to
the all-controlling, all-knowing state. He ultimately puts his own life on the
line to protect them.
For Americans who enjoy a degree
of freedom unprecedented in history, and who take full advantage of our First
Amendment right to openly heap criticism upon our leaders, it is thankfully impossible
to grasp what daily life is like under the terrible oppression of a
totalitarian state. Neighbors, friends, and even lovers on the wrong side of
the Iron Curtain were encouraged – or threatened – to spy on each other,
meaning absolutely no one could be trusted. A casual joke made at the expense
of the state, overheard by the Stasi, meant the end of your career or worse.
The slightest indication that you were less than totally committed to the
socialist state meant brutal interrogation, imprisonment, possibly death.
The winner of armloads of awards
including the 2006 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Lives was not only von Donnersmarck’s first feature film, it was
also his first feature screenplay, which he wrote in the seclusion of his
uncle’s abbey in
Heiligenkreuz, Austria. Coincidental trivia: while backpacking through
Europe many years ago, I actually stayed for a few days in that beautiful
abbey, the oldest continuously
occupied Cistercian monastery in the world. More trivia: Von
Donnersmarck was later named one of Oxford University’s 100 most notable alumni
in its ten centuries of existence;
that puts him in the company of figures like St. Thomas More, Lawrence of
Arabia, Oscar Wilde, and Stephen Hawking. Not bad.
A consultant on The
Lives of Others was
the Wende
Museum in Los Angeles, which houses the world’s largest collection of Cold
War artifacts (“wend” means “turning point,” and was the word Germans used to
refer to the collapse of communism). Nearly 75% of the more than 70,000 objects in that collection originate
from the GDR, where the movie is set. It has a vast amount of Stasi surveillance equipment, which
is chilling to examine. You can almost hear the ghostly echoes of tapped phone
calls, or of secretly recorded conversations that damned many.
You can count on one hand the
number of films that confront the reality of communism without moral
equivalence. Hollywood films about the Cold War focus instead on our paranoia
and McCarthyism, like Good Night and Good
Luck, or on the nail-biting brinkmanship of nuclear war, like Fail Safe. It took an outsider, a German
director to capture the soul-crushing oppression of life under totalitarianism,
and to remind us how precious is the freedom to live lives of our own.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 7/2/13)
