13 - Surveillance States: Structures of Conspiracy in Wende Cinema

Summary

WHEN FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK’S Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, FRG 2006) first appeared in commercial and festival theaters, audiences and critics both in Germany and internationally embraced its dramatic treatment of life under the oppressive regime of the former German Democratic Republic. Set in 1984, the film is a thriller about the intertwined fates of an East German author, his lover, and the State Security (or “Stasi”) agent hired to track their movements. Ultimately, it becomes a tale of redemption for the two central male characters: author Georg Dreymann (played by Sebastian Koch) successfully smuggles out a groundbreaking article on GDR suicide rates, in large part thanks to covert assistance provided by his watcher, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), who transforms from a Party hack to a rebel after becoming convinced both of the corruptness of his agency and the moral rectitude of Dreymann’s political and aesthetic project. Although von Donnersmarck admitted that the figure of Wiesler had no historical antecedent, he insisted on the larger truth of his film, and with its muted color palette, studious replication of mundane detail, and tragic sweep, the film bears all the formal hallmarks of the sort of contemporary German historical cinema that more commonly has turned its attention to conjuring the era of National Socialism. The film garnered strong audiences worldwide and dozens of film prizes, including numerous Film Awards in Gold at the 2006 German Film Awards, the 2006 Friedenspreis des deutschen Films (or Peace Prize in German Cinema, also known as the Bernhard Wicki Film Award) for its director, and in 2007, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In the laudatio for the Friedenspreis, former German Vice Chancellor Hans Dietrich Genscher hailed the film as an important and felicitous intervention: “Dieser Film kommt zur richtigen Zeit, … in einer Zeit, in der DDR-Nostalgie wie eine Art geschichtlicher Weichspüler zu wirken beginnt” (This film comes at the right time, a time in which GDR nostalgia has begun to act like a softener on the fabric of history).