Edward Snowden has put spying on the front page. Reminds me of the best film I've ever seen about spying, "The Lives of Others," 2006, by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Here's an article about that film I wrote for a scholarly journal.
"Weren't
you afraid?" listeners demand, when they learn that I spent years
traveling alone, by the cheapest means possible, including hitchhiking.
"No,"
I reply. If pressed, I confess: I trust in God. In spite of armed kidnappers in
Africa, the goods I smuggled in Burma, the Texas thug with a gun, I was not
afraid.
Except. One country stands out -- The German
Democratic Republic, the former East Germany. Nothing happened to me there, and
yet something about the GDR rattled me. "East German border guard"
became a favorite insult.
Florian Henckel von
Donnersmarck's 2006 The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
invites viewers on a quick trip to the late, in some corners, lamented, GDR. Lives
depicts the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für
Staatssicherheit.) One in fifty East Germans played some role in Stasi spying.
Unofficial Collaborators (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) included husbands, doctors,
parents, informing on wives, patients, daughters and sons. Stasi spy archives
constitute more written records than Germany had produced in all of its
previous history.
Sounds pretty grim. And yet Lives'
fans report joyous weeping during its final scene. Lives won the 2006
Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film, and too many other awards to
list here. IMDB fans have voted it number 74 of the best films of all time,
after Rashomon, Modern Times, and Singing in the Rain.
Naysayers insist that Lives' fans are naïve. Not I. This review will
argue that Lives is a profound, if flawed, work of art, and that its
beauty, wrung from soul-crushing ugliness, is earned.
It's
November, 1984, the screen title reads, the Orwellian year. We are walking down
an institutional hallway. This is Hohenschönhausen, a former Gestapo prison,
inherited by the Stasi. The walls range between blue-gray, green and yellow:
the signature spectrum of a Caucasian dying of cirrhosis, or of the Soviet
empire. Get used to it. A tall, uniformed man with a cinched waist keeps a
tight grip on his prisoner. Without a second thought, you would have passed
this prisoner -- a somewhat cocky, handsome redhead, in a windbreaker -- on the
line getting into the theater showing this film. No armband or exotic ethnicity
differentiates him from his guard or from you. The horror begins.
A
slightly built, balding, fifty-something captain, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler
(Ulrich Muhe), clicks on a bulky, reel-to-reel recorder. Lives is a trip
down spy technology memory lane. Okay, what's this? The prisoner is ordered to
place his hands under his thighs, palms down. The viewer had been girded for
scenes of torture. The palms-down routine is quaint as, but less menacing than,
punishments meted out in Catholic school. Huh, we think, perhaps along with the
prisoner. We can take this. And other viewers are thinking, "See? I told
you that the Commies were never as bad as the Nazis."
The
captain wears the facial expression of a commuter driving through a familiar
toll booth, waiting for the electronic acknowledgement that he's paid his fare.
The prisoner is self-assured. He will just continue denying everything. Wiesler
points out that the prisoner's so much as implying that he has been detained
without reason impugns the benignity of the GDR, and, thus, itself constitutes
reason for the prisoner to be punished. Eventually, controlled, righteous anger
registers on the captain's face. This man is doing his duty; the prisoner's
"prepared lies" slight the captain.
The
reel-to-reel is fast forwarded. In fact, it is being played, later, in an
intercut scene, to a brightly lit class of prospective Stasi agents; young
people listen to the tape while looking like the attentive, ambitious young
people one might find at any lecture given by a powerful man whose power the
students hope, one day, to take. This interrogation is also a performance. Lives'
theme of voyeurism is announced. The camera cuts back to the interrogation
room, now darkened; these yellow-greens have rotted to the necrotic. The cocky
young man sobs, sweats, wilts. He has been deprived of sleep. His mind has been
toyed with. He provides the captain with information Wiesler may have had all along.
The camera cuts back to the classroom. A student raises his hand and protests
that these techniques are inhuman. Wiesler coolly, silently, and efficiently
marks an "x" (like a cross) next to the student's name -- which is,
appropriately enough, "Benedikt." (Lives is nothing if not a
movie worth paying close attention to; "benediction" from "speak
well" means "blessing;" Benedict is the current, conservative,
German pope.)
Wiesler stares down his students, as, in the
intercut scenes, he stares down his prisoner. His job is getting at the truth,
that's all, and upholding the very high ideals of the GDR. Wiesler allows a
moment of exasperated annoyance to show on his face as he takes his prisoner's
finally delivered confession; with a wait-for-it flourish, he instructs his
students to listen carefully to the interrogation's denouement; wearing gloves,
Wiesler kneels and flips screws off the seat cover. The cover is placed into a
jar sealed with a metal clip. This is a scent sample, to be saved in case the prisoner
is to be tracked with dogs.
This, then, as cited in the
title of a recent documentary, is the "decomposition of a soul." As
stated in Stasi documents, ''the aim of decomposition is fragmentation,
paralysis, to disorganize and isolate the negative enemy forces and thus allow
a political ideological recuperation.''
As students file
out, Wiesler is intercepted by his old school chum and current superior, Anton
Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur). Grubitz, tall, superficially handsome, with a floppy,
blonde comb-over, suggests a new investigation to Wiesler, who glances at
Grubitz's back as he, Wiesler, puts away his equipment. This is the first of
many scenes in which Wiesler, without making eye contact, registers others the
way an animal registers predator or prey. These moments of unreciprocated
glances are feral, they communicate isolation. The audience begins to learn how
difficult it would be for Wiesler to make human contact.
The
screen goes black; typed words appear: "The Lives of Others." A chill
goes down the viewer's back. Will the "lives" here serve as menu
items for a Stasi soul cannibal? Or does that title promise, and not threaten;
are its use of the words, not a reflection of callous exploitation, but an
invitation to the unique gifts others' lives afford when they are engaged with
love?
Wiesler now sits in the box of a theater, watching,
through opera glasses. The play is Faces of Love (Gesichter der Liebe),
about heroic female factory workers. A tall, handsome man, dressed in rumpled,
Bohemian jacket, no tie, appears in the wings. This is Georg Dreyman (Sebastian
Koch), "the GDR's only non-subversive author," who thinks that he
lives in the greatest country on earth. The playwright, he graciously
acknowledges applause from the audience.
When Wiesler views
the play's heroine, the sensual, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), he is
no longer the functionary in complete control. Gabriel Yared's soundtrack
perfectly emphasizes this moment that kicks the plot into gear; the operatic
score luxuriates in a vibrancy, color and brio otherwise impossible in a film
about the GDR. After the play, Wiesler observes Christa-Maria's embrace of
Georg; he looks angry; he looks competitive. He tells Grubitz he wants to
investigate Georg. Grubitz reports this to Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas
Thieme). Hempf is a human Jabba the Hut; he's fat and vile; even the sounds his
body makes as he shifts his girth in his theater seat are grotesque. (Thieme
deserves special appreciation for his willingness to be so repulsive.) Wiesler
watches from above. Wiesler watching Hempf watching Georg hammers home the
voyeuristic theme.
Later, at a cast party, Georg and
Christa-Maria dance; their friends stand back and watch. Even among show
people, Georg and Christa-Maria are the show. As glamorous as they are, though,
they are still behind the bars of a cage; Christa-Maria's shiny dress is the
dreary shade of a faded bruise; her eye shadow is a too obvious blue. Hempf,
channeling Castro's "Words to the Intellectuals," says that "The
party needs artists, but artists need the party more." Hempf nails this by
surreptitiously pawing Christa-Maria, who moves away. He praises Georg by
announcing, "Writers are engineers of the soul." Georg reminds Hempf
that that's a Stalinist quote.
Georg tells Hempf that he
needs Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) to direct his plays, but Jerska has been
blacklisted. Hempf reprimands Georg; "there is no such thing as a
blacklist" in the GDR. And, Hempf insists, Jerska cannot be trusted.
"People don't change."
After the party, which he
has observed surreptitiously, Wiesler returns to his apartment. Wiesler's
trimly efficient, unostentatious body enters a vestibule; the camera pans his
dwelling as Wiesler hangs his jacket on a hook. Apparently the one color
allowed in Stasiland other than jaundice is beige. Wiesler's wallpaper is beige
faux-wood. His apartment is large, spacious, and clean. All angles are a sharp
ninety degrees. Two too small paintings adorn the walls. Nothing is messy or
out of place. The scene is chilling. In his pristine kitchen, Wiesler squirts a
tube of red paste onto white food. He settles down in front of the TV. His
companion: a report on land for chicken farmers.
The next
scene is a strong contrast. Georg, in a long coat that flatters his height and
adds dash, is transporting a mess of scallions and other groceries. He
interrupts his shopping to play boisterous street soccer with neighborhood
kids. Wiesler is plastered against a wall, watching Georg play. He is wearing a
waist-length, multiply zipped and snapped jacket that is -- no surprise here --
gray-blue-green, the exact shades of the wall behind him.
With
a brisk, practiced efficiency that consumers might wish their internet
providers could emulate, as soon as Georg steps out, Wiesler and his team,
working against a stopwatch, wire Georg's apartment. Wiesler's eyes stare
straight ahead, never veering left nor right; his body seems directed, given
shape, not by his spine, but by his stare. Given the intensity of his stare, and
the slightness of his body, he seems almost a mythical creature made only of
the stare, straight outward, incapable of the poetry, spirituality and ethics
that arise from introspection, from seeing oneself in relation to what one
sees.
Even as Wiesler prepares to spy, a shot through a
peephole reveals that he's being spied upon -- by Frau Meineke (Marie Gruber),
Georg's neighbor. As if by ESP -- and Wiesler is so competent that the viewer
accepts that ESP may be part of his job description -- Wiesler senses. He
knocks sternly on her door, and calmly informs her, "Frau Meineke, one
word of this and Masha loses her place at the university. Understand?" The
intimacy of Wiesler's communication -- he knows her, he knows her daughter, he
knows her most vulnerable point -- Meineke's cringing stance, her inability to
meet Wiesler's gaze as she mutely nods, thus becoming a collaborator, speak
volumes, and economically so.
Wiesler is now ensconced in
his observation blind above Georg's apartment. In a high-ceilinged, unfinished
loft, spattered by light from marred panes and wall chinks, surrounded by bulky
equipment that seems the closest he'll ever have to companions, headphones on,
Wiesler types his account of Georg's 40th birthday party.
Before
the party, Christa-Maria gave Georg a necktie; at first he resisted, but he
gives in. Georg is the quintessential nice guy. He is tall and effortlessly
handsome, but he does nothing to play that up. His hair needs a wash and a cut;
his clothes are as rumpled as his friends'. In his small struggle against the
necktie, the viewer might guess some of his backstory, how communism's
egalitarian ideals appeal to him; how the state has been good to him; in his
easy smile one sees a writer who hasn't felt any need, so far, to rock any
boats.
Georg is surrounded by people more complicated than
himself. He didn't see Hempf paw Christa-Maria; he mentioned the forbidden word
"blacklist." He does not notice that Christa-Maria needs to take
drugs before she can face the birthday party. And he is not in tune with his
more radical friends. He does not see Jerska's pain at being denied the
opportunity to direct. "A director without a play is like a projector
without film," as Jerska says. Paul Hauser (Hans-Uwe Bauer) storms out of
Georg's party, saying that Georg should contact him only when he is ready to
take action.
"They unwrap presents, then presumably
have intercourse," Wiesler types, as Georg tugs Christa-Maria's hem up to
her garter belt, encasing a lush thigh. Wiesler's nightshift replacement, Udo
(Charly Hübner) arrives. Wiesler registers awareness of the youth's arrival
without making eye contact; he even hands the headphones to Udo without
looking. Udo, fat and jolly, expresses lubricious satisfaction in listening to
sex. "I much prefer monitoring artists over peace activists or
priests," Udo says. Wiesler rolls his eyes toward the ceiling and sighs.
Udo makes to high five him; Wiesler leaves him hanging.
Wiesler
meets with Grubitz at a Stasi cafeteria. He chooses to sit with his inferiors;
"Socialism has to start somewhere," he says. Wiesler tells Grubitz
that Christa-Maria is having an affair with Hempf. Grubitz shrugs. "We
can't monitor top officials." "Is that why we took an oath on the
sword and shield?" Wielser asks.
One of the
lower-ranked employees tells a joke: the sun, once it reaches the West, says
"Screw you," to Erich Honecker. Grubitz toys with the young joke
teller, alternately threatening, and egging him on. Here Ulrich Tukur, who is
very good at looking both pleasantly bland and diabolically evil, uses that
skill to chilling effect. Wiesler's face registers disdain.
On
the rough plank floorboards of his aerie, Wiesler draws a chalk floor plan of
Georg's apartment. He steps into the diagram marked "CMS." As Wiesler
metaphorically steps into Christa-Maria's bedroom, the camera cuts to
Christa-Maria stopped on the street by Hempf. At first she resists his
blandishments, but then, with a look of defeat, she enters Hempf's car, where
he paws her resistant form, as his chauffeur watches in the rearview mirror.
Hempf violates Christa-Maria; she allows it because she is afraid. Strangely,
more than one reviewer has commented on the sight of Hempf's white underwear in
this scene, as if it were indicative of the lack of fashionable clothing in the
GDR.
Wiesler sees Hempf's car pull up. Grubitz won't let
Wiesler turn Hempf in, so, Wiesler turns him in himself. In his first step away
from observing and toward the "engineering" that, according to
Stalin, writers perform, Wiesler uses his electronic equipment to buzz Georg's
apartment. Georg runs downstairs and sees Christa-Maria getting out of a man's
car, and tucking her blouse into her skirt. Georg hides behind the building's
door as Christa-Maria enters. She takes a shower, panting and crying. Wiesler
turns up the volume on his control knob marked "bath." Christa-Maria
collapses to the floor of the shower. She takes more drugs. She falls onto the
bed, in a fetal position. Georg, who had been pacing the apartment in a state
of heartbreak and confusion, sits beside her. "Hold me," she begs. He
embraces her. Whatever reaction Wiesler had hoped for or expected, Georg's show
of compassion was not it. In his attic, Wiesler slumps, his eyes closed, his
mouth slack, his arms wrapped around himself and the back of his chair, in a
simulated embrace. Udo walks in on him. Without a word, Wiesler rises and
leaves.
In his apartment, Wiesler washes his face, and
answers the door. A Stasi-issued prostitute has arrived: a blowsy, buxom, bottle
blonde. She serves a fully-clothed Wiesler a carefully timed orgasm. Wiesler
clutches at her naked breast and begs her to stay a moment, she reminds him
that she must service other Stasi men before the night is out. She nags him to
schedule more efficiently. A look of bitter disappointment registers on his
face.
Wiesler steps into Georg's empty apartment. His
attitude announces that this time he is here, not as a spy, but as a mendicant
pilgrim. He crouches down, almost kneeling, his head lowered, and, with a
reverential air, he strokes only the very edge of Christa-Maria and Georg's
rumpled bed.
"Where is my Brecht?" Georg asks. In
fact, Wiesler is reading it, a poem about a kiss, a plum tree, and a cloud:
"Erinnerung an die Marie A." He lays on his couch, not so much as a
pillow between his head and the armrest behind him. For the first time in the
film, something like a look of human warmth and happiness registers on
Wiesler's face.
A phone call informs Georg that Jerska has
taken his own life. Georg crumples. But then he composes himself, and turns to
the piano. Jerska had given him, for his 40th birthday, the sheet
music for "Sonata for a Good Man." Georg plays it. Christa-Maria
places her hands on Georg's back.
We see the attic's vast
space, and the small grey man in the center, connected to nothing but
surveillance machines, like an embryonic creature ensconced in its shell. He
listens to the music Georg plays. The camera moves around, from Wiesler's back
to his front. His face is transformed. He looks possessed. For good or ill? The
viewer cannot tell. The camera continues moving, until Wiesler's entire face is
visible. Then it is clear: a tear is falling down Wiesler's cheek.
Georg
says to Christa-Maria that he remembers a quote by Lenin. The actual quote:
I
know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day.
What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps naively
so, to think that people can work such miracles! But I can't listen to music very
often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the
heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can't
pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to
be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly.
"Can
anyone who has truly heard this, be a bad person?" Georg asks.
Wiesler
trudges towards his apartment. A small boy with a ball enters the elevator with
him; says that his father says that he is a Stasi agent. Wiesler flashes a look
of contempt. "What is the name of your --" we know he's going to ask
for the boy's father's name. Wiesler proceeds, "--ball?" The boy
protests that balls don't have names.
Christa-Maria leaves
Georg's apartment for an assignation with Hempf. Georg pleads that she not go.
Wiesler, troubled by this exchange, checks into a dismal bar right out of a
Charles Bukowski short story. As it happens, Christa-Maria enters the same bar.
Again, Wiesler's registering of her presence is feral; he does not look at her;
he may as well be registering her by scent. After debating with himself,
Wiesler approaches Christa-Maria. He breaks the fourth wall. "I am your
audience," he tells her, and we know how true that is. "You are a
great actress." In other words, she doesn't need Hempf's patronage.
"Actors
are never who they appear to be," she scoffs, thinking that Wiesler is
just a worshipful fan.
He will not be put off. "Many
people love you for who you are," he says. "You were more yourself
onstage than you are now." She says that artists sell themselves for their
art. "You already have art," Wiesler says. "That would be a bad
deal."
"You are a kind man," she tells him.
The
next morning, when he arrives to relieve a sleeping Udo, Wiesler slips Udo's
report from the typewriter platen. The typewritten pages are superimposed over
a love scene, as if it were erupting beneath the words. Christa-Maria, inspired
by Wiesler's words, stood up Hempf and returned to Georg; they affirmed their
deep love for each other with great passion. Wiesler is shot from below as he
reads. A faint smile of satisfaction crosses his face.
With
Jerska's suicide and Christa-Maria's reaffirmation of her love for him, Georg
resolves to create a more significant work of art. He meets his dissident
friends at the Soviet War Memorial in Pankow -- Hauser and Wallner meet there
in order to avoid the Stasi microphones they know to be in their own
apartments.
They supply Georg with a smuggled-in typewriter
he can use to type up an essay exposing the high suicide rate in the GDR. All
typewriters in the GDR are registered and his typing could be traced to him.
The smuggler apologizes: only red ribbon had been available. We had been seeing
Wiesler at a typewriter; now we see Georg tapping away. Georg speaks of
honoring those who have made it to the other side, a phrase that could mean the
West, or the next world, a reference to those who died trying to escape.
Christa-Maria enters the apartment unexpectedly and catches Georg hiding the
typewriter beneath the floorboards; she says nothing to him, economically
conveying how day-to-day state terror efficiently splintered human relations.
Wiesler
brings his report to Grubitz. Before he can deliver it, Grubitz describes a new
report on prison conditions for subversive artists. It divides artists into
five types, and details methods to break each. In some cases, the Stasi
initiates no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, "nothing they can write
about later." This approach merely isolates the writer, so that he never
writes again. As he listens to Grubitz, Wiesler rolls his report in his lap.
"You're hiding something from me," Grubitz says. Wiesler denies it,
but he never delivers the report.
Grubitz must discover the
identity of the author of the suicide essay, which receives prominent attention
in West Germany. A typewriter keystroke expert presents his analysis. This
young bureaucrat's tight little presentation of focused attention on keystrokes
and their role in state spying involves no blood or torture, but is chillingly
effective.
Christa-Maria is arrested, ostensibly for
illegal drug use. While being interrogated by Grubitz, she offers herself to
him in exchange for favorable treatment. He says it's too late -- she's made an
enemy of a powerful man. Grubitz raids Georg's apartment. Wiesler sees him in
his TV monitor. Knowing he is seen, Grubitz waves at Wiesler. Again, the
watcher is being watched. Stasi agents slit Georg's couch cushions, finger his
tea leaves, turn back his bed covers, all as Georg powerlessly watches. Georg
is not alone; upstairs, Wiesler squirms with him; he had begun altering his
reports to protect Georg. Georg has a Solzhenitsyn book. "It was given to
me by Margot Honecker," he explains.
Grubitz calls
Wiesler in to headquarters; gestures to him to sit. Wiesler's assigned chair is
the wooden kind for prisoners being interrogated. It lacks, however, the
removable cloth cover. The implication could be that the Stasi needn't collect
a scent sample for Wiesler; they already have one. Grubitz asks him, "You
are still on the right side, aren't you?" In its most flamboyant move of
the film, the camera careens backward to Wiesler, whose head is turned left at
a sharp right angle to his body. "Yes," he replies, emphatically.
Wiesler
is ordered to interrogate Christa-Maria in front of a large mirror, behind
which Grubitz and a stenographer watch. At first, he keeps his back turned on
Christa-Maria. He had, of course, exposed his face to her in their encounter in
the bar. He turns slowly; slowly so as not to startle her into blurting out
their previous meeting. He alludes to what he had said to her in the bar,
"Remember your audience." Perhaps he is telling her that she is a
great actress, and she is being watched, and it is her job, now, to perform in
such a way that will get all three of them -- Wiesler, herself, and Georg --
out of the fix they are in. After some hesitation, she announces the location
of the typewriter.
Agents return to Georg's building. As
they rush in, hiding behind the door, in the exact spot Georg had occupied when
he ran downstairs after being alerted to Christa-Maria's arrival in Hempf's
car, is Wiesler. The agents run upstairs; Wiesler exits rapidly, a typewriter
hidden behind his back.
Christa-Maria, clad only in a
bathrobe, (she had, again, been showering, after her interrogation) walks into
the street, into an oncoming truck. Red blood stains her white robe. Wiesler
runs to her, kneels beside her, and, in a heartrending gesture, holds out his
hands above her body, without ever touching her. Georg believes that she had
removed the typewriter. He arrives; Wiesler stands back; Georg sobs over the
corpse of his beloved, begging, "Forgive me." The investigation is
declared at an end; one might think that the movie would end here, as well.
There
are, though, five codas, and their payoff is so great that viewers identify
them as the source of the film's most profound power. Grubitz informs Wiesler,
who, again, does not look at him, but who registers awareness of the import of
what Grubitz says, "I know it was you. I have no proof. But you're going
to spend the rest of your career steaming open envelopes in a basement."
Wiesler accepts these damning words stoically. The End. And yet, Grubitz has
tossed a newspaper onto the seat of Wiesler's car; on the front page is a
photograph of Mikhail Gorbachev, who, then, March, 1985, had just been elected
General Secretary of the Communist Party.
Four years and
seven months later, a screen title announces, we see letters, delivered down an
automated belt, being methodically steamed open on w-shaped steamers. The men
steaming the letters are Wiesler and the young man who had told the joke about
the sun. The joke teller announces, "The Berlin wall is down."
Wiesler, without a word, rises, and leaves the room. His coworkers follow.
A
curtain rises on a stage. We are, again, viewing Georg's "Faces of
Love", only this time in a slick, new production. Georg watches from the
audience, with a beautiful woman at his side. She looks a bit like
Christa-Maria. When the character that had been played by Christa-Maria makes
her speech, Georg, overcome, must leave the theater. In the lobby, he is
confronted by Hempf. Hempf attempts to sully Georg's memory of Christa-Maria;
he points out that Georg has not written anything in years. Georg looks at
Hempf in disgust. To think that people like you used to rule a country, he
says. Hempf's expression communicates that he regards Georg as naïve; of course
it is people like Hempf who run countries.
Hempf had
informed Georg that "we" knew all about his activities. Georg returns
to his apartment and finds the wires. He looks horrified, despairing, and yet
as if he has gained new knowledge that will further mature him. He then visits
his Stasi file. The camera travels to the archive room's 125 miles of rolling
metal file cases. Georg appears intimidated when a hand cart brings him the
numerous notebooks accumulated on him. He steels himself to read them. Georg
cringes to read of his sex life on the page; like the reader of a good novel,
he is fascinated by the development of the plot. His chronicler, Georg learns
for the first time, had become his ally. There is a red smudge on the final
page. It was this Stasi spy, Georg learns for the first time, not Christa-Maria,
who had removed the typewriter. The author of these accounts, he learns, is
"HGW XX/7." Georg asks for, and receives, a photograph of the man who
had, without his knowledge, shared his life.
Georg is
traveling in the back of a taxi. He sees a small, gray, robotic man delivering
junk mail to old, stone buildings incongruously colorful with graffiti. It is
HGW XX/7. Georg instructs the taxi to stop. Georg gets out. He appears
overwhelmed. What could he say that would honor the moment? He reenters the
taxi.
And the final coda. It is two years later, the screen
title informs us. The gray, robotic man is still delivering junk mail in a
joylessly efficient fashion. He passes a bookstore display window. Georg's
handsome face gazes out from a poster advertising a new book, Sonata for a
Good Man. Wiesler initially passes, but then walks back, does a
double-take. He enters the bookstore. The camera pans back; this is the
Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung. Wiesler picks up a copy and flips through it. Sonata
for a Good Man has been dedicated to "HGW XX/7."
Wiesler
approaches the cashier. "Would you like that gift wrapped?" the cool
young clerk asks.
"No," Wiesler says. "It is
for me."
***
Von
Donnersmarck's success has generated a backlash. "Naïve," his critics
scorn, "sentimental," "melodramatic." These terms are the
egghead equivalent of calling von Donnersmarck a "sissy." The most
devastating cut, "Hollywood," translates that Lives is worthy
to be taken seriously only by the unwashed. Some wanted a crueler film, with
more scenes of torture; many rejected Wiesler's change.
These
criticisms are themselves naïve; naïve about art and the mechanics of human
perception. The New York Times dismissed the 2003 documentary, The
Decomposition of the Soul, which focuses without let-up on non-fiction
accounts of Stasi evil, as "a bore," as it merely presented horrid
facts without "intelligent, specific, directed filmmaking." Under
prolonged battering, the perceptions of the filmgoer, no less than those of the
political prisoner, go numb.
As van Gogh said, to startle
the viewer's eyes with the pink of a cheek, juxtapose a sliver of green. High,
controlled contrast communicates content in a way that monochrome cannot. The
love in Lives, Georg's for Christa-Maria, and the viewer's for Wiesler,
allow us to feel the hate all the more. Further, narrative demands change;
Wiesler's high-contrast transformation invests us, and makes us feel, rather
than just intellectually acknowledge, the moral miasma that was the Stasi.
Intelligent
filmmaking recognizes the impact on the viewer of economical, restrained
scenes: a young man telling a joke in a cafeteria becomes a squirming victim of
psychological torture; a mother is intimidated into silence after seeing her
neighbor's apartment wired. These scenes transpire in a world without obvious
gunshots, death squads, or jack boots -- a world that looks like one many
viewers inhabit. That these soul-destroying activities are folded
inconspicuously into lives viewers can imagine themselves living highlights
their horror.
After screenings of Lives, viewers in
the former GDR sat with von Donnersmarck and his leads for hours, crying and
telling stories, he reported, that they said they had never told anyone before.
Von Donnersmarck worked for, and achieved, verisimilitude.
When
I surveyed Americans who had, for the most part, never been to Eastern Europe
about their stereotypes of the place, they often mentioned the word
"gray." Was it really? I remember one night in Poland waking up to my
dorm roommate kneeling on my sleeping body. "I just got back from West
Germany!" she crowed. "It's pulsing with capitalist color!" A
Polish friend had been desperate to spend her months' income on one spool of
turquoise silk thread from West Germany.
"The Eastern
bloc did look different," von Donnersmarck told NPR's Fresh Air.
"These somehow desaturated, washed-out colors that the East had, there was
something very unique about that. I even once spoke to a chemist who explained
to me that there were certain patents that the East did not have, and,
therefore, they couldn't make those bright, neon colors that the West had. But
I didn't simply want to do it by washing out the colors or doing some lab
trick. So I tried to analyze which colors were the most shockingly Western, and
I actually found that it was red and blue. Those colors really throw you and
seem very loud and extreme. And so I said. . . 'OK, well, look, let's eliminate
blue and red altogether.'"
The red in the film
ratchets up, from the blurt of red on Wiesler's white bachelor dinner, to the
red of the typewriter ribbon on which Georg types his magnum opus, to the red
of Christa-Maria's blood, and, finally, the red smudge that informs Georg of
Wiesler's support. Red symbolizes passion, compassion and sacrifice; in a
wonderful irony, it also symbolizes communism.
Sets serve
verisimilitude equally well as colors. The property master was a former Stasi
prisoner. He used actual surveillance equipment, including an original letter
steamer. Von Donnersmarck went so far as to interview former Stasi prostitutes.
Housing was at a premium in the Soviet Empire in the post
WW II period. Jerska, the blacklisted director, is depicted living with a fat
drunk, his dog, and a woman the drunk yells at. We all knew people who roomed
in such makeshift asylums. Citizens of the empire might fantasize an apartment
like Wiesler's. Viewing it, its spaciousness, order, cleanliness, and
isolation, one acknowledges how immediately irresistible it would be to someone
who has to live like Jerska, and shudders both at its price, and at what one
might dream of, under what life circumstances: "This is what we
sell out for." Stasi agent Werner Teske sold out, inter alia, for canned
mushrooms. In other circumstances, people have betrayed their child for a hunk
of bread. In his pan of Wiesler's apartment, von Donnersmarck invites the
thoughtful viewer to consider the immediate allure and loathsome retrospect of
whatever we ourselves have sold out for.
When Polish teachers
presented seminal films, poems, and other artworks to us foreign students in
their midst, they began, "You won't fully understand this, because it is
peculiar to our national experience." That stance struck me as
self-indulgent and self-defeating. Why not present your particular experience
in universal terms outsiders can be moved by? Lives is masterful in its
insistence on presenting a particular story in universal terms. In discussions
of his film, von Donnersmarck mentions invisibility cloaks in folklore.
"If you had one, wouldn't you use it?" He's teaching viewers the
peculiarly GDR narrative of the Stasi using universal and ancient motifs with
which most viewers can identify; he's made a kind of monster -- Wiesler -- a
man who has a power many viewers might wish to have.
Spying
is a perfect entry point to capture universal interest in the GDR's particular
history. Spying is of current interest in the wake of 9-11 and the murder of
Alexander Litvinenko. Lives came out in the same year as Robert DeNiro's
CIA history, The Good Shepherd and Casino Royale, a controversial
"reboot" of the James Bond franchise.
But spying
is of perennial interest because it may really be the world's oldest
profession. We learn by watching others; we have all been tempted to watch
surreptitiously. As NPR's This American Life has pointed out, when given
a choice between superpowers, most people would choose to be invisible rather
than to fly. In addition to wanting to spy, we crave to be spied on. The
fantasy of being spied on satisfies our paranoia; it thrills us with a frisson
of danger and the suggestion that our lives are much more exciting than they
really are. It flatters us; maybe our quotidian activities are so consequential
that someone would bother to read our e-mail or install hidden microphones in
our bathrooms.
Spying also thrums with divine association.
God is a spy, in one fundamental understanding. God is the one who watches our
every move with interest, reports psalm 139. We are seen; what we do matters. A
piece of wildly popular devotional folklore, "Footprints in the
Sand," argues that at the moments when we feel the most alone and bereft,
God is closest to us. In Lives' fourth coda, Georg reads his Stasi file,
and realizes that at what, to him, must have seemed the bleakest and most alone
moment of his life -- when he found Christa-Maria dead on the street --
unbeknownst to him, a benign, powerful force, Wiesler, was altering events in
order to make life easier for Georg. The Stasi file scene is in some ways what
some of us think our arrival in Heaven will be like: a file recording
everything we've done will be unscrolled in front of us and examined.
Wiesler
could have set up his listening post anywhere, but he did it in an attic, above
Georg, the position traditionally assigned to God in relation to man.
Writers, and all artists, have been, in art, traditionally associated with God,
in that writers and artists create, a function associated with the divine.
After Wiesler breaks the fourth wall, approaches Christa-Maria, and ends her
association with Hempf and causes her to return to Georg, Wiesler learns of
their love-making by reading words on a page; the page grows translucent; the
love-making takes place as if beneath the typed words. Wiesler is shot, God-like,
from below. His look is beatific.
Directors, like Alfred
Hitchcock, certainly, in Rear Window, and film scholars, like Laura
Mulvey, have emphasized the voyeuristic nature of film-watching. Part of Lives'
power may be its placement of Wiesler as the hero. Georg is the matinee star:
he's tall, handsome, charismatic, successful, loved, with the hot girlfriend --
and he's no deeper than necessary. Wiesler, on the other hand, is like us, an
average-looking, working stiff. When Wiesler eats his instant bachelor meal in
front of the TV, his companion, a televised discussion of land for chicken
farmers, he recollects not James Bond, but another lonely, nebbish Everyman. CC
Baxter (Jack Lemmon) in Billy Wilders' 1960 The Apartment is just a
working stiff following orders in corporate America. Baxter turns his life
around after he experiences an epiphany, and ends his own compromised
collaboration with corrupt higher-ups, one of whom is having an illicit affair
with a compromised woman Baxter comes to love. As in Lives, there are
two attempted suicides in The Apartment; unlike Lives, both are
unsuccessful. In a classic moment in this classic film, Baxter arrives home,
cooks an instant meal, and plops down in front of a TV showing unsatisfying
fare -- capitalist commercials. In these scenes of lonely, average working men,
both Baxter and Wiesler are universal; they are the lonely man in all of us.
Georg
and Wiesler develop a doppelganger-like relationship. Both Wiesler and Georg believe
in the GDR's utopian ideals; both defy cynical GDR reality. Before Wiesler had
left a red smudge on his soul-redeeming final report, Georg had smudged his
magnum opus, his suicide essay. Georg and Wiesler both interact with boys with
soccer balls. Georg and Wiesler hide in the same spot. Georg begged
Christa-Maria to forgive him as she lay dying; words Wiesler might have spoken.
And, Georg and Wiesler both change, neither into a perfect man, but both into a
better man.
Everyman Wiesler watches Matinee Idol Georg in
the same way that we, the audience, watch celebrities like Georg. Audiences
watching films and reading books often feel the temptation felt by Wiesler --
to break the fourth wall and intervene in the action, to engineer characters'
souls. We want to "rescue" characters in peril. We want to rewrite
their narrative. Wiesler fulfills that exact fantasy. Wiesler is the hardcore
film fans' surrogate.
Ulrich Muhe's award-winning
performance resists penetration or description. This is no Peter O'Toole in Lawrence
of Arabia, for example, a human meteorological device registering every
alteration in conditions via distended nostrils or quivering lips. Muhe
appeared to be doing nothing; there were certainly no fireworks scenes. Muhe's
body channels Wiesler completely; note, for example, his hesitant, apologetic
tread as he approaches the cashier in the bookstore to purchase a book
dedicated to him. After watching Lives with the sound off, I concluded
that Muhe's face speaks what his words do not. When, for example, Grubitz
describes how he will destroy Georg as an artist, Muhe looks as if he's a
little boy and someone is about to strangle his puppy in front of him. Muhe's
Wiesler hides nothing; he simply does not speak it. That a state that monitors
everything could allow a turned spy to hide in plain sight speaks volumes about
the abysmal level of humanity achieved by communism's guardians. Or by most of
us, for that matter, who don't see what is right in front of us.
Von
Donnersmarck's script, rich with implications and yet still simple, incites the
viewers' imaginations: What is Wiesler backstory? How did he become a master
interrogator who could be moved to tears by the "Sonata for a Good
Man"? In the backstory imagined by this viewer, Wiesler is a sort of high
functioning autistic, uncomfortable in social situations, and yet expert in
one, mechanical, function. He had been traumatized by growing up under Nazism,
and when the communists arrived offering a brave, new world, Wiesler believed
them; he lacked the human calculus to compute the new narrative's errors.
Naysayers
claim that Lives depicts an impossible transformation that never
occurred in real life. The first assertion is untrue; the second is unprovable.
Wiesler does not change from being a robotic Stasi agent to being a
life-affirming, Broadway-anthem-singing, Amnesty-International poster boy. He
makes one small choice -- to hide a typewriter -- that results in one small
change -- a minor, nascent dissident's not being brought in for questioning.
Alas, Wiesler cannot rescue Christa-Maria from Hempf or from suicide; he cannot
rescue Georg from writer's block. Wiesler continues to work for the Stasi until
the fall of the Berlin wall; even after, given his body language, one has to
guess that he still lives in that sterile apartment. We hope he has continued
to read poetry.
"No Stasi agent ever did what Wiesler
did," naysayers protest. In fact, that can never be proved. Wiesler's
invisible small choice, though he is punished for it by Grubitz, might well
have been hidden by Grubitz in CYA mode; Grubitz has nothing to gain by telling
his superiors that he suspects, but cannot prove, that Wiesler duped him.
Grubitz punishes Wiesler out of spite. He didn't like being outsmarted.
Wiesler's
tiny act of heroism is not a plot hole in a falsely comforting fantasy; it is,
rather, a brilliant and deeply moving portrait of how everyday goodness works.
Most good deeds are invisible, many result in the punishment, rather than the
reward, of the "hero." Polish peasants who hid Jews during WW II,
often hid their own heroism as well. Fellow villagers might have blamed them
for risking Nazi retaliation. Years later a camera crew shows up, to find
"heroes" slopping hogs and blinking into the spotlight. The power
structure, and, therefore, the narrative around them, has changed, and suddenly
they are recast as "heroes." Very likely we are surrounded by
invisible heroes. This is why cinema-goers report their audience's spontaneous
tears and applause at the end of Lives. We aren't, and can't be,
Spiderman, but we may well be Wiesler.
Von Donnersmarck
finalized his script in his uncle's monastery. His most heinous character,
Hempf, declares that people don't change. People don't change, in this
worldview, because humans are not equipped with any immaterial essence that
transcends their material reality. The Judeo-Christian tradition insists that
people have immaterial consciences that transcend material reality, and an
immaterial free will that equips choice, and that any person, in any
circumstances, including a Stasi agent, can be affected by the conscience and
can choose to do right.
Wiesler's final line, "It is
for me," has grabbed moviegoers. Wiesler is simply informing the clerk
that he does not need the book gift-wrapped. He is also acknowledging his own
awareness of how the one good deed of his life has been seen and acknowledged.
Here, again, is the theme of the divine as celestial scorekeeper and spy: just
as Wiesler had seen Georg and protected him when Georg did not realize it,
Georg, in a divine gesture, has, in spite of all the harm he's done, seen and
elevated Wiesler's best self.
"It is for me"
defies the preceding forty years of communism, and the twelve years of Nazism
before that. Wiesler's utterance affirms the priority of the individual, of
ownership, and of one-on-one intimacy. Under totalitarianism, the collective is
the significant unit, rather than the individual, and wealth and art are
generated for the collective -- "property is theft." To replace
individualism and intimate love with a primary focus on membership in, and
loyalty to, the collective, Nazism and communism eroded and degraded one-on-one
relationships -- by invading the home, usurping child-rearing authority, and,
indeed, by spying. Stasi goals included "the destruction of all love
relationships and friendships." Wiesler's final sentence is a triumphant
declaration that the best in him survived the worst; that it is delivered in
Wiesler's signature stoic deadpan makes it all the more glorious.
We
live in an imperfect world; Lives' imperfection is its misogyny. Almost
all the leads and supporting characters are male. There are three females, all
are invidious stereotypes; all are Madonnas or whores. Christa-Maria is an
actress, that most feminine of professions. Her life is devoted to the
feminine-coded activities of artifice and self-presentation. Throughout the
film, Christa-Maria is shot in clingy, satiny materials; she sashays her hips
and lounges provocatively. Even when interrogated by Wiesler, she cannot stop
stroking her own lips and running her hand between her cleavage. Unlike Georg,
Christa-Maria is never shown carrying groceries or playing ball with children;
she can't; she's strictly a sex machine.
Christa-Maria functions
as the stereotype as ancient as Eve; she is the weak-willed, treacherous woman
who destroys paradise by giving in to the blandishments of Satan. She has sex
with Hempf, takes drugs, betrays her lover, and destroys herself, in spite of
the superhuman devotion shown her by Georg, who does not so much as raise his
voice when he learns that she is cheating on him; in spite of a compassionate
Stasi agent who gives her a loving pep talk in a bar, and risks himself to help
her.
Wiesler's hooker doesn't even have a heart of gold;
seconds after his state-sanctioned orgasm, she's out the door, leaving him
bereft, showing even the Stasi man powerless before The Lady Eve. She's the
only powerful woman in the film, and she uses her power for evil. Frau Meineke
is a mother whose life revolves around her child. She, like Christa-Maria, is
weak. She cowers before Wiesler.
Could these
characterizations of women have been balanced without damaging the film's
verisimilitude or artistic merit? Yes. In Poland in 1987-89, I never attended
dissident activity -- protest rallies, planning, street scuffles with police --
that did not include women. In East Germany, there were women like Vera
Wollenberger. Study 1989 photos of Leipzig; were there not as many women on the
street as men?
Georg is aided and inspired by several
dissidents. Hauser and Wallner are gender-neutral parts. Either or both could
have been women. Frau Meineke could have attempted to say something, and been
disappeared, without Georg ever knowing why. These small changes would have
eliminated Lives' misogynist valence.
Scholar
Agnieszka Graff has written on an association of women with communism,
especially as depicted in the 1983 film, Sex Mission (Seksmisja). In Sex
Mission, communism is part of a evil feminist plot. Women's roles in
defeating communism, on the other hand, have been suppressed, reports Shana
Penn in Solidarity's Secret: The Women Who Defeated Communism in Poland.
Polish director Andrzej Wajda, himself winner of an Academy Award, took this
turn in his own oeuvre; first he made Man of Marble (Czlowiek z
Marmuru 1977), that placed a woman, Agnieszka, (Krystyna Janda) centrally
in efforts to expose the truth about communism's past; its sequel, Man of
Iron (Czlowiek z Zelaza 1981), featured his crusading heroine
scoffing at her own former zeal; now she was a contended housewife.
Lives
is often described as a corrective to the "ostalgie," or
nostalgia for the departed Soviet Empire, depicted in Wolfgang Becker's 2003
comedy, Good Bye Lenin. In that film, Alex, a teenage boy, in post-1989
Berlin, recreates East Germany so as not to upset his mother, who had been in a
coma when the Wall came down. Alex's mother is duplicitous and weak. Her heroic
husband had escaped to the West and begged his wife to accompany him, along
with his children, whom he deeply loved. Alex's mother lies to her children,
telling them that their father left them coldly in order to commit adultery.
She, in a skewed attempt to replace her lost husband, maniacally embraces
communism. Her husband writes love letters to her and to his children, and she,
in a microcosmic recapitulation of state censorship, hides the letters. Her
delusion holds the entire family hostage; no one can enter the West until she
dies.
Alex, displaying the superhero powers of a comic book
blockbuster star, and the unrequited, devoted love of a male for a female
typical of misogynist fare, orchestrates his family, friends, neighbors, and
even passersby into an acting troupe, and recreates East Germany for his
mother. The GDR, he reports, "is a country I will always associate with my
mother."
This association of women with communism is
not limited to the former Soviet Empire, nor is it new; C. S. Lewis once said,
"In the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that
some of us most dread for our own species -- the dominance of the female and
the dominance of the collective." It's worth mentioning here that in
Oliver Hirschbiegel 2004 film, Downfall (Der Untergang), about Hitler's
final days, the most horrific moment comes when Magda Goebbels methodically
poisons her own children. The insults Paul Verhoeven visits on his female
character in 2006's Black Book (Zwartboek) include having her shave her
pubic hair on camera, falling in love with a Nazi (she's Jewish), and being
showered by a vat of feces.
When men feel betrayed by
seductive, alluring, but strumpet ideologies, do they associate that sense of
betrayal with a more atavistic one: that of feeling betrayed by man's ur
other, women, who, apparently, can never love men enough to eliminate the
misogynist taint from art, even great art, created by the best artists, with
the purists of intentions? Perhaps von Donnersmarck would consider penning his
next script, not in a monastery, but in a convent.
Like Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or any number of other buddy movies, the
important bond in Lives is between two men. Its ending is reminiscent of
one for which von Donnersmarck has expressed a "lifelong love" --
that of the 1942 Hollywood romance, Casablanca. The Stasi codename for
Georg is "Lazlo," the name of a key character in that film. In
a tense stand-off at an airport, cynical Rick (Humphrey Bogart), in a moment of
atypical self-sacrifice to the higher good, encourages the love of his life,
the beautiful Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), to leave him and stay with her husband,
Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a resistance fighter. Also at the airport is Rick's
friendly antagonist, Captain Renault (Claude Rains), a morally compromised
Vichy officer. Previously, Renault had said, "If I were a woman . . . I
should be in love with Rick." Casablanca ends with Ilsa eliminated,
and Rick and Renault walking off together, Rick saying, "I think this is
the beginning of a beautiful friendship." There is no room for women, any
women, at the end of Casablanca nor at the end of The Lives of
Others.
The antidote to brilliant movies' flaws, is, of
course, more movies. Man of Marble, 1990's The Nasty Girl (Das
schreckliche Maedchen) 2003's Rosenstrasse, and 2005's Sophie
Scholl all address Central Europeans coming to terms with totalitarian
pasts in a woman-friendly way.
Finally, the question of
art. Von Donnersmarck said that the art that changes Wiesler had to be music,
because music is an "X-ray" that transcends language and rational
thought. As reported in the Washington Post, "The director
challenged composer Gabriel Yared . . . To 'imagine that you can travel to 1933
and meet Hitler before he commits any of his atrocities. All you can do is play
him your new piece of music. What will that piece of music be?'"
Von
Donnersmarck is bold. Theodor Adorno famously encapsulated the belief that
"Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Adorno himself stopped
composing music. The 2001 film Taking Sides opens with a provocative
scene: a dramatization of the great conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler (Stellan
Skarsgaard), conducting Beethoven's fifth symphony before an audience of
uniformed Nazis. The bulk of Taking Sides consists of a verbal duel
between Furtwangler and the denazification official (Harvey Keitel)
interrogating him. Furtwangler protests that he never supported Nazism, but
stayed in his country because it needed art during its darkest hour. "Art
for me has mystical powers that nurture man's spiritual needs," he says.
The denazification official remains cynical, as did many who just could not buy
Wiesler's transformation.
Of course art changes people. All
totalitarianisms know this; that is why all exercise a stranglehold on art. It
would be obscene, after Auschwitz, to stop writing poetry, out of any misguided
desire to appear sophisticated, to surrender art's transformative power to the
burners of books and mounters of exhibitions of the degenerate. Von
Donnersmarck's further insistence is antique: that good art changes
people for the better. What constitutes "good" art and
"better" people are concepts ostensibly abjured by relativism; yet
another reason why the film may offend. The tears Lives induces may be,
in some part, a flood of relief that the old-fashioned concept of human
goodness has survived efforts to save it by destroying it.
Art,
like reason, like love, like faith, is an invitation, not an incontrovertible
order. Its flexibility is part of its power. In declining the invitation, we
don't alter that which we decline; we alter ourselves. That Lenin had to refuse
art to turn himself into a smasher of heads is testimony to the power of art
and what it did to Lenin to resist it. Art does not elevate every audience with
every exposure, any more than science reaches every mind. But one can't get
what one gets from science, at its best, any place else, and the same is true
of art. I have seen the transformation that Wiesler's face reveals as he
listens to "Sonata for a Good Man." Muhe plays epiphany exactly right
-- as an "Oh no" moment as much of an "Aha" one. That is
why this viewer's eyes, with so many others', teared up while viewing The
Lives of Others.
