The Lives of Others Stirs Up Heated Debate In Germany

An article published yesterday in the online version of Le Monde raises some interesting questions regarding the portrayal of the Stasi (the secret police of former East Germany) in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Academy Award-winning drama The Lives of Others. Is the worldwide acclaim of the film due to the fact that it brilliantly evokes for the first time in cinema, the methods of the Stasi, telling the story of a couple of artists who, at first persecuted by one of its agents, end up being saved by him? For Hubertus Knabe, historian and director of the Stasi central prison, since converted into a Memorial in former East Berlin, the "...film responds to the fundamental human need to refuse a reality without hope and to believe that, even in evil, it is possible to do good." He goes on to draw a parallel with Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List", with the difference that, while Schindler actually existed, the character of Gerd Wiesler, the Stasi captain in The Lives of Others who becomes sympathetic to the plight of his victims, is pure fiction. Knabe asserts that, " such a scenario never existed, and never could have, because the Stasi monitored its own agents very effectively, and that the slightest disloyalty would have been punished by death." It is for this reason that the director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial refused to allow the filmmaker access to the historical site for the shooting of his film. "We didn't want to offend the victims of the regime of the former GDR, who were subjected to interrogations and incarcerated in appalling conditions for years without ever being judged," he explained, saying that there was never any question, "...out of respect for the survivors, of supporting a film in which the oppressor practically becomes a sympathetic hero to the public." On the other hand, the Memorial director recognizes certain merits of the film, in particular the realism at the beginning, which shows how the Stasi agents conducted their interrogations, the classes where future officers learned how to extract confessions from their victims, and the climate that pervaded artistic circles, closely watched by the secret police because they were considered more dangerous, which he found very convincing. Nevertheless, he points out that the same agent could not have, as in the film, followed the victims from A to Z -- from the wiretapping to their imprisonment -- enabling him to become attached to them. "In reality, the functions of the operators of the Stasi were far more compartmentalized -- those who listened did not even know who they were eavesdropping on, and contented themselves with transmitting their reports to another department. It is this compartmentalization that has always ensured the effectiveness of dictatorships."

[Source: Le Monde]