Tim Garton Ash on ‘The Lives of Others’

I want badly to say that this essay almost redeems him for his silliness about Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

When I met von Donnersmarck in Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the mid-1990s, I discussed my reservations with him. While fiercely defending the basic historical accuracy of the film, he immediately agreed that some details were deliberately altered for dramatic effect. Thus, he explained, if he had shown the Stasi cadets in uniform, no ordinary cinemagoer would have identified with them. But because he shows them (inaccurately) in student-type civilian dress and has one of them (implausibly) ask a naive question to the effect of "isn't bullying people in interrogations wrong?," the viewer can identify with them and is drawn into the story. He argued that in a movie the reality has always to be verdichtet, a word which means thickened, concentrated, intensified, but carries a verbal association with Dichtung, meaning poetry or, more broadly, fiction. Hence the elevated language ("I beg you, I beseech you"—ich flehe dich an—says the playwright at one point, asking his girlfriend not to submit again to the minister's piggish lechery). Hence the luxuriant palette of rich greens, browns, and subtle grays in which the whole movie is shot, and the frankly operatic staging of Christa's death.

During a subsequent question-and-answer session in an Oxford cinema the director mentioned, in separate answers, two films that he admired: Claude Lanzmann's harrowing Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and Anthony Minghella's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley—a thriller involving murder and stolen identity—which he singled out because "it doesn't bore me, and for that I'm very grateful." In The Lives of Others, Shoah meets The Talented Mr. Ripley. Von Donnersmarck does care about the historical facts, but he's even more concerned not to bore us. And for that we are grateful. It is just because he is not an East German survivor but a fresh, cosmopolitan child of the Americanized West, a privileged Wessi down to the carefully unbuttoned tips of his pink button-down shirt, fluent in American-accented English and the universal language of Hollywood, that he is able to translate the East German experience into an idiom that catches the imagination of the world.

A brief note about the Stasi agent's quick conversion into a "good man." It wasn't necessary all that quick. Just because the clipped, gray automaton we're introduced to at the beginning of the film indicates Wiesler was still the perfect surveillance agent doesn't mean he hadn't had doubts about his profession or his state before eavesdropping on a charismatic intellectual and his beautiful actress girlfriend.

The point conveyed by the best fictional anatomies of totalitarian societies is that even the oppressors harbor a latent, or incipient, sympathy with those they oppress. When O'Brien tells Winston Smith of the life Winston and Julia will be forced to lead in the underground — a life that would in all probability end in early death — is there not a slight vicarious thrill in his forecast of their martyrdom?

The very psychology that enabled regimes of terror in the twentieth century was also responsible for their downfall. A two-hour time window may have required the filmmaker to speed up the process in his characters some, but the essential truth of his film remains in tact.

The Stasi on Our Minds – The New York Review of Books