The horrors of 'Lives' in a police state

TORONTO -- The Bush Administration has taken a pounding for its unauthorized spying on American citizens in the name of national security. But imagine living in a country, the former East Germany, in which the secret police, known as the Stasi, had 100,000 employees and 200,000 informants, and whose stated goal was "to know everything."

And all this for a population that never exceeded 16 million.

A new German film, "The Lives of Others" (Das Leben der Anderen), which opens Friday, makes the horrors of this police state concrete by focusing on the relationship between a writer, Georg Dreyman (played by Sebastian Koch), and his actress wife, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), and a Stasi agent named Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) who monitors every minute of their waking lives through the listening devices planted in their apartment. The film has already won a host of prestigious prizes in Europe and is one of five finalists for the foreign-language Oscar this year.

Piers Handling, director of the Toronto International Film Festival, who chose to premiere the film though it had been turned down by Berlin and Cannes, said, "It is one of the strongest works I saw last year. It's well-conceived, moving, architecturally flawless, and beautifully shot. It's constructed like a Swiss watch."

When the film opens, we see Wiesler, a true believer in socialism, dispassionately instructing new Stasi recruits in the brutal psychological techniques used to gain information from detainees. However, as Wiesler begins to be drawn into the "lives of others" while listening in on their innermost secrets, he is subtly influenced by the aesthetic and moral values that rule these artists' lives. Things aren't helped by the rampant careerism of his immediate supervisor and the blatant misuse of power by a ruthless member of the Central Committee.

In an interview at the Toronto festival last fall, the director of the film, a dapper man of 33 who sports the fairy-tale name Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, said that he was interested in portraying East Germany as it really was, rather than in the humorous or even nostalgic way of recent films such as "Good Bye, Lenin!"

Some German intellectuals, however, have complained that it's all too easy to paint East Germany as a horrible place and West Germany as a perfect Eden. Mühe, a famous East German actor who plays Wiesler -- and whose former wife informed on him to the Stasi in the 1980s -- said that he is very happy that the country is gone, but that he had a very good life as an actor there.

"I had a wonderful time learning my trade, becoming an actor," he said in German in Toronto. "It was also true that women had much more freedom, from the point of view of abortion rights and divorce, than in West Germany. But ultimately you just have more choices in a democracy than under a dictatorship."

Henckel von Donnersmarck was born in Cologne, Germany, but lived and studied all over the world, including the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom, before deciding on a film career. He graduated from the prestigious Academy of Film and Television in Munich, where he directed some award-winning short films.

He says he prefers capitalism, but "the lack of freedom can take place in any dictatorial system. It's not specific to communism. I just don't like it when any state is too involved in my life. I believe very strongly in the individual, but also in individual responsibility and accountability."

Having lived in America for six years, he's an unabashed fan of the country. He agrees with critics of the United States who point to such social problems as endemic poverty, but, he says, "at the same time look at the possibilities in the US, look at what you can make of yourself! The communist goal of making everyone equal just goes against individualism and personal accountability."

By the mid-1980 s not too many people still living in East Germany really believed that they were building communism. "With my friends there, it had become more of a habit, like a person who's gone to Mass for 40 years is not going to skip on Sunday, even though he's no longer a believer. People often don't really know what they believe, and there was a lot of unconscious cynicism. But at the end of the day you have to judge people by their actions. And their actions were pretty terrible."

According to Henckel von Donnersmarck, a significant source of income for East Germany for many years was selling political prisoners to the West for 100,000 marks a head. "People in the East now complain that they can't get their kids into kindergartens," he said with rising emotion, "while there was plenty of space in the old days. But they forget that those kindergartens were paid for by the lives of these political prisoners. The economy was completely bankrupt."

He originally had the idea for the film in 1997, but by 2002 he still hadn't gotten it off the ground. While his own experience with East Germany was limited, his mother was originally from the East and chose to move to the West before the wall was built, while other family members stayed behind.

"My mother was on the Stasi list because she had chosen to go to the West, so every time we would visit our relatives in the East she was kept waiting for hours and hours while being searched and humiliated. As we approached the border, she would get more and more tense."

During subsequent trips years later, he said, "I could feel that there were untold stories there, and I spent a year just talking to people who were on both sides, the victims and the Stasi officers. For me, the film is really about one fundamental question: Can people change? I really believe they can. It's also about where you decide to position yourself on the scale that has principle on the one side and feeling on the other. Probably both extremes are wrong, and the truth is somewhere in the middle."

When the Stasi files became available, a wide-ranging debate about the danger of vigilantism began. "Many thought that if the files were opened people would just go and kill those who had betrayed them. But there was not one single case of self-justice. Then again, only 10 percent of the people investigated actually asked to look at their files."

Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn't agree with people who say it's better to leave the past alone. "If more people read their files, it would be easier to talk about these things. The amazing thing is how much people complained to us, especially to Ulrich, when we talked about the informers in his theater company. They really didn't want to know and said that we were the informers. It was totally crazy."

The director insists that "it's important to look at how the very best people did behave, and then measure the others' behavior against theirs. We shouldn't let people off too easily." He says that when the current director of the Stasi archives was asked if their huge bulk depressed her, she answered, "No, because there were so many people who were very courageous and simply refused to become informers, and lived with the consequences. And that keeps me going." "So," Henckel von Donnersmarck insists, "let's use the heroes as the measurement."

When he is gingerly asked about the relevance of his film to accusations of torture leveled in recent years at the United States, the director falls silent for a few moments.

"I'm deeply shocked by the things I'm reading," he finally says. "I've heard from so many older Germans how amazing it was to experience the generosity and great-heartedness of the Americans after World War II. Then I lived in the US for six years as a boy, and really got to know and love the country. So many generations have spent so much time building up all the good that America stands for, that I can't believe what's going on now."