Brian Micklethwait's Blog
In which I continue to seek part time employment as the ruler of the world.
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Most recent entries
- Brian Micklethwait’s New Blog starts now
- Now you see it now you don’t – then you do again
- Quimper Cathedral photos from a year ago
- Another symptom of getting old
- Quota photo of a signpost
- Three professional Japanese footballers play against one hundred children
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- There is no day that can’t be improved by seeing pictures of how they weigh an owl
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- A musical metaphor is developed
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War
In accordance with one of those little coincidences that life bestows from time to time, I was watching a DVD of The Lives of Others. But, I was pausing it from time to time to keep up with the Holland Italy game, and in among all the pausing, I also read this:
Who were the people who carried out the daily atrocities? What and how did they believe? Where are they now? Did they go back home to their families at the end of the day, having broken a few more bodies and spirits? Did they do this out of fear? Or were they merely sadists gravitating to the communism sanctioned violence towards their fellow human beings?
Pretty much, would be my guess.
However, the character at the centre of The Lives of Others, played by Ulrich Muhe, is made of very different stuff. His demeanour and mentality is almost saintly, certainly rather priestlike. He means well, and he feels the pain of those he spies on almost as if it were his own. Were any of the Stasi really like this?
This movie has been hailed as a masterpiece from all parts of the political spectrum. Perhaps part of the hailing is because it makes the Stasi seem, in at least some cases, nicer and more morally and aesthetically exalted than any of them really were. It’s not a bad movie, you understand. Just, I suspect, profoundly unrealistic as far as the central character is concerned. All the other Stasis we see, and especially the politician to whom they all owe allegiance, are pigs.
But, I do not have intimate knowledge of communism, or indeed of any saintly looking men who were or who are actually doing piglike things. Perhaps many of the Stasis were like this man. I must ask my friend Adriana Lukas, who grew up under Communism in Slovakia, and who is the writer of the piece linked to and quoted above.
It would appear that at least one East German border guard was very like Ulrich Muhe, for the simple reason that one of them, once upon a time was Ulrich Muhe. Muhe died last year of stomach cancer:
The cause of death was stomach cancer, but the Hollywood Reporter obit includes “Lives” director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s statement that the ailment stemmed from Muhe’s experiences in the East German military in the 1970s, when he developed stomach problems after being ordered to shoot fugitives escaping over the Berlin Wall. (The Spiegel Online obit has further details.)
He literally didn’t have the stomach for it. Blog and learn.
It occurs to me that I had already noticed that Muhe, at any rate for this movie, had a very particular way of walking, which is the complete opposite of clumping about. His walk was all feet and ankles, shorter than usual steps, almost balletic. I put it down to him wanting to look like a man who did not want to be noticed or to cause any sort of stir to others. But this would also be your walk if you wanted to subject your stomach muscles to the minimum of stress.
By the way, I wrote that bit about how he “feels the pain of those he spies on almost as if it were his own” before I knew anything about the man dying of cancer. Spooky. I only got to the cancer stuff because I wanted a good picture of the man.
"Or were they merely sadists gravitating to the communism sanctioned violence towards their fellow human beings?”
That’s the great thing about capitalism. Under capitalism the sadists don’t stop being sadists but they find that they have to do something useful first.
Haven’t seen the film yet, but multiple reviews got me thinking along same lines.
Everything that I heard about Soviet “interior intelligence” agencies, from many sources, make me doubt very much that a person like the character in the movie would be possible in the system; of course, I don’t know as much about Stasi, maybe in some aspects it was different.
Humanitarian concerns, I think, might have surfaced, but only as a means of trapping the victim during interrogation.
MarkHolland
Spot on. I hadn’t seen all of this movie before posting my posting, but a key scene is the one where the Good Stasi Man asks to do solo surveillance, and is allowed to!
Also, I suspect that in the real East Germany, at aleast some of the most active anti-Socialist activists would have been informers on the side. (Not that I blame them. It would have been that or catastrophe.) No hint of that in this movie.
So, a charming fairy tale, with just enough tragedy and nastiness to make it plausible to ignorant anti-anti-Communist outsiders, and to flatter German collaborators with the old East Germany (i.e. most East Germans and a great many West Germans), telling all such persons that it wasn’t all that bad really. Yes it bloody was. Not Bolshevik propaganda exactly. Too real and accurate for that. Just good business.
Compare and contrast, as they say: Schindler’s List.
Have you seen Katyń Brian?
It’s incredibly grisly but welcome because it reminds us of something many either don’t know or forget, namely that when the Nazis invaded Poland from the west the Soviets came in from the east taking half the territory the Germans took but killing twice as many people. And also the subsequent way the Soviet puppet authorities try to eradicate the idea that a) there was a massacre and b) the Soviets did it was another brutal reminder of what a loathesome show these thugs were and not the “elagitarians” or whatever the likes of Harry’s Place call them when their sucessors sit in the Europarliament.
Finally, my first post had said this.
When we went around Stasi HQ, no guided tour, just make your own way ‘round, I couldn’t help but notice that the TV in Erich Mielke’s office was a Philips. Another triumph for the dictatorship of the workers and peasants!
I had a long post here that got lost when I hit ‘submit’
This is the nub of the matter though:
No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. (We’d know if one had, because the files are so comprehensive.) Unlike Wiesler, who runs a nearly solo surveillance operation and can withhold the results from his superior, totalitarian systems rely on thoroughgoing internal surveillance (terror) and division of tasks. The film doesn’t accurately portray the way totalitarian systems work, because it needs to leave room for its hero to act humanely (something such systems are designed to prevent). It’s worth looking at the reality of what the Stasi did, and the current relations between them and their victims, to get a sense of where this beautiful fiction sits over that uglier truth.
That doesn’t prevent TLOO being a great film though.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2072454,00.html