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

"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!