Zizek on the Lives of Others

satyam |

34 | May 19, 2007 at 3:41 pm | 59 views | International| Share

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The Dreams of Others
By tying the drama to a mere personal whim, The Lives of Others fails to capture the true horror of the GDR
By Slavoj Zizek
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Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others—this year’s Oscar-winning film on life under the Stasi, the East German secret police—has often been favorably compared with Ulrich Becker’s 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin!. The claim is that it provides the necessary corrective to Lenin’s sentimental Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East), illustrating how the Stasi terror penetrated every pore of East Germans’ private lives. But is this really the case?

Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.

Equally troublesome is the film’s portrayal of Dreyman. He is idealized in the opposite direction—a great writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, who is personally close to the top regime figures. (We learn that Margot Honnecker, the Party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people.) One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.

To ask some obvious questions: If he was such an honest and powerful writer, how come he did not get into trouble with the regime much earlier? Why wasn’t he considered at least a little bit problematic by the regime, with his excesses tolerated because of his international fame, as was the case with famous GDR authors like Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Muller and Christa Wolf? The film takes place in 1984—so where was he in 1976 when the GDR regime did not allow Wolf Biermann to return from a West German tour, leading nearly all great East German writers to sign a petition protesting this measure.

Likewise, during a reception at the film’s beginning, a dissident directly and aggressively confronts the culture minister, without consequences. If such a thing was possible, as is assumed in the film, was the regime really so terrible? Finally, there is a weird twist to the story that blatantly contradicts historical fact. In all known cases of a married couple where a spouse betrayed a partner, it was always a man who became an informant—in Lives, it is the woman, Christa-Maria, who breaks down and betrays her husband.

Isn’t the reason for this weird distortion the film’s secret homosexual undercurrent? The film’s hero, Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent whose duty is to plant the microphones and listen to everything the couple does, becomes attracted to Dreyman. It is this affection that gradually leads him to help Dreyman. After die Wende—the “turning point” when the Wall came down—Dreyman discovers what went on by gaining access to his files. He returns Wiesler’s love interest, secretly following Wiesler who now works as a modest postman. The situation is thus effectively reversed: The observed victim is now the observer. In the film’s last scene, Wiesler goes to a bookstore (the legendary Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung on the Stalin Alee, of course), buys the writer’s new novel, The Sonata for an Honest Man, and discovers it is dedicated to him (designated by his secret Stasi code). Thus, to indulge in a somewhat cruel irony, the finale of Lives recalls the famous ending of Casablanca: With the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” between Dreyman and Wiesler, now that the intruding obstacle of a woman is conveniently out of the way—a true Christ-like gesture of sacrifice on her part. (No wonder her name is Christa-Maria!)

In contrast to this idyll, the very superficial appearance of light-hearted nostalgic comedy in Good Bye Lenin! is a screen that covers a much harsher underlying reality (signalled at the film’s opening by the brutal intrusion of the Stasi into the family home after the husband escapes to the West). The lesson is thus much more desperate than the one of Lives: No heroic resistance to the GDR regime could be sustained. The only way to survive was to escape into madness, to disconnect from reality.

Good Bye Lenin! tells the story of a son whose mother, an honest GDR believer, has a heart attack on the night of the demonstrations that ultimately led to the regime’s demise in 1991. She survives, but the doctor warns the son that any traumatic experience could cause her death. With the help of a friend, the son thus stages for his mother, who is contained to her apartment, the smooth continuation of the GDR: Every evening, they air the video-recorded fake GDR news. Toward the film’s end, the hero says that the game got out of hand—the fiction staged for the dying mother became an alternate GDR, reinvented as it should have been.

Therein resides the key political question, beyond the rather boring topic of Ostalgie (which is not a real longing for the GDR, but the enactment of the real parting from it, the acquiring of a distance, de-traumatization): Was this dream of an “alternate GDR” inherent to the GDR itself? When, in the final fictional TV report, the new GDR leader (the first GDR astronaut) decides to open the borders, allowing the West German citizens to escape consumer terrorism, hopeless life struggle and racism, it is clear that the need for such a utopian escape is real.

To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: “Good Bye Hitler” instead of “Good Bye Lenin.” Doesn’t this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany toward the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a Lenin-statue carried by the helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may appear.

This, of course, in no way implies that Good Bye Lenin! is without faults. The weak point of the film is that (like Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful) it sustains the ethics of protecting one’s illusions: It manipulates the threat of a new heart attack as the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty. Isn’t the film then unexpectedly endorsing Leo Strauss’ thesis on the need for a “noble lie”? So is it really that the emancipatory potential of Communism is only a “noble lie” to be staged and sustained for the naive believers, a lie which effectively only masks the ruthless violence of the Communist rule? Here mother is the “subject supposed to believe”: through her, others sustain their belief. (The irony is that it is usually the mother who is supposed to be the caretaker, protecting children from cruel reality.)

The lesson of all this? We are still waiting for a film that would provide a complete description of the GDR terror, a film that would do for the Stasi what Varlam Shalamov, in his unsurpassed Kolyma Tales, did for the Gulag.
Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. He is the author of, among many other books, The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

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There Are 34 Responses So Far. »

Qalandar 19 May 2007
04:25:59 pm

The second paragraph is one I agree with; the sixth (“Christa Maria!) is vintage Zizek. But overall I think he is less than generous to the film, which never purported to be “the complete description of GDR terror” that Zizek seems to believe it HAS to be if it is to be credible. Rather, I see the political thrust of this film as on corruption — of the body, of the soul, of art, of love, and of friendship. The Lives of Others does not critique Communism so much as enact –and make the viewer experience– the corruption that the GDR’s Communist system incentivized (on the evidence of this film, with great efficiency).

satyam 19 May 2007
04:52:57 pm

I agree, I think that rather than write a ‘history’ of the GDR or the Stasi the director means to simply use the specifics in a paradigmatic sense. It’s more novel-ised history than anything else and in my view the stronger for it. I think that it’s most usefully read in a Derridean vein.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
01:37:41 am

I think this writer is missing the whole point and wants to see a film that he wants to see, not the film that was shown to him.

This line says it all: “We are still waiting for a film that would provide a complete description of the GDR terror…”

Are WE, kind sir, or are YOU? How many people are waiting in this world for this?

Lastly, the film is not about the GDR’s terror or GDR – it’s about, amongst 100 other things, humans in catch22 conflicts; their abrasive lives happen to be in mid 80’s GDR.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
01:57:09 am

A comment from the same website:

“After squirming through “The Lives of Others” in a Potsdam movie theater last year, I’ve been searching in vain for a commentator who would do it justice. That’s why I’m grateful to Zizek for finally putting the record straight on this shamelessly overrated Oscar winner. The film’s opening sequences certainly do capture the drabness of the East German experience (which I became intimately acquainted with in the 1980s, Stasi and all), but Donnersmarck immediately resorts to the flimsiest of cliches to get his “message” across. The phoniness of the loyal but noble East German intellectual is particularly cloying (what country did he think he was living in?), and the Stasi agent’s corresponding emotional vacuity (symbolized by his drab high-rise apartment and his flabby prostitute) makes everything just a bit too easy – as if middle aged Stasi operatives didn’t have wives, children, suburban allotment gardens, hobbies or even housecats just like everybody else. The ensuing melodrama is all too predictable. Having said that, if “The Lives of Others” – like “Schindler’s List” – had actually been based on a true story, these plot devices could perhaps be forgiven. However, as far as I can discover, Wiesler’s sentimental conversion to a “good person” is pure fantasy – the Stasi did not work this way, and certainly wasn’t impressed by phony bourgeois intellectuals who were, by definition, the “class enemy.” Ironically enough, instead of revealing the genuine evil that underlay the East German system, the film actually makes us feel good about the regime – or about how it could have been if there had been more people like Wiesler, as if we all would have done the same in similar circumstances (“Schindler’s List,” which is about a “good Nazi,” also has this paradoxical effect, making it into one of the popular movies ever shown in Germany). In fact, the last thing we need are feel-good movies about Communism, or Nazism, or any other inhuman system of this kind. And as Zizek points out, by leading nostalgia for the GDR *ad absurdum*, “Goodbye Lenin” does a much better job of demolishing the regime’s “humanistic” pretensions than the sugar-coated “Lives of Others.”

And what exactly IS the film’s message? That redemption is available to all of us and that if we would show kindness to our neighbors then the world would be a more humane place? Fair enough, but then again Dickens did a much better job expressing this sentiment in his “Christmas Carol,” but nobody has ever mistaken his fairytale for an accurate description of life in Victorian Britain.”

I also disagree with the authors basic argument (as above), but he’s definitely articulated his points more succiently than Zizek…

satyam 20 May 2007
07:05:26 am

Rohit, I think what Zizek is trying to get at here is that Lives of Others in its current form fulfills a certain ideological purpose and he thinks it ‘improper’ to present such a film. In other words the film serves the wrong ideological function for him.

I of course don’t agree with that sort of reading here but that’s where he’s coming from.

For example Zizek would say for a film like Sound of Music that it seems like a fun musical and the Nazis seem to be the enemies but it actually fulfills a right wing agenda which remains a bit ‘hidden’ in the film.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
10:02:49 am

I think the director is intelligent enough to make a film that can be more ‘proper’, but thats just not the film he wanted to make…

satyam 20 May 2007
10:19:11 am

True Rohit. But Zizek’s point is that his film ‘obuscates’ what it represents. Again this is obviously not my view since I consider it the best film of the year and one of the great films of our time. But I think to give credit to Zizek (who is one of the foremost theorists of our time and more well versed in cinema than anyone has a right to be!) he isn’t just attacking the director for not making a film that he would approve. I think he finds the film ideologically problematic. In other words he faults the director for choosing this sort of story for that sort of historical backdrop. Again I don’t agree of course.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
10:22:27 am

Fair enough. I actually agree with him from a political angle (its hard not too), but not cinematic because I think he’s not being fair to himself or the film…

Tango 20 May 2007
11:01:10 am

Hello Rohit, nice to have you around. Bhai kabh to aa jaya karo , at least once a day !

We are all very busy in our own professions, but come here because of NG and all the efforts that you have put in and those are showing results.

OK- Wanted to ask you ?

You have put up a lot of posts( by your standards) about Paris Hilton , so do you like her or dislike her or you just put them up ?
Just curious.

Also, a lot of my old posts have been deleted from the archieves so it is about time you evaluated ur policy of giving editing/deleting rights to all mature members.

Whatever you decide I will accept it.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
11:03:41 am

What??! I dont delete posts EVER. If I do I tell people this.

How many posts have been deleted and what time? This is strange…please give me details!!!

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
11:04:13 am

Paris Hilton: shes good fun…and gives us hits!

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
11:04:54 am

I am going to change permissions in any case….

Tango 20 May 2007
11:14:43 am

I have list, as most posts are related to a particular website(some with scans & links) but let us not make an issue out of it as we are all friends out here.

Yes, it is about time you decided to tighten the screws on us MATURE( actually we are not that mature) ppl about being able to delete any post once it gets on to the archieves.

You must authorise a few ppl( any you choose) to delete and they must also inform you abt the post they have deleted.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
11:27:00 am

Can you please email me the list? I am going to change permissions after I receive this…

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I had no idea this was going on.

satyam 20 May 2007
12:31:32 pm

Actually Rohit, I think Tango is either a bit challenged in a technological sense or simply being hysterical as usual.

There is no one here who has ever complained about posts being deleted bu Tango.

What happens is that the search function is still quite imperfect both for comments and specially for post searches. Sometimes a post does not come up when searched a certain way but comes up in other ways. I have spent a lot of time trying to retrieve old posts.

Tango though keeps insinuating that somehow his old post mysteriously vanish!

Ironically Tango has deleted posts most often when it hasn’t suited him. Of course it’s his prerogative to delete his posts but he’s done it at times after a number of comments were added which isn’t fair.

A few days ago he went into one of Ravi’s (or perhaps Robbie’s) responses and actually changed it because he was called Abid instead of Tango in the response. Tango changed it back to his new username with a ‘I hope you don’t mind’ attached to it!

But you’re right, he should produce a list of such posts!

A lot happens here but I have never seen or heard of anyone change anyone’s post or responses or delete anything.

This is just ridiculous.

Tango 20 May 2007
12:32:24 pm

Let us not indulge in witch hunting, though if you insist I’ll send it.

I am more than happy that you have taken it seriously.

I’ll mail you 3 posts, along with date and title that are no longer there but it will not serve any purpose as we won’t have clinching evidence against anyone.

Let us look forward to the future with NG and the fact that you are thinking about going selective with priveledges.

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
12:37:06 pm

Guys lets not start a fight over this. Tango, send me the posts and I’ll take it from there.

Please, lets look at this objectively and not start pointing fingers. I have to take each allegation seriously but I must see where things are with respect to the proof that is produced…

Tango, is this true:

“A few days ago he went into one of Ravi’s (or perhaps Robbie’s) responses and actually changed it because he was called Abid instead of Tango in the response. Tango changed it back to his new username with a ‘I hope you don’t mind’ attached to it!”

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
12:37:58 pm

Is it me or do I find it ironic that this convo is going on under a “Lives of Others” post…

Tango 20 May 2007
12:44:52 pm

Rohit I did not take any names but this guy jumps at me talking about issues not at hand.

Is it something like gulity conscience pricks the mind? I don’t at all mind if you withdraw the editing priveledges rt away because in a way it will improve things.

Why does he always tell me not to put this scan or to put that scan.

It is better if he minds his own business.

Good that you are here to see as no one else but him barged in. This is the nth time whereby he has acted as if he is the owber of NG.

satyam 20 May 2007
12:50:59 pm

Who said anything about scans here?! Stick to the topic. And the owner has asked you to produce a list of deleted posts. Hope you’ll be able to do this!

Qalandar 20 May 2007
12:51:13 pm

Re: “Is it me or do I find it ironic that this convo is going on under a “Lives of Others” post…”

LOL! Good one Rohit…

Tango 20 May 2007
12:54:46 pm

Mind your own business instead of talking and complaining on others behalf!

It is between Rohit and me and WE WILL DECIDE WHAT TO DO !

You are not the owner of NG or are you ?

satyam 20 May 2007
01:00:36 pm

I always talk with evidence Rohit. here’s the thread and quote:

http://www.naachgaana.com/2007.....ig-league/

“Ravi I am Tango so please call me that !

i have even taken the liberty of changing to Tango below in your quote, hope you don’t mind .

“Tango , I don’t quite understand why you are so prejudiced against Aby baby, I remember in indo link you were not for him or against him ”

I had answered above but you asked a second time so I am answering a second time

- Ravi , just check the comments above and see who is insecure about Ranbir against Abhishek

I did not bring him here !

“Interesting isn’t it? Ranbir is celebrated for the same advantages Abhishek is castigated for””

satyam 20 May 2007
01:05:15 pm

By the way Tango I never ever complain to Rohit. You can check with him on this! Whatever I want to say I say it here upfront.

Even when a certain member was banned by Rohit for saying personal things about me I urged him not to do so and readily agreed when Rohit gave him another chance.

I say many things that people don’t like but I ALWAYS have the courage to say it bluntly and upfront.

You’ve insinuated many many times that people delete and change posts without the slightest evidence.

I think that is wrong. It has nothing to do with being the owner. As another member here I object to this kind of game. Because whatever our disagreements here, however fiercely we might argue I have never seen or heard of anyone doing this sort of thing. Therefore to insinuate this is happening is wrong. Because if it is one of us here is doing it and I can quite confidently state no one would do such a thing here.

Just to produce this link above I had to search it a number of different ways. I finally had to do it by ID.

satyam 20 May 2007
01:06:04 pm

And it is NOT between Rohit and you when you insinuate that your posts are disappearing because that automatically implicates other members here!

satyam 20 May 2007
01:06:52 pm

“Is it me or do I find it ironic that this convo is going on under a “Lives of Others” post…”

LOL! I second what Qalandar says!!!

Tango 20 May 2007
01:17:33 pm

I repeat

Mind your own business instead of talking and complaining on others behalf!

It is between Rohit and me and WE WILL DECIDE WHAT TO DO !

You are not the owner of NG or are you ?

Qalandar 20 May 2007
01:20:27 pm

Mere bhaiyon, kyun “Lives of Others” ke thread ki maa behen ek kar rahe ho?

Mr.Bond 20 May 2007
01:23:46 pm

Q: Ooay, maa aur behen ka izzat say naam lo. Warna mujh say bura koi na hoga… hai allah!!

Mr.Bond 20 May 2007
01:25:51 pm

Yeh kia ho raha haiy aray yeh kia ho raha heiy. Haain.

satyam 20 May 2007
01:27:09 pm

Actually Qalandar, Lives of Others is very relevant to the present discussion. Here you have someone ‘denouncing’ NG members, claiming that people delete his posts. On the other hand I am using technology to establish a chain of evidence here! I am trying to rescue NG members from these ‘denunciations’!

Qalandar 20 May 2007
01:38:16 pm

…so it’s the inverse of the TLOO situation, where the technology was being used to denounce…

Tango 20 May 2007
01:38:58 pm

Yay! Yay! Saviour of NG is here

Launch your own site and boss there !

rohitkarnbatra 20 May 2007
02:15:11 pm

Guys – I am closing this topic. Its going nowhere! I’ll address this offline.

Tango, Abid: I am on no ones side here. My job now is to just figure out what is going on…no need to waste energy and bandwidth on NG…

satyam

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