Hiding In The Closet
With Das Leben der Anderen, Germany cuts deeper into the East
No one ever takes me to German films. The last one I saw was Silentium, and that's Austrian, for Pete's sake. At first, I thought Germans were always like, "No, let's just see Tomb Raider" because they wanted to indulge me. I now realise that they figured there's nothing for me in serious German cinema. I just wouldn't understand.
Mostly because, along with all you fellow liberté et egalitéers, I've never lived under the cruel-to-be-kind lash of communism. Many Eastern Europeans remember it from most of their childhood and adolescence, and that is, to say the least, a different way to come up. East Germany was quite successful -- in what is admittedly a seller's market -- but communism means different things to people on either side of the Curtain.
A Czech girl I know, for example, necessarily has some fondness for the days under Husák, because they were the days of her youth. A lot of the communist trappings of those days -- gas attack drills in school, free market contraband spirited in by parents -- have been subverted into comedy by the transformative caprices of children, and the warm filters of memory.
The difference between Ostalgic films like Sonnenallee and Goodbye, Lenin! and the this film is largely the line between childhood and adulthood. Whether they were for or against the communist state, the former used kids as catalysts -- too naive or transparent to see the meanings behind the symbols, the real evil behind the literal. Thus, their attempts to interact with it generate comedy. But when we are adults, when we are too old to see anything light in the regime. We mostly just suffer in the game. The rotating files in Das Leben der Anderen are a potent image of why Germans proceeded efficiently under communism: in the meantime, we focus on the lives and liberty lost under the lash.
So, who wants to take me to this one?