The new movie Das Leben Der Anderen (The Lives Of Others) deals squarely and soberly with the Stasi and the shame attached to this part of east Germany’s collective memory. It does this by tying this collective memory to the improbable story of a Stasi spy who risks his freedom for the sake of a writer and his wife. Maybe the point is that collective memory is nothing but a series of myths, and is never as telling as the individual memories. The film does everything it can to appear as accurate and right-minded about the inhuman practices and corruption in the German secret police, and manages to keep the relationship between the political and the individual strong but never intrusive throughout the film.

At the same time it does everything it can to be entertaining. It keeps lesser characters as caricatured and simple to understand as possible, it plays openly with your sympathies, and appends an egregiously sentimental ending. The story is all melodrama, tragedy and fairytale, but this is the film’s strength as well as its weakness. It’s a strength because it’ll bring this history to a wide audience, and it’s also the source of the film’s humanity, and it’s the weakness because it leads to compromises of its authenticity and its art.

Populist German films always have this demonstrative element – they like to hammer the point of each scene into your face, thinking rightly that is how Hollywood does it. Hollywood does it with more style, while German films, like last year’s Downfall, end up haplessly funny. So this film turns out good even if it's very silly sometimes.