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The World from Berlin

The Stasi Goes Hollywood

Is Oscar success for "The Lives of Others" good or bad for German cinema? Has the world finally stopped expecting Nazis to appear in prize-winning German films? Is the movie even a true portrait of the East German secret police? German papers discuss.

When first-time director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in Hollywood on Sunday night, he gave Germans a feeling of being back on the mass-market cultural map. "The Lives of Others," Donnersmarck's dour Cold War thriller about an East German Stasi officer who listens in on the lives of an East Berlin playwright and his wife, had the most lucrative American launch of any German film in history. Donnersmarck's future as a director seems assured, and his accomplishment looks even more impressive because, as a western-born German, he apparently excavated the lives of easterners with such an accurate touch.

But this is Germany, so press reaction to Donnersmarck's success is mixed. Some commentators on Tuesday morning point out flaws in the film; others note that it's the second Oscar for a German movie in four years -- after "Nowhere in Africa" won the award in 2003 -- and wonder if German cinema, after decades in the doldrums, has revived.

The left-wing Berliner Zeitung writes:

"The movie has led to a lot of discussion in Germany … Many East Germans didn't have clean-swept attics (like the one in the movie) just waiting for a Stasi officer to simply move in. Their political leaders seemed colder, their informants more obstinate, the system far more petty and violent. Other former East Germans, on the other hand -- even those watched by the Stasi -- remember the past as brighter, their daily lives as freer, their relationships to power as less complicated (than in the film). Overlaying these contradictions among all eastern-born Germans is a general feeling that the right to interpret their stories since the collapse of the Berlin Wall belongs to the West … to the von Donnersmarcks of the new republic, in fact.

"A lot of truth gets lost along the way from the old GDR to Hollywood. The film has a pared-down, parable-like aesthetic. It deals with iconic scenes of surveillance, with the yearning of the oppressors for the lives of the oppressed. This abstraction has led to a notion among American viewers that 'The Lives of Others' represents American life in the wake of September 11. 'The Lives of Others' is our life, US newspapers have been claiming for the last two weeks, since the movie premiered overseas.

"No, in fact it was our life, say those Germans who are still waiting for more precise and more political films about the Stasi…"

The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"German cinema has earned international attention and a fairy-tale number of prizes lately -- the Oscar for the best foreign-language film for "The Lives of Others" … is both the proof and the crown of this trend. It started with the Oscar for Caroline Link (director of 'Nowhere in Africa') in 2003 and hasn't stopped.

"In any case the Berlin school of cinema represents an intellectual branch of filmmaking ... and in von Donnersmarck, who more and more seems to be growing into his own universe, we have an enthusiastic "mainstreamer" who can interest not just international audiences but also Germans in German-made film…"

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"'The Lives of Others' offers exactly what Academy members look for in foreign-language films: a concise, sleekly-told little drama from a distant land that on the one hand is comfortably part of the past, but on the other hand qualifies as a universal tale of love and guilt.

"One can only hope that the producers won't interpret this Oscar as a reason to manufacture more and more harmless German history films, now that "The Downfall," "Sophie Scholl: The Final Days," and "The Lives of Others" have made it three in a row (for such films to be nominated by the Academy). If the Oscar success is to last, it's now time to experiment and dare to make films with riskier stuff."

The right-wing daily Die Welt argues:

"We can't forget (Donnersmarck's) impressive contribution to our reappraisal of the second German dictatorship, the finely-tuned and cool anatomization of the East German Stasi. This is the first (postwar) German film to earn international praise without grappling in some broad sense with the Nazi dicatatorship. World audiences have clearly grown used to the idea of taking German cinema seriously outside the parameters of Germany's Nazi past."

-- Michael Scott Moore, 3pm, CET