1
The love lives of others. The discourse of love and the reconstruction of east German
identity in post-unification cinema.’ [Slide1]
Seán Allan (University of Warwick)
In an observation that predates the phenomenon of ‘Ostalgia’ by some two centuries, the
Romantic philosopher and poet Jean Paul once remarked that ‘Die Erinnerung ist das
einzige Paradies aus dem wir nicht vertrieben werden können.’1 And in the so-called
post-ideological era in which all grand narratives of history have been relentlessly called
into question, it is hardly surprising that, following the collapse of the GDR and the end
of the Cold War, the focus of cultural analysis has shifted away from ‘history’ and
towards ‘memory’ – a change of emphasis that some have caricatured as a move away
from the assumed objectivity of conventional historical narratives and towards a more
subjective approach rooted in theories of social psychology. Whereas in 1974 the
historian Hayden White argued in favour of bringing the tools of literary analysis to bear
on historiography, complaining that ‘history as a discipline is in bad shape today because
it has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination’,2 today the situation has almost
been reversed. Now cultural studies – with a theoretical approach derived from fields as
diverse as literary studies, anthropology, ethnography, and psychoanalysis – has created a
set of analytical tools with which to embrace the plurality of different discursive
constructions of memory.
In the field of German Studies, many of these ‘memory contests’ have – perhaps
inevitably – focused on memories of the Third Reich and the legacy of the Holocaust;
and
the
shift
away
from
the
more
conventional
paradigms
of
‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ during the 1980s, and towards an engagement with cultures
1
Jean Paul, ‘Impromptus, welche ich künftig in Stammbücher schreiben werden’, Sämtliche Werke,
ed. by Norbert Miller, Munich: Hanser, 1978, section II, vol. 3, pp. 814-823 (p. 820, No. 29)
2
Reproduced in Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1978, p.99
2
of memory in the post-unification period, has been accelerated by what Sigrid Weigel has
termed the ‘Generationswechsel’ and, in particular, the emergence of a new ‘third
generation’. In the context of the Third Reich, the clearly defined periodisation of 193345, makes its relatively straightforward to pinpoint generational transformations: crudely
put, we are talking about a post-1914 generation, a post-45 generation and a post 1968generation. But one of the difficulties in tackling memories of the GDR, of course, is that
this generational schema does not map very neatly onto the history of the GDR. In part,
this is because the course of GDR history is often regarded – not only in the UK but also
in the Federal Republic – for the most part as a monolithic and undifferentiated historical
narrative. Whereas prior to 1949, the Third Reich and the Holocaust constitute a point of
departure from which we can start counting in generations, unless we choose to regard
the founding of the GDR as a similar moment of historical trauma – not an approach I
would endorse – such moments of trauma in the history of the GDR apear defuse and illdefined. Were we to adapt Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory and apply it to
discussions of the GDR for example, what are the moments of trauma that might
constitute the ‘post-memories’ of subsequent generations? The failed uprising of 1953?
The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961? The 11th Plenum of 1965? The widescale
recruitment of IMs by the Stasi from the mid 1970s onwards? Or indeed the collapse of
the GDR itself (a moment of personal trauma that – albeit from the perspective of a leftwing west intellectual – was captured so eloquently in Oskar Röhler’s film Die
Unberührbare of 2001)? By the same token, while some historians would draw a
parallels between the totalitarian character of the Hitler-regime during the Third Reich
and the SED-regime in the GDR many – if not most – scholars find such undifferentiated
approaches as highly questionable. But even if one accepts, at least in part, the view of
the GDR as a totalitarian state the parameters of the perpetrator-victim discourse in the
3
GDR are considerably more blurred than that of the Third Reich. Who, exactly, are the
victims in the GDR? Indeed this problem of GDR ‘victimhood’ is one that we find
documented in Jürgen Böttcher’s Jahrgang ‘45, sentimentalised in Margarethe von
Trotta’s Das Versprechen, satirised in Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee, and
provocatively reformulated in von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen. Indeed the
question of victimhood – and its relationship to east German identity both pre- and postWende – is further confounded by the process of unification and the subsequent
positioning of the ‘Neue Bundesländer’ within the political framework of the new Federal
Republic as a whole. Is victimhood to be restricted to just those who suffered at the hands
of the SED-regime and, in particular, the Stasi? Or should all citizens of the former GDR
to be considered as ‘victims’ of a process of economic and political ‘colonisation’ by the
Federal Republic? And finally, now that the GDR no longer exists, to what extent is it
meaningful to talk about an east German identity in the post-Wende world? Now that a
generation of children born to parents from the former GDR has come of age in the postWende world, what exactly is their relationship to the historical past of their parents?
Loyalty, rejection, detachment, or nostalgic longing?
In an attempt to trace a series of shifts in the way in which memories of the GDR
and constructions of the GDR-Alltag have been reflected in a range of films from the
post-Wende period, I have chosen to focus on the changing discourse of love in these
films and consider the ways in which the transformation of this discourse at different
historical moments opens of a range of perspectives on east German identity. In its ideal
form, love might be seen as a sphere from which relationships of power and operations of
political ideology have been banished; yet as the films I will be discussing demonstrate, it
is often precisely where ideology is denied that it is most pervasively at work. It is in this
respect that the discourse of love – and its representation in film – has something in
4
common with ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ generally. For as Martin Sabrow notes in the catalogue
to the 2007 exhibition ‘Parteidiktatur und Alltag in der DDR’ staged by the Deutsches
Historisches Museum: ‘Nun wird das Alltagsleben… schon längst nicht mehr in erster
Linie als Zone einer autonomen Sonderkultur untersucht, deren Entwicklung weitgehend
unberührt von den politischen Umständen der Zeit verläuft.’
The first film I want to consider – Jürgen Böttcher’s Jahrgang ’45 [Slide 2] –
offers a historical snapshot of the GDR-Alltag in the mid-1960s from an insider’s
perspective. Although partially completed in 1966, Böttcher’s film was banned in the
wake of the infamous 11. Plenum of 1965, on the grounds that:
Personen und Umwelt sind vielmehr so gestaltet, daß sie eher der kapitalistischen als der sozialistischen
Lebenssphäre zugerechnet werden könnten. Da der Film jedoch eindeutig vorgibt, einen Auschnitt aus
unseren gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen zu reflektieren, wird er zutiefst unwahr. 3
As a result the film was not screened until after the collapse of the GDR in 1990, and it is
this delayed release that invites us to see this 1960s ‘Gegenwartsfilm’ as a work of
cinematic memory when viewed from the perspective of the post-Wende period. Set in
the GDR during the mid 1960s, and filmed in an aesthetic style that underlines Böttcher’s
debt to both Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague, Jarhrgang ’45 tells the
story of a young couple, Al and Li, whose marriage is on the point of collapse. Having
taken a few days off from the car repair shop where he works in order to sort out his
impending divorce, Al aimlessly drifts around Berlin while his wife, Li carries on with
her work in the maternity ward of the local hospital.
Böttcher’s film portrays a love relationship that, in its advanced state of decay, is
the very antithesis of the teleologically-constructed love relationships that are so
characteristic of early DEFA cinema in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1952, the
director Kurt Maetzig had confidently proclaimed that ‘Unsere Liebe unterscheidet sich
3
Schenk, p. 209.
5
schon heute von der der untergehenden Bürgerwelt… Deshalb spiegelt eine echte
Liebesgeschichte von heute die Veränderungen unseres gesellschaftlichen, moralischen,
körperlichen und intellektuellen Lebens wider.’4 This new vision of love during the
founding years of the GDR was one that Maetzig had sought to realise in his film Roman
einer jungen Ehe (1952) [Slide 3] a work of socialist realism which – as John Urang has
pointed out – ‘makes the protagonists’ love contingent upon their politics.’5 Maetzig’s
Cold War classic traces the turbulent marriage of Agnes Sailer, an idealistic young
actress from the East, and her husband, Jochen Karsten, an actor from the West, who is
initially too weak to resist the temptations strewn in his path by unscrupulous theatre
producers from the West. Yet the lovers’ reconciliation in Roman einer jungen Ehe
comes about about from a combination of Jochen’s eventual recognition of the West’s
moral bankruptcy, and the intervention of Papa Dulze, a paternalistic old socialist figure
and one that, during the films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, had become an almost
obligatory stock character. Despite the attempts of filmmakers such as Gerhard Klein and
Wolfgang Kohlhaase to break with the teleological aesthetics of socialist realism with
more open-ended love stories in films such as Eine Berliner Romanze (1956) and Berlin –
Ecke Schönhauser (1957), the highly schematic, politicised love relationship of Roman
einer jungen Ehe represented a model to which East German directors would periodically
return in times of political crisis and, in particular, in a series of films made on or around
the autumn of 1961.
The contrast between Maetzig’s Roman einer jungen Ehe and Böttcher’s
Jahrgang ’45 could hardly be more striking. Opening with a sequence in which Al steps
4
Kurt Maetzig, ‘Über die Liebe in unseren Filmen. Eröffnung einer Diskussion’, in Günter Agde
(ed.), Kurt Maetzig: Filmarbeit. Gespräche Reden, Schriften, Berlin: Henschel, 1987, pp. 243-6 (p. 243).
The article was first published in the GDR daily Neues Deutschland under the title ‘Warum gibt es keine
Liebe in unseren Filmen?’ on 1 February 1953.
5
John Griffith Urang, ‘Realism and Romance in the East German Cinema, 1952-1962’, Film
History, 18 (2006): 88-103 (89).
6
out onto the balacony of his Prenzlauer Berg flat [Slide 4] – a kind of existential
‘Zwischenraum’ that features not only in Andreas Dresen’s Sommer auf dem Balkon
(2005) but also in Bernd Böhlich’s Du bist nicht allein (2007) – Böttcher’s film
highlights thesense of alienation and ennui experienced by the second generation GDR
citizens. What makes Jahrgang ’45 so different from other films of this period is the
extent to which it reflects the experiences of a generation that, in the absence of firsthand
experiences of fascism, was no longer able or willing to accept the anti-fascist agenda of
the GDR’s founding fathers as a justification for the shortcomings of the GDR itself.
Indeed, in Böttcher’s film the protagonists remain fundamentally disconnected from the
memories of the war-time past that, in other films, are repeatedly invoked in order to
legitimise and bolster the historical mission of the GDR. Al’s elderly neighbour Mogul
[Slide 5] never talks about his experiences of fascism, but views life in material terms,
constantly reminding Al that, ‘Du hast ja alles’. Similarly, the reasons for the absence of
Al’s father – a victim of World War II we are left to assume – is never addressed during
the strained exchanges with his mother; while the relationship between Al and his Opa
reflects a total breakdown in communication: ‘Er will mich nicht verstehen’, Al remarks.
If Böttcher’s film seeks to invoke memories of the past, then it is not through
cross-generational dialogue, but rather through the Berlin landscapes against which the
protagonists play out their daily lives. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sequence where
Al and his friends lounge around in front of the partially burned-out and bullet-scarred
buildings of Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt. The extent to which this backdrop has become
de-historicised in the minds of the films’ East German protagonists is reflected in the
nonchalant manner in which they lounge around in front of the buildings, and in the
contrast that is set up by the arrival of a bus of western tourists photographing this site of
historical memory. Yet as Böttcher’s film suggests – and here we are reminded of the
7
tourists visiting the remains of the Berlin Wall in Böttcher’s post-Wende documentary
Die Mauer (1990) – there is something inappropriate about the way in which, from a
western perspective, history has been transformed into a spectacle for consumption.
[Slide 6 Clip A]. Seen in this light, Böttcher’s film explores the limitations of any
attempt to instrumentalise history and memory both within and outside the GDR. For Al
memories of the fascist past – memories that he seems unable to tap into – are not
sufficient to dispel the sense of existentialist despair with which he is beset; but by the
same token, [Slide 7] the vision of a new modern ‘Plattenbau’ estate with all the modern
conveniences that so impresses his youthful friends, also fails to eradicate the moment of
crisis in his life. Indeed what is so provocative about Jahrgang ‘45 is its relentless
questioning of what, in the absence of a teleological view of the past and the future,
might constitute a meaningful existence in the here and now of the GDR in the mid1960s, and it is in this spirit that Al resolves to re-commit to his relationship with Li.
Böttcher’s Jahrgang ’45 was by no means the only film released in the immediate
aftermath of the Wende that mobilises the discourse of love in order to present a bleak
account of everyday life in the GDR. In the last turbulent years of DEFA members of the
younger generation of directors such as Peter Kahane, Herwig Kipping and Dietmar
Hochhuth presented a series of failed – and failing – love affairs to present a nightmarish
vision of the GDR-Alltag. Ranging from [Slide 8] Peter Kahane’s melodramatic Die
Architekten of 1990 (a film in which the collapse of the young architect Daniel’s
visionary housing project is compounded by his wife’s decision to leave the GDR) to
Herwig Kipping’s allegory [Slide 9] for the new production group DaDaeR Das Land
hinter dem Regenbogen of 1992 (a love story set in the GDR of the 1950s in the aptly
named village of Stalina) the films produced by this generation reflect the pent-up
frustrations of a generation of film-makers who, by and large, had been denied any real
8
opportunities by the DEFA Studios during the 1980s. Indeed the sub-title – ‘Demontage
eines Alptraums’ – of Jürgen Böttcher’s 1990 documentary Die Mauer clearly reflects the
dominant key in which memories of the GDR were being presented by those schooled in
the traditions of DEFA. But one consequence of the collapse of the GDR was, of course,
the demise of the DEFA studio itself in the early 1990s and with it the loss of a
production facility from which a distinctively GDR perspective on the GDR might be
articulated. As a result, perhaps the best known cinematic representation of the GDR
during the 1990s was that produced by the west German team of Margarethe von Trotta
and Peter Schneider, namely Das Versprechen (1995). [Slide 10] While west German
cinema of the 1970s and 1980s had focused much of its energy on exploring the Federal
Republic’s relationship to the past, it is striking that the GDR is a topic conspicuous for
its absence on the agenda of the New German Cinema. However, following German
unification in 1990, filmmakers from both East and West were faced with a very different
kind of challenge, namely that of creating a new sense of German identity while at the
same time exploring what it meant to be ‘east German’ in a world in which the GDR no
longer existed.
In Das Versprechen, von Trotta presents the love affair between an East German
couple who, for over thirty years, are separated by the Berlin Wall as a means of tracing
some of the key moments in the history of the Cold War while at the same time offering a
critique of everyday life in the GDR. As the film unfolds we follow the lovers’ fortunes
from the early 1960s – when Konrad’s undone shoelace prevents him from fleeing to
West Berlin with his girlfriend Sophie – right up until the night of 9 November 1989,
where the two are on the point of being ‘re-united’ in a moment of mutual recognition on
the Glienicker Brücke following the opening of the border between East and West Berlin.
Das Versprechen contains many visual echoes of Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel
9
(1964), a film to which it specifically alludes on more than one occasion; but in stark
contrast to Der geteilte Himmel – where the reasons for Rita’s decision not to follow her
lover Manfred to the West are clearly spelled out – von Trotta’s film is deeply ambivalent
about Konrad’s reasons for remaining in the East (and at no point does he ever actively
endorse socialism). Indeed there is a sense in which Das Versprechen can be read as a
critical postscript to Der geteilte Himmel, as a tragic account of a love that – as its
unremittingly bleak presentation of life in the GDR suggests – has been sacrificed in
vain. Not surprisingly the film’s reconstruction of the GDR-Alltag was to attract
considerable criticism, notably from Corinna Harfouche, the East German actress playing
Sophie who in an interview for Wochenpost remarked:
Herausgekommen ist für mich eine absolute Negativbewertung der DDR. Mein Land kann ich in diesem
Film nicht wiedererkennen.... Dieser harte Ton der Gespräche, diese düsteren Bilder. Das stimmt schon.
Aber es stimmt eben nur zum Teil. Wir hatten nicht nur Herbst und Winter, bei uns war manchmal auch
Frühling und Sommer. Es gab durchaus Tage, an denen wir nicht mit der Staatssicherheit in Konflikt
gekommen sind. Im Film sieht es so aus, als wären wir auf Schritt und Tritt verfolgt worden. 6
At times, the film’s portrayal of the love affair presents the protagonists not as
individuals in control of their own destiny, but rather as passive victims of historical
determinism, a view that seems to be borne out by Peter Schneider’s concise explanation
of the key question addressed by the film: ‘Was macht die Geschichte aus Individuen, die
sie gewissermaßen als Geiseln genommen hat.’7
Schneider’s highly contentious concept of East German victimhood – together
with the film’s dour portrayal of the GDR – was to be radically challenged both by the
east German team of Leander Haußmann and Thomas Brussig in their film Sonnenallee
(1999) and by the west German team of Wolfgang Becker and Bernd Lichtenberg in their
ground-breaking post-unification comedy Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). [Slide 11] The
6
Interview with Corinna Harfouche by Manuel Brug and Frank Junghänel, Wochenpost, 10
February 1995.
7
Otto Matthies, ‘Interview mit Margarethe von Trotta und Peter Schneider’, in: Peter Schneider &
Margarethe von Trotta, Das Versprechen oder Der lange Atem der Liebe. Filmszenarium, Berlin: Volk &
Welt, 1994, pp.140-5 (p. 142).
10
contrast between the new generation’s ironic and irreverent view of the process of
unification and the older generation’s melodramatic portrayal of the collapse of the GDR
could hardly be greater. Thomas Brussig’s explanation of the premise underlying
Sonnenallee – ‘Meine Kindheit hat in der DDR stattgefunden. Das macht die DDR nicht
besser. Aber ich erinnere mich trotzdem gerne an die Kindheit’8 – might be read both as
symptomatic of an ‘ostalgic’ attitude and as an attempt to normalise German-German
relations on the scriptwriter’s part. Yet as Helen Cafferty and Paul Cooke have argued
convincingly, it is precisely though the foregrounding of performances of ‘Ostalgie’ that
Sonnenallee enacts a critique of uncritical nostalgic tendencies. Accordingly when the
central protagonist Micha attempts to restore his standing in the eyes of his beloved
Miriam by creating a set of (non-existent) diaries [Slide 12] that reflect the conflicts of
his supposedly ‘dissident’ adolescence, he embarks on a process of ‘remembering’ in
which he, quite literally, rewrites his own identity and with it, his attitude to the GDR.
Yet rather than portray this as a questionable act of revisionism, the sequence serves as a
reminder of the way in which memory and the construction of personal and political
histories are conditioned by the needs of the present and, here in particular, by the desires
of their infatuated teenage author. And while the irony of the sequence arises, in part,
from the discrepancy between Micha’s actual childhood experiences and his post-hoc
construction of an childhood dogged by state oppression that he has not in fact
experienced as such the sequence has a serious function, triggering as they do an
important process in his personal development: ‘Ich machte mir über dieses Land
Gedanken’, he tells us via the voice-over, ‘Was es bedeutet, hier zu leben, und warum
Miriam so unglücklich wirkte.’
8
Sandra Maischberger, ‘Sonnenallee – Eine Mauerkomödie: Interview mit Leander Haußmann und
Thomas Brussig’, in: Leander Haußmann (ed.), Sonnenallee. Das Buch zum Farbfilm, Berlin: Quadriga,
1999, pp. 8-24, (p. 12)
11
However Brussig’s acknowledgement that, as he put it, ‘mir ging es nur darum,
die DDR als Kulisse zu benutzen’ also serves as a reminder – as if one were needed – not
to mistake the settings used in Sonnenallee for an objective reflection of GDR-Alltag. For
his words underline the very different agenda of a set of filmmakers who sought to
‘normalise’ the experience of the GDR by combining the boy-meets-girl plots of
adolescent love affairs with the 1990s vogue for 70s retro-culture. For as Leander
Haußmann was to put it: ‘Wenn ein Junge zum ersten Mal ein Mädchen sieht – das ist
etwas, was jeder versteht.’ Indeed, the notion of the GDR-Alltag as ‘Kulisse’ is one that–
albeit in a much cruder form – been recycled Carsten Fiebeler’s Kleinruppin Forever
[Slide 13] of 2004, another teenage rom-com set this time in the 1980s in which the
affections of a girl from the east convince spoiled brat from the West to remain in the
GDR despite its obvious material shortcomings. But as Paul Cooke has persuasively
argued, the hyperrealism of Sonnenallee combined with the way in which it foregrounds
perfomances of ‘Ostalgie’ make it impossible to read the film as a straightforward work
of ‘Ostalgie’. By the same token, in Good Bye, Lenin! Alex Kerner’s observation that
‘Die DDR, die ich für meine Mutter schuf, wurde immer mehr die DDR, die ich mir
vielleicht gewünscht hätte’, [Slide 14] also serves to remind the spectator of the
artificiality of the ostalgic project that he is involved in. However, what is particularly
striking about these films is the way in which – at this crucial political juncture and
breakdown of national identity – everyday life in the GDR is presented in a performative
mode, an approach that allows essentialist concepts of identity to be challenged and
replaced with an alternative model of identity as something that is fluid and dynamic and
thus capable of adapting toa world in flux. Yet in this respect too, the discourse of love
plays a crucial role, not least in the contrast these films draw between, on the one hand,
the attempts of the young masculine pratogonists to stage an elaborate performance of
12
courtship, and on the other, the concept of love as a utopian space in which role-playing
is superfluous and in which difference might be both accepted and celebrated and in
which, consequently, a degree of individual authenticity might be possible.
This is, of course, particularly the case in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin!, a
film that revolves around two love affairs: on the one hand Alex’s love for his Russian
girlfriend Lara and on the other, the unconditional bond of love between Alex and his
mother. Although Alex embarks on his ostalgic project out of love for his mother and the
belief that she needs to be protected from the new world order, it becomes increasingly
clear that it is in fact he who cannot come to terms with the abrupt loss of his idyllic
childhood (a loss symbolised by the collapse of the GDR). Just as Christiane’s temporary
awakening from her coma provides the young protagonist with an extended opportunity
to prepare himself for the eventual trauma of losing his mother, so too the ‘extra-time’ the
‘GDR’ enjoys, gives him an opportunity to make the transition from the old to the new
world order. In psychological terms, the relationship between mother and son as a
utopian realm of the imaginary from which all the contradictions of the symbolic order
have been banished. And in a manner that calls to mind Jean Paul’s observation that ‘Die
Erinnerung ist das einzige Paradies aus dem wir nicht vertrieben werden können’,9
Alex’s attempt to recreate the ‘GDR’ from his memories of the past is one that seeks to
correct the contradictions of ‘real existing socialism’. Accordingly, his memory work
assumes a utopian dimension as he seeks to construct an imaginary version of what a
genuinely socialist GDR could have been like and, in the process, creates a monument to
the hopes and aspirations of those who, like his mother, pursued an ideal only to be
betrayed by the regime itself. Seen in this light Good Bye Lenin! is a rites of passage
movie in a double sense; for the successful conclusion to Alex’s development takes place
9
Jean Paul, ‘Impromptus, welche ich künftig in Stammbücher schreiben werden’, Sämtliche Werke,
ed. by Norbert Miller, Munich: Hanser, 1978, section II, vol. 3, pp. 814-823 (p. 820, No. 29).
13
at both a personal and a political level. What we witness is a process of mourning for
both his mother and for the GDR: at a personal level he succeeds in transferring his
emotional attachment from his mother to his Russian girl-friend Lara; at a political level,
he is able to come to terms with the end of the GDR and thereby embrace the new future
symbolised by the firework display on the eve of unification that he watches together
with Lara from the rooftop of the hospital. This moment of transition is further
underscored in the penultimate sequence in the film in which he scatters his mother’s
ashes across both East and West using one of the model space rockets of his youth. At the
same time, the elision of this sequence with the concluding section of ‘super-8 footage’
(an idyllic collage of childhood memories) remind the viewer that for any individual to
make a genuine transition to a new future, he or she must be allowed to cherish the
memories of the past.
Just three years later, however, the success of Good Bye, Lenin! was to be
eclipsed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (2006). [Slide
15] While Das Leben der Anderen represented a radical break with the humorous
portrayal of the GDR in both Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! the attempt to produce a
serious film about the GDR past (and the Stasi in particular) was warmly welcomed even
by those whose names had become synonymous with the earlier ‘ostalgic’ comedies.
Brussig himself conceded that:
Nicht die DDR-Komödien haben das DDR-Bild verzerrt, sondern das schlichte Nichtvorhandensein solcher
Filme wie Das Leben der Anderen. Insofern bin ich über diesen Film schon deshalb froh, weil endlich
dieses Manko behoben ist.10
Moreover, just before the film’s release, it seemed that life was indeed imitating art when
Ulrich Mühe (the east German actor cast in the role of Wiesler) accused his former wife,
the well known DEFA star Jenny Gröllmann, of having spied on him for the Stasi during
10
Thomas Brussig, ‘Klaviatur des Sadismus. Die DDR in Das Leben der Anderen’, Süddeutsche
Zeitung, 21 March 2006.
14
their marriage.11 In the context of a workshop on GDR-Alltag, it might of course, be
argued that there is little that is ‘everyday’ about either the relationship between Mühe
and Gröllmann or the fictional relationship between the playwright, Georg Dreyman and
his lover, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland. However, one of the most loudly trumpeted
aspects of the film was the director’s attempts painstaking attempt to create a carbon copy
of the GDR milieu in which the relationship of this elite couple is played out. Anxious
not to repeat the mistakes made by Margarethe von Trotta in Das Versprechen, von
Donnersmarck engaged a team of expert costume- and set-designers (many of them from
the former GDR) to ensure that – on the surface at least – his film was as authentic as
possible. Indeed the publicity material for Das leben der Anderen places a great deal of
emphasis on the film’s ‘never-before-seen-authenticity’; and notwithstanding some minor
errors, reviewers from both East and West were almost unanimous in their admiration for
the way in which, the selection of locations and props together with the use of a subtle
palette of predominatly orange and brown tones succeed in conveying a sense of the look
and feel of the GDR in the mid-1980s.
The realist aesthetics of Das Leben der Anderen are, of course, strikingly similar
to those on display in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (2004). And in both films it
is precisely this supposed historical verisimilitude and attention to superficial detail that
is invoked to legitimise the film’s underlying – and in both cases highly contentious –
ideological thrust. However, it was not von Donnersmarck’s attention to such details that
prompted critics such as Anna Funder – the author of Stasiland (2003) – to describe Das
Leben der Anderen as ‘the first realistic portrayal of the GDR’,12 but its focus on the
Stasi. Not surprisingly, opinions were sharply divided regarding the radical
11
These allegations were vigorously denied by Gröllmann, who insisted that the files referring to her
had been falsified, and obtained a court injunction preventing Mühe from repeating them in public.
12
Anna Funder, ‘Tyranny of Terror’, The Guardian, 5 May 2007.
15
transformation that takes place in the Stasi officer during his surveillance of the couple.
In an attempt to justify his decision not to allow von Donnersmarck’s team to film on
location in the Stasi’s infamous Hohenschönhausen prison, Hubertus Knabe, the director
of the memorial centre that now occupies the buildings, commented: ‘Der StasiVernehmer als Held: Das verletzt die Gefühle vieler Opfer und führt die Zuschauer in die
Irre.’13 Moreover, as historians of the GDR were quick to point out, there was no
historical precedent for Wiesler’s actions. Yet while the film pulls no punches in
highlighting the abuse of power by figures like Hempf and Grubitz it is hard not to feel
that von Donnersmarck’s relentlessly bleak picture of the GDR is no less one-sided than
the perhaps overly optimistic portrayal of the GDR in the earlier comedies against which
his film is pitted. Indeed the extent to which the historical reality of the GDR can in fact
be mapped onto the GDR as represented in the film remains something of an open
question, and Das Leben der Anderen is perhaps best approached not as a historically
accurate account of the GDR itself, but rather as a study of the potential of love as an
instrument of resistance and redemption in an abstract totalitarian milieu. Seen in this
light, the motivation behind von Donnersmarck’s act of poetic licence regarding
Wiesler’s transformation is neatly encapsulated in Wolf Biermann’s observation that:
‘Wir sind alle wie süchtig nach Beweisen für die Fähigkeit der Menschen, sich zum
Guten zu verändern.’14
In his portrayal of the love relationship between Dreyman and Sieland, von
Donnersmarck offers us a glimpse of a potentially utopian space within the bleak and
oppressive atmosphere of an Orwellian-like state. While the strength of their passion
renders the lovers so vulnerable in their society, it is precisely this vulnerability that
defines their essential humanity and which sets their existence in such stark contrast to
13
14
‘Das problem liegt bei der PDS’, Spiegel Online, 15 September 2006.
Wolf Biermann, ‘Die Gespenster treten aus dem Schatten’, Welt Online, 22 March 2006.
16
the mechanical efficiency of the ruthless state security apparatus. Not surprisingly
Sieland’s role in the film attracted considerable criticism and, writing for the Goethe
Institut’s website, Claudia Lenssen noted that: ‘Einzig die Frau im Scheitelpunkt des
Dramas bleibt passiv, willfärig und labil, sie muss aus dramturgischen Gründen schwach
bleiben, ist ein klassisches Frauenopfer, dass folgerichtig in den eigenen Tod läuft.’15 Yet
while Lennssen is surely correct to criticise the film for its primary focus on the film’s
male protagonists (in her view the only ones with narrative agency) the very
‘impossibility’ of Sieland assuming an active role in the film might be seen as a reminder
to the viewer the essentially patriarchal character of all totalitarian societies. Yet what
sets it apart from the other love relationships I have explored so far is the way in which,
to adapt John Urang’s remark about Roman einer jungen Ehe, it makes the protagonists
love not ‘contingent on their politics’, but rather their politics contingent on their love. As
we watch Wiesler listening to Dreyman’s rendition of the ‘Sonate des guten Menschen’
following the death of his friend, the tear running down Wiesler’s face underlines his
capacity to empathise with the musical expression of love and pain, while the
significance of the moment is underlined by Dreyman’s remark: ‘Kann jemand, der diese
Musik gehört hat, wirklich gehört hat, noch ein schlechter Mensch sein?’ Dreyman’s
observation perfectly encapsulates the faith of von Donnersmarck’s film in the
redemptive power not only of art and music, but also of love, something that is further
emphasised the next day when Grubitz greets Wiesler with the now ambiguous words
‘Wir beide haben an dieser Liebesgeschichte viel zu gewinnen… oder zu verlieren’. And
although at the end of the film Wiesler might be said to have saved Dreyman (by
concealing the evidence of the typewriter), ultimately it is the love affair between
Dreyman and Sieland that ‘saves’ Wiesler as a human being. Put another way, the
15
http:/www.goeth.de/ins/pl/lp/kue/flm/de2045379.htm
17
discourse of love in Das Leben der Anderen is a crucial component of the film’s moral
agenda in which no individual is shown to be beyond redemption.
At first sight Das Leben der Anderen would appear to commend itself as a key
film for the new Federal Republic in the post-unification era, for it is a film in which the
relationship between the lovers highlights both the inhumanity of a totalitarian regime
and yet holds out the possibility that, even in a totalitarian state, the discourse of love can
triumph over the discourse of hatred that Wiesler initially espouses. Nonetheless, the
melodramatic pathos of Das Leben der Anderen serves as a reminder of the stark
difference between the conservative essentialist concept of identity that lies at the heart of
von Donnersmarck’s film and the more radical performative model of identity that
informs both Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin!. Indeed there is something almost
Expressionist about the manner of Wiesler’s rebirth in von Donnersmarck’s film, a
throwback to the classical humanist agenda of individual moral regeneration through a
combination of art and love. Seen in this light, the quasi-Christian moral agenda
underpinning Das Leben der Anderen seeks to invoke an essentialist notion of humanity
shared by all; by contrast, the comedy of identity in Good Bye, Lenin! suggests ways in
which the complex positions of spectatorship that are themselves the product of an
increasingly heterogeneous society might be negotiated in future.
All of the films I have looked at so far are, of course, unambiguously set at some
point in the period 1945-1990; but I would like to end by reflecting on the extent to
which films set in the post-1990s might nonetheless be said to be ‘east German’. In this
context, the everyday Frankfurt/Oder setting of Andreas Dresen’s Halbe Treppe (2002)
[Slide 16] would appear to evoke many aspects of a way of life that is indelibly
associated with the GDR. By the same token Bernd Böhlich’s 2007 comedy Du bist nicht
allein staring Katharina Thalbach and the uniquitous Axel Prahl – another film set in an
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unmistakably eastern district of Berlin – explores the relationship between meaningful
employment and a meaningful existence, and does so in a way that invites a critique of
the different discourses of socialism and capitalism in which the protagonists’ lives have
been caught up over time. And, it might be asked, in what sense might a film such as
Andreas Dresen’s Sommer vorm Balkon (2005) be regarded an ‘east German’ film?
In part the difficulty of categorising such films stems from the transitional
identities of the films’ youthful protagonists, whose adolescent lives encompass the
collapse of the GDR and the assimilation of the Neue Bundesländer into the new post1990s Federal Republic. The relationship of this new generation to the experiences of
their parents and grandparents – experiences that, by and large, are rooted in the former
GDR – remains one of the most contentious issues in contemporary cinema, and it is an
issue that informs the work of the young director Christian Schwochow in his highly
acclaimed film Novemberkind of 2008. [Slide 17] Indeed the complex nature of east
German identities in a post-GDR world is encapsulated in the family history of the main
actress, Anna Maria Mühe; for the premature deaths of her two parents (Ulrich Mühe and
Jenny Gröllmann) following an embittered relationship serves as a reminder of latent
personal and historical trauma that, in some cases, lie just beneath the surface of many
biographies of those belonging to the pre-1990 parental generation.
Such unresolved ‘memory contests’ play a crucial role in Schochow’s
Novemberkind, a film which, like Good Bye, Lenin! explores the bond between mother
and child, but which unlike Becker’s comedy, does so from the perspective of its young
female protagonist, Inga, and re-casts its subject matter in a minor key. Having been
brought up by her grandparents in the belief that her mother died in a swimmimng
accident when she was still an infant, Inga is forced to recognise that her granparents’
version of events is untrue, and that her mother abandoned her when she fled to the west
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in 1980. What is striking about Schochow’s film is the way in which it explores the
relationship between memory and personal trauma in terms of both generational and
historical structures. Indeed Novemberkind might be described as a film that addresses
not so much the workings of memory, but rather the psychology of forgetting. For as Inga
comes to realise when she reads the opening line of her mother’s poem – ‘Keiner lehrt
mich /Zu vergessen / Wär da ein Gruß von daheim / Und könnt suchen mich / Ich würd
hoffen ein bisschen’ – it is precisely her mother’s inability to let go of her memories of
the past that prevents her from establishing a new life in the West and prompts her to
commit suicide after 10 years in a psychiatric institution. However, in Novemberkind it
falls to the members of the third generation to tackle the repressed trauma arising from
the feelings of mutual betrayal experienced by the first and second generations. Indeed it
is in this respect that Schochow’s film does offer a glimpse of what post-memory might
mean in a GDR context. For when Inga condemns her grandparents for having broken of
all contact with her mother – ‘Ihr habt Eure eigene Tochter verraten, stimmt’s?’ – the
extent to which she, the granddaughter, identifies with the suffering experienced by her
mother is subtly suggested when we recall her earlier explanation of her familial set-up:
‘Ich habe Eltern. Sie heißen Oma und Opa.’ Seen in the light of this remark, the burden
of suffering to which Inga is subjected embraces that of not one but two generations (and
this is further underlined in the film by having the lead actress Anna Maria Mühe play the
roles of both Inga and her mother). Yet perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of this
film is the way in which – in stark contrast to almost all the post-Wende films I have
referred to, it is a film in which female (rather than male) agency is finally reasserted. At
the same time it is a film in which the importance of east German – rather than west
German – agency in tackling specifically east German memory contests is underlined too.
For when Imga insists that Robert – the west German professor of creative writing whose
20
seminars her mother once attended – hand back the documentary in his possession, this
act of self-assertion together with the closing sequence in which we see her beginning to
re-write the story of her mother’s life serves as a reminder of the crucial importance of
regaining narrative agency for those, whose victimhood remains concealed behind the
contests and constructions of memory.