Life Behind the Iron Curtain

 

That’s all there is to it! You are arrested!

And you’ll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: “Me? What for?”

That’s what arrest is: it’s a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality.

That’s all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else. 

Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Achipelago. I, 4.

 

Saw yestedeay Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others. It is, no doubt, a powerful meditation on the constraints of life in the GDR (and by extention, any other totalitarian regime). It is an illustration of the mechanics of State Security and the absolute control over individual life. The mirror game between reality and state sanctioned representation is fascinating: whose life is it? the individual’s or the State’s? What really makes up the lives of others? The words and thoughts and actions of people and those around them, or the reports found in official dossiers in locked cabinets? The power of the State is such that, even under faltering and porous regimes like the one we live in, there is a terrifying degree of control exterted over our daily lives. So much so that, many times we could not possibly speak of our lives as being our own in any sense. Yet, for all the horrors of the regime(s), some depictions in the film struck me as being too benign: the lack of physical torture, the need to obtain proof in order to convict someone (really, even in a “democratic” state such as ours, it is well known that you are always guilty until proved otherwise and seldom, if ever, any proof of crime is required), and the (small) degree of dissent allowed in certain situations (as when playwright Paul Hauser accuses Minister Bruno Hempf of including people in the black list to his face). All in all, even though the film’s focus is the potential for individual redemption even within the machinery of the State, there is one political implication that cannot be missed. Cinematic representations of the horrors of Communist regimes in general, and GDR in specific, have constantly been toned down by what Zizek would call the emancipatory potential present in Communism (see Goodbye Lenin!, for example). Thus, whereas the horrors of Nazi Germany are documented and depicted in detail, there seems to be an reluctance to face the nightmares of life behind the iron curtain. Perhaps the wounds are still too fresh, or perhaps there is just no political will to really face and prosecute, with full force, this spectre that once haunted half the world. If such an industry has been made out of the Holocaust, which has, at least, spread awareness about the unspeakable evils of Fascism then, without hesitation the same must be done with any instance in which the weight of the State crushes the lives of others.

 blb.