Images of Stasiland - a personal view of award winning German film The Lives of Others by Anne Edmonds.  Anne is a retired lecturer in film and media studies and a member of Lothians Solidarity

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (a fine heel-clicking Junker name) made the psychological drama The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) in 2006 and it won the   Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2007: compared to many past winners in that section it well deserved the award and it is not surprising that it was seen by more people in the UK than any other German film (including the blockbuster of Hitler in the Bunker, Downfall). It is a thoroughly entertaining film and well-made in every respect - a gripping plot, first-class acting, subtly muted production design which, despite using colour, emphasises the drabness of East German life, sparing  and effective use of music; only the sentimental last scene falls below the highest standards of cinema.

Yet, in retrospect its portrayal of the Stasi lacks credibility and its picture of cultural life in the DDR is incomplete and misleading.

SYNOPSIS The plot centres on Captain Wieser, a Stasi agent shown at the film’s start as totally dedicated and ruthlessly efficient in pursuing enemies of the state. Given the job of spying on a liberal playwright, Georg, and his actress girlfriend, Christa, he gradually realises how barren is his existence compared to their full and artistically creative lives. He begins to act as their guardian angel, even removing incriminating evidence from their home to save them from arrest. When found out by his boss, he is relegated to steaming open letters in the censorship department. On the fall of the DDR, we see him earning his living as a junk mail deliverer; meanwhile Georg, whose life Wieser saved, reads the Stasi file on him and writes a novel, Sonata for a Good Man; in the maudlin final sequence Wieser buys the book and reads the dedication – it is to him.

Weiser

 This portrayal of Stasi activity is at odds with the facts. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland and an authority on the DDR spy system, has praised the film as a work of art but is scathing about its central theme of redemption. She points out that there is no record of any Stasi agent behaving in this way and believes the system made it impossible for anyone to do so: the Stasi compartmentalised duties within the organisation so no individual would have lectured at the spy academy, conducted interrogations, sat in the attic eavesdropping on the couple in the flat below, typed the report on their activities - all of these Wieser performs to dramatic effect in the film. The Stasi also employed the same surveillance techniques used against anti-DDR suspects to ensure that each agent was under the scrutiny of a fellow Stasi at every stage of his work.

The punishment for any betrayal was death - not relegation to the postal department. Funder also notes that Stasi operatives were highly trained technocrats: after reunification they were snapped up by computer companies, security firms and detective agencies; many set up successful businesses and some, just like the Nazis after 1945, emerged in the police and as politicians i.e. playing a full part in German public life to this day.

I suggest another weakness in the portrayal of Wieser - the Stasi used sophisticated psychological tests to ensure vulnerable characters would be eliminated from the recruitment process; Wieser is a lonely, isolated man without family or friends, his only social contact being joyless sex with a woman provided by the organisation - the likelihood of such a personality being seduced by the lifestyle of a charming, good-looking couple, in love with each other and with music, arts and ideas, would surely have emerged during the psychological selection; Wieser would have been weeded out early on, not promoted to captain.

I am not one of those nit-picking film buffs who believe that the slightest error in continuity or plot invalidates a film; rather, I accept Alfred Hitchcock's concept of "ice-box logic" i.e. as long as the audience is held by the film in the cinema, it doesn't matter if they see holes in the story while fetching an iced beer at home afterwards. But rewriting history can be dangerous and, although any socialist activist will be aware of the Stasi's chilling control over life in the DDR, Donnersmarck distorts this in the interests of dramatic effect with his false portrait of Wieser as a bad man who is redeemed by humanity into becoming a Good Man.

Also, although Georg and Christa are theatre professionals and it is well known that theatre was heavily subsidised in the DDR to ensure low ticket prices, in the film's discussions on Georg's work there is no mention of the effect writing for an audience drawn from a wide section of society might have had on the plays he produced; indeed, when we briefly see the audience at one of his plays, it appears to be as bourgeois as the stalls at a Covent garden gala.

All this is dangerous: there is at the moment a move among right-wing, revisionist historians (like the UK's Niall Ferguson) to shift the blame for World War 2 from the Nazis to the Soviets. This is particularly disquieting now that British Tory MEPs are, thanks to David Cameron, having to accept Michal Kaminski as their leader in the European parliament. Kaminski claims there is equivalence between the murder of c.4 million Polish Jews by the Nazis and the collusion of a few Jewish communists with the Soviet occupation of East Poland between 1939 and 1941; he is also a firm supporter of the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom Party's attempts to declare the Waffen SS Legionaries as a Latvian resistance movement deserving military pensions.

In the light of all this and the current celebration of the overthrow of the Berlin Wall, I suggest that The Lives of Others, however attractive and entertaining a film it is, should not be praised without reservation by socialists; if recommending it to friends, its historical flaws should be mentioned and the more positive side of DDR life (itself perhaps semi-redemptive) pointed out - its heavily subsidised sport, entertainment and culture and its highly developed welfare system providing pensions, health care, education etc. There is no doubt that these are still missed by many in east Germany; they showed their support for democratic socialism by playing a major part in the Links party's impressive 13% vote in the recent German elections.