A remarkably assured first feature from the maker of the award-winning shorts Dobermann (1999) and The Crusader (2002), writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (2006) paints a dark picture of life under the Communist regime in East Germany. Eschewing a purely historical approach by creating fictional characters, the film is part-thriller and part-love story, and offers a compelling tale of individuals whose lives and search for dignity are shaped by the society in which they live. The film also shows with remarkable consistency that the mechanisms which upheld the GDR ultimately led to its demise.
Von Donnersmarck spent four years conducting intensive research and writing his screenplay before beginning shooting. In addition to reading an abundance of specialised literature, the director also spent countless hours in conversation with eyewitnesses, and former Stasi (State Police) employees and their victims. He was advised and supported on historical matters by a number of distinguished specialists, including Prof. Manfred Wilke, head of the Research Committee on the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the Socialist Unity Party), Jörg Drieselmann, head of the Research Agency and Memorial in Normannenstrasse and former Stasi colonel Wolfgang Schmidt.
Further establishing time, place and texture was von Donnersmarck’s determination to shoot wherever possible on original locations. These venues include the former Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse, a feared address during the years of the SED regime. The Lives of Others was also the first and is, to date, the only feature film that was allowed to be shot in the original file-card archives of the former Stasi headquarters.
Awarded the grade ‘particularly worthwhile’ by the German Film Evaluation Bureau, The Lives of Others’ list of accolades also includes the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, seven Lola German Film Awards and three European Film Awards.
This interview was previously published in Projections 5+ The European Film Academy (Faber, 2007). The director has since completed the disappointing The Tourist (2010).
JASON WOOD: Let’s start with the quote from Lenin.
FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK: The quote from Lenin was really the starting point. I remember very clearly the moment when I had the idea to make the film. Listening to a Beethoven piano sonata and I remember this quote I read in a book by Maxim Gorky, actually a friend of Lenin’s, and Lenin had said to him ‘Beethoven’s appassionato is my favourite piece of music, but I don’t want to listen to it anymore because it makes me go all soft, stroke peoples’ heads and tell them sweet, stupid things. But I have to smash in those heads. Smash them in without mercy in order to finish my revolution.’And I thought perhaps I should find a film story or plot where I can force Lenin to listen to the appassionato just as he was getting ready to smash in somebody’s head. And would that change the course of history? When I thought about forcing Lenin to listen to the music I had the story within a few minutes, the entire structure, and I sat down at my keyboard and typed it within an hour. So that was a two-page outline of the plot and that still is remarkably close to what I ended up writing. It’s just that it took another three years.
JW: Let’s talk about those three years. You had made a number of shorts before this that were very highly regarded which makes this an audacious undertaking for a first feature, particularly the scope and the attention to detail. Tell me about the three-year research period, what kind of processes you went through and why the need for such accuracy?
FD: I knew all of the survivors of that period were still alive so I knew if I got anything wrong I would be slaughtered. As a filmmaker it is a matter of honour to get the setting for a film right. Even if most of the survivors of the Russian revolution were dead by then I’m sure the makers of Dr. Zhivago [1965] adopted exactly the same painstaking work to get the details right. There’s something comically wrong with a film if you don’t work on those details. Before writing the first line of dialogue I spent one and a half years just researching. I didn’t intend for it to take that long but it was only after one and a half years that I reached a point where I really knew enough about it to tell the tale objectively. And I’d heard both sides and so many contradictions in the ways that the stories were told about this that the point had come where I had enough to make my own mind up about how it was.
I’d talked to Stasi victims and to Stasi officers. It was quite an emotional roller-coaster ride that year and a half. Literally, I’d be meeting one of the victims in the morning that would tell me about how they were tortured psychologically and in the afternoon I’d meet the person who did all that. I actually invited my main Stasi consultant to the film. Luckily he didn’t come in uniform. He came with his wife who was also a Stasi officer. They were only allowed to marry amongst themselves. I was watching him out of the corner of my eye. He left immediately after the film was over and I thought that would be the last I ever heard from him but then he wrote me a letter. ‘I’m glad at least you got the historical details right. But isn’t it a sad state of things that the only way you can portray a Stasi officer as a hero is by making him a traitor?’ I thought it was incredible that he can have seen the film that you have seen and still be thinking ‘what a traitor!’ It was absurd.
JW: There was some interest in the film early on from financiers but am I correct in saying they wanted you to write it as a comedy?
FD: Well, there had been a number of successful comedies treating this period in German history. Good Bye Lenin! [2003] for example. They read the screenplay and didn’t know what to do with it and thought that as there were comic elements in my short films....
JW: I was going to save this unil the end but it seems apt now to mention it, but is there a certain amount of vindication on your part.
FD: Vindication has such a negative connotation. I try not to focus on the people who made it hard for me but on those who fought with me. Everyone you saw in that long end credit. Those were people who were prepared to work for much less than they make and the actors even more so. I was relieved when the film did well that I kept calling the distributor in Germany, who again kept telling me that no one was going to want to watch this. By this point I still needed about 130,000 Euros on lab work to finish the film. So I knew I wouldn’t even be able to finish it if I didn’t get a distributor to put up that money. They all refused. Even the arthouse distributors. In the end it was the largest German distributor who picked up the film, knowing that everyone else had refused this film. They didn’t know what to do so they just tested the film with an audience of a certain level of education and it did very well. And as a result of that they did it.
JW: Ulrich Muhe has an explicit connection with the material.
FD: Muhe was probably the most formidable actor of the former GDR, and at a very young age became incredibly famous and was at the Deuschte-teatr in East Berlin. He received all the main roles and Heiner Muller even constructed entire theatre evenings around him and considered him the greatest actor ever. But for this film he didn’t prepare at all. His only preparation he told me was to remember. After The Lives of Others he claimed his Stasi files. Every victim has the right to do so, although fewer than ten per cent have chosen to do so. He found out that four members of his theatre group, which for an actor is like his family, were actually placed there by the Stasi to monitor him, to write reports on him. And he also found out, and perhaps the most painful discovery, was his wife of six years had been listed as an informer and had been reporting on him.
He’s a very sensitive man and in the interview I did with him to accompany the published screenplay I told him that these are things the tabloid press will find out and will be grossly misrepresented, so why don’t you tell me the story from your perspective? And he did. And we took twenty pages to properly cover the subject. And most people thought we had gone too far, washing dirty laundry in public. And he was attacked very severely. In some parts he was hailed as finally the person to cross that bridge and talk about these things. But it was really a very painful thing for him. He really couldn’t enjoy the success of this film because of the vicious attacks. Every day the answering machine would be full of the most awful venom. And all he was saying was’l want to be able to talk about my past when people ask me. I have nothing to be ashamed of’. He said something interesting in that in dictatorships he says they force their victims to be silent out of a sense of shame. Often Jews who experienced something similar in the concentration camps speak of not talking about it out of a sense of shame, some weird malfunction in the brain that makes you ashamed of injustices that you have suffered. Many victims of child abuse know about that. And he said he didn’t want that to happen to him, he wanted to talk about these things. He suffered, so much so that he really is not in good health now.
JW: A key moment in the film is when Wiesler goes to Dreyman’s apartment and discovers Brecht for the first time.
FD: He sees everything with different eyes. It’s the first time he’s not there to intimidate or to install wires and he sees that these people have lives. It’s the scene that I’m most proud of. It takes only perhaps a minute and a half and it has no dialogue but you can see how this person is searching for meaning and searching for feeling, but he has been repressed for so long that he doesn’t know how to go about it. He thought that he could find feeling by ordering a prostitute but this is unable to satisfy him and then he realises that these people are finding satisfaction through art so maybe this is something he should be doing; he thinks that maybe he should be reading Brecht.
JW: Do you think that this is the specific moment that he decides his life should take a different direction?
FD: I don’t think that there is a specific moment. I just think that he is gradually being pushed away from the path that he felt that was the right path and that perhaps he was mistaken. He doesn’t really know what he is to do but that what he is doing so far isn’t right. It’s like a mid-life crisis but only in a good way. It was always important to me that there not be one specific turning point.
On the one hand, on the Stasi side he realises that his sacred mission to find enemies of the state is being used for personal motives and this central committee member just has a passion for this girl. He also realises that his friend, who was always a little less intelligent and a little less party loyal than he, is making a better career and that people actually mistrust him for being almost religious in his support of the party.
On the other hand, as he is monitoring the so-called enemies of the state, he has to ask himself ‘are these really the people I’ve been fighting against all my life?’ They seem so normal to him, especially as he experiences them in moments of greatness and moments of weakness. These moments always seemed easier to ignore in an interrogation scenario. There is also a third level that leads to change and that is art. He experiences that it is possible to live with music and to live with poetry and he realises that it is possible for him to live with these things too. All these things together gradually make him change. As the change is gradual – he is a resistant hero at first, letting things go and falsifying reports – it is only right at the end that he decides to do something physically to help Dreyman. People often don’t feel they are that heroic when they are doing heroic acts, it is often only in retrospect that they recognise their heroism.
JW: Adding to the texture, and in line with your requiring that though a work of fiction the film is grounded in historical accuracy, was your decision to shoot on location wherever possible. Given the amount of changes in so short a period this must have been quite an undertaking.
FD: It was harder to shoot something in 1984 East Berlin than it would have been to make a film set in Renaissance Italy for example. At least if you go into other periods of history you have buildings that have been preserved exactly that way. In Germany, since 1989, people have done nothing but tried to destroy traces of that period. Fortunately, we got some very special authorisations to shoot in the Stasi archives so what you see in the film are the real Stasi files and archives and the real rooms with their revolving index-card machines. I also found an apartment that had not been renovated, enabling me to get the texture of the walls. This always looks more authentic to me than if you try to build something in a studio.
What was really hard to find was the street outside Dreyman’s apartment because I needed that as a 360 degrees location. The graffiti was everywhere and there was of course no graffiti in the GDR. Every morning we had to have a group of painters re-paint the walls of this entire street because every night the graffiti would just re-appear. Our producers even calculated to see if it would be cheaper to employ armed security guards for our clean walls overnight or to just have painters re-paint from 4am to 7am every morning. We decided to do the latter.
I really tried to reconstruct that world and by looking at pictures I realised that red and blue, two colours that seem the most shocking to the eye and which have very extreme qualities to them, were largely absent. It occurred to me that we could reconstruct the East by simply leaving out these two colours all together. That’s what I did. I experimented through drawings and designs and when I showed these and shots from the film to my friends and relatives from the East they remarked right away that it really reminded them of the GDR. I stuck to that principle and there is no red or blue in the film. I think that the film is very evocative of the GDR because of this. Of course, there was red and blue in the GDR but eliminating them made it feel more like the GDR than it would if you reconstructed things exactly as they were. When the lead actors and I toured the film for several weeks in the East people just could not believe how they were able to re-enter their past. I decided not to tell them about my little trick with colour.
