Movies About or Around Europe: "The Lives of Others"/"Das Leben Der Anderen"

Perhaps "The Lives of Others" should be a mandatory double feature with "Goodbye Lenin", which I previously reviewed. http://jensroadtoeurope.blogspot.kr/2014/08/movies-about-or-around-europe-goodbye.html While "Goodbye Lenin" shows a lighter side of the DDR, a life in transition as the wall comes down, "The Lives of Others" shows a country where ordinary people's lives can be destroyed forever by the Stasi, East Germany's state police. Perhaps you have already seen the film, since it has won many awards, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and was pretty much universally acclaimed when it came out. If you haven't seen it, however, here's a review of the film which comes with my highest recommendation.

"The Lives of Others" is truly one of the best films I've seen in a long time. 

The main characters are a member of the Stasi, Hauptmann (Captain) Gerd Wiesler, and the artist couple Georg and Christa Maria, whom  he's asked to run surveillance on by his friend and superior in the Stasi. The surveillance turns out to be a set-up on behalf of a high-ranking party official to get Georg out of the picture so that he can gain full access to Christa Maria, whom he's already been pressuring into a sexual relationship.Whether Georg is guilty or not isn't the point. Wiesler is charged with finding something.

What the upper officials don't account for, however, is Captain Wiesler's dedication not just to the party, but to ideas of right and wrong. He's disenchanted from the first by his friend's ambition to get ahead, regardless of the truth. He also appears to be immediately quite personally attracted to Christa Maria, which leads him to look out for her and intervene in her life. At one point in the story he uses information he's discovered about her personality through surveillance to convince her to return to Georg, rather than meeting the party official who's been sexually pressuring her. After his successful intervention, and the resulting happiness of the couple, Wiesler's interest in their lives only grows, and he is drawn deeper into a world of shades of gray and farther from his purpose as a Stasi official.

Captain Wiesler begins to become less strict in carrying out his duties in general, as he's exposed to Georg's private life.

Wiesler is also particularly sensitive to beauty, as in one scene where he appears to be transported by Georg's piano-playing heard through his surveillance headphones. The film's director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, told the New York Times that his initial inspiration for the film was the idea of just such a scene where a Stasi officer would overhear a supposed enemy of the state making music and be moved by it. In the film, Wiesel is also shown "borrowing" and quite enjoying one of Georg's books, a work by Brecht. These artistic connections between Wiesel and Georg create a thread of hope and light throughout the film, that creation and beauty may really trump forces of destruction.

Georg plays a piano song to release his emotions with unimagined effects on Captain Wiesel, who listens in secret. 

This was an exceedingly moving film, and I am sure I will watch it again at some point. The characters are well-drawn and fully human. The plot is involving but not at all rushed. The themes are universal and relevant, and surveillance is certainly not a relic of the past. I think this film is also a great introduction to the dark side of the DDR, though some critics have pointed out that the situation portrayed in the film perhaps would have been impossible, since Stasi officials were generally watched by other Stasi officials or operated in teams. Whether or not it is strictly historically accurate, however, it is true to human nature while also being forgiving of our collective weaknesses and hopeful about our future. This combination is rarer than it should be. I recommend seeing this movie as soon as possible!

*On one final note - I've reached 70 days of consecutive French and German study as of today. I'm happy to say, also, that in the 2 weeks or so since my last German film viewing, I've noticed a large increase in the amount of German which I can understand without the subtitles. I'm understanding whole sentences at times, and I'm getting more words in other sentences. It's really quite encouraging!

Movies About or Around Europe: "Goodbye Lenin"

"Goodbye Lenin" is a funny and moving portrait of one son's efforts to keep his mother from finding out about the collapse of East Germany in order to save her from a life-threatening shock, starring Daniel Brühl as Alex and Katrin Saß as his mother. 

We meet the family in Alex's childhood, as his father disappears from the family life into West Germany. After losing her husband, Alex's mother, Christiane, devotes her entire life to socialism, becoming active in community life and "marrying the party." As protests begin to spring up in 1989, however, Christiane witnesses Alex participating in one, and suffers a heart attack. She then lapses into a coma for eight months, the Wall comes down, and the worldview she devoted herself to collapses with it. When she wakes up, the doctor says another shock could kill her, so Alex decides he and his sister should bring her home and create the past in the apartment. This starts out as a fairly simple matter of redecorating, but becomes more and more complicated as the world continues to change outside the apartment. Eventually, in his love for his mother, Alex goes so far as to help make fake news reports to explain away phenomena such as a Coca Cola advertisement being hung on a nearby building or the presence of West Germans in their neighborhood.

The movie's fake newscasts are some of the most interesting and inventive parts of the movie, as Alex begins to create an alternate history of his country, with the help of a film-savvy friend.

While Christiane is kept in the dark, the viewer is treated to a movie about a country and its people in transition - some are overjoyed and excited, others, mainly the older people, are worried or angry about unemployment and the loss of old routines. Here are, in fact, two links to fairly recent articles about dissatisfied East German citizens - one is an opinion piece in the Guardian, the other a feature in Der Spiegel:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/nov/08/1989-berlin-wall  http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-dictatorship-majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-a-634122.html

I had a very limited knowledge of East Germany, or in German, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, before watching this film, but the movie made me curious to learn more. It's amazing to think that such a huge transition happened within my lifetime, and within the lifetimes of Germans who are the same age as me. Since I currently live in a divided country, it's of particular interest, though the gulf between North and South Korea is certainly much wider than that between the two Germanys.

Christiane is perplexed as West Germans move into her apartment complex.

I highly recommend this film both as an introduction to this interesting time in German history and as a human drama. The acting is good, the story inventive and creative. It is the kind of movie that makes you think about what you would do in a similar situation and puts you in the shoes of someone from a different culture and time. It's also a great family film, as long as you don't mind some brief, non-sexual, male nudity.

The film made me curious to visit some sites in Germany which might help me learn more about this historical period. Here are some places I might try:
http://www.ddr-museum.de/en  (A museum in Berlin dedicated to the history of the DDR)
http://www.museenfuergeschichte.de/de/7/Zeitgeschichtliches-Forum-Leipzig.html?mid=20  (another museum on the DDR, located in the former East Germany. You'll have to translate this page if you don't read German!)
http://coldwarsites.net/country/germany  (A page which links to a variety of sites within Germany)

Finally, here are some photos taken in the last days of the DDR and an interview with the photographer:
http://www.dw.de/photographer-captures-colors-of-gdr-life/a-16864700

Movies About or Around Europe: "The Blue Angel"/"Der Blaue Engel"

I'm finally getting around to seeing some classic films which I probably should have watched in high school instead of watching "Heathers" or "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" for the fiftieth time. Not to say "The Blue Angel" is fundamentally better than these movies, just to say that it is a piece of film history - a reference point. It may be the first Marlene Dietrich movie I have seen. As someone who considers herself a bit of film geek, I have some catching up to do.

The film is heartbreaking and pathetic, but I'm not going to tell you why, because there's no way to do so without spoiling it. What I can say is that the story involves a professor, played very realistically by Emil Jannings, and a nightclub performer, Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich in her breakout role. Professor Emmanuel Rath is so terribly earnest that it makes him helpless both against the sparkling facade of the nightclub and against the guise of morality of the bourgeois world he belongs to. This is a man who believes in doing what's right - to drive the point home in one scene we see a motto about doing right hanging above his bed. Unfortunately, those who do what's right and take responsibility for their actions are often wronged by the people around them.

This is also a "femme fatale" film - a cautionary tale about the dangers of beautiful women. It's not too hard to take this moral from the film, since Dietrich sings two songs which distinctly warn the audience about getting involved with a woman like her. "Falling in Love Again", Dietrich's signature song goes: "Men cluster to me/Like moths around a flame/And if their wings burn/I know I'm not to blame." Another song, "Blonde Women" warns: " Beware the amazing blond women/Be careful when you meet a sweet blond stranger. You may not know it, but you're reaching danger." Just to drive the point home, there are a series of shots that cut from Dietrich on the stage, to linger for a moment on a statue of a siren (those evil temptresses of the sea who caused men to crash against the rocks), to the Professor gazing at Dietrich.

The arresting presence of Marlene Dietrich shines on stage.

In this sense, I find the film tiresome. Though it wasn't such a warmed-over cliche in 1930, today I've had it with decades of films which warn men against sexy women yet entice men towards them simultaneously. For all the fuss that's made about such women in film, I've rarely if ever met such women in real life, and when audiences are made to sympathize with the poor, duped man over and over again, it sort of takes the heat off the male role in the objectification of beautiful women. It's far more common in real life to see women taken advantage of by men - human trafficking and rape immediately come to mind. However, in films, women and their sexuality are constant, deadly snares, as if Angelina Jolie or a young Kathleen Turner were waiting around every street corner.

Dietrich does manage to make the role of the femme fatale more than a stereotype, however. First, her charisma is intense.  Her screen presence travels across the decades to make this 1930, beginning-of-the-sound-era film seem, if not contemporary, at least not a fossil. She is one of those actors with an extra spark in her eye and the ability to arrest attention. The black and white, somewhat expressionist filming accentuates this allure, and it's not hard to believe that she could hold sway over this club or over human lives. She is more than her charm, however. She also has some fine scenes with Jannings (also terrific), and it is clear that there is some complexity of feeling in her character - some inner conflict.

Emil Jannings as the earnest and upright schoolteacher of "Der Blaue Engel."

At the end of the day, though, I'm not sure if this is a movie I'd recommend strongly. It was interesting to me as a part of film history and as an introduction to Dietrich, whose other films I think I will seek out eventually. It is interesting to see a film made in the Weimar era which possibly reflects some of the tensions of the time. Overall, though, the film suffers from its age and tropes which have been exhausted in the subsequent years.

I did watch the film in German, however, and, as usual that was good practice. I didn't pick up any new expressions this time, but Lee was happy to hear his favorite word: "Entschuldigung" (Excuse me/I'm sorry) from the other room.

One more thing, slightly unrelated, but I couldn't get this song out of my head while watching the movie. It's a pretty great song, for my money the best one on the album. Enjoy:

Movies About or Around Europe: "Downfall" ("Der Untergang")

Ever since I was about 8 or 9 years old I've been reading about the Holocaust and Hitler's Germany. I don't know why. I started with your standard children's books on the topic - "The Hiding Place", maybe "The Diary of Anne Frank", but soon I was reading "Night" by Elie Wiesel and other, darker books documenting Nazi atrocities. I watched a lot of movies on the topic too. Some of the first foreign films I watched were things like "Europa, Europa" that dealt with Nazi Germany. I've always felt a bit uncomfortable with my fascination with the Holocaust and the Third Reich, because it is a sort of fascination, and to be fascinated by something seems to imply a lack of disgust, or a lack of reverence for those who suffered. It seems lurid to me, a species of people craning their necks to get a look at a car accident only worse. Yet it is part of me. I deplore the Holocaust, and I deplore fascism and any signs of fascism in the world around me (believe me, I see the potential more often than I would like in my own country). But I also can't look away. I'm not the kid in "Apt Pupil", certainly, but I think Stephen King was onto something. (Isn't he always...)

I watched "Downfall" ("Der Untergang") believing that it was a documentary about Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge. There was a documentary made about the movie's fly-on-the-wall character - "Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary."  I'll probably watch that as well at some point. "Downfall", from what I can read on the net, however, appears to be a mainly historically accurate film about Hitler and his inner circle in their last days in the Berlin bunker. And though I have read a lot about the Third Reich before, it was mainly from a distance. From a distance this machine seemed somehow grandiose and terrible, unstoppable like the Party in "1984." It at least seemed to be run by competent, if evil, people. But as portrayed in "Der Untergang", the Third Reich is a cult that is falling apart, its members losing faith or spiraling into suicidal insanity.

Hitler's former secretary, Traudl Junge, as she appears in the beginning and end of the film. 

Hitler himself is portrayed as, by turns, delusional, cordial, paranoid, confident, self-pitying, and enraged. At times he resembles somebody's weird old crank of a grandpa who everyone has to listen to even if no one agrees with him. (This is the movie that brought you those "Hitler reacts to..." videos where Hitler's subtitles are changed and he appears to be enraged by everything from teachers desk-warming in Korea to Twitter not working.) http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/downfall-hitler-reacts Despite this unstable personality, he is obeyed nearly without question and executions are being carried out at his behest even as it becomes clear that no one's getting out of this alive or uncaptured anyway. In this movie, Hitler is repeatedly portrayed as saying that if the Third Reich won't survive, the people don't deserve to survive either.

Hitler's bunker, in the film, resembles nothing so much as a cult - a Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones situation. Indeed, many of the inner circle are portrayed committing suicide and taking their families with them - willingly or unwillingly. Even a dog is subjected to this ritual suicide. These are a people who have come so much to believe in their own myth-making, their own prejudice, their own skewed vision of the world - that they can't imagine a life worth living after the Third Reich - even people who must know they would not be found culpable of the Third Reich's crimes. Meanwhile Hitler and his commanders' refusal to surrender is shown to be needlessly wasting the lives of civilians in the world above the bunker. Children and teenagers fight fanatically and senselessly on Hitler's behalf, old men are shot for refusing to do the same, wounded and sick people are abandoned in hospitals. None of it matters to Hitler, who vacillates between looking at his architectural model for a new Berlin with Albert Speer and believing himself betrayed by each and every person under his command.

It is hard to believe, watching this movie, that Hitler was able to rise to power, to win so many followers and this type of devotion. Perhaps the unreason in him, the madness in him, called to a madness in many other people. Perhaps his delusions were delusions that many others wanted to believe. It's been a long time since I read it, but "Hitler's Willing Executioners", by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, made the case that the anti-Jewish sentiment was already there in the German people.  http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/hitler.html
That would make the power of a man who was so delusional much more comprehensible. That he did suffer from delusions does seem backed up by historical references, especially from Albert Speer's book "Inside the Third Reich." This movie does not seem to be attempting to fictionalize Hitler but to demystify him.

Today, Hitler's bunker is under a parking lot, marked by a historical plaque, itself only recently erected. It is not somewhere I want to visit, but I have always been fascinated by this historical period. Part of it is maybe lurid, but in writing this entry, I begin to think that a bigger part of me just wants to understand how such unreason, racism, and lack of compassion - probably sociopathy - can come to be followed by so many people and can come to nearly dominate the world. It's important to remember that the world isn't inevitably good. I think a lot of people who grew up white and middle-class in the United States, like me, assume freedom, assume a world of progress. Maybe this is less true these days, post 9-11, post-Guantanamo. I don't know. But I think the assumption is faulty. Though Hitler meets his pitiful downfall in this film, I think Roger Ebert said it best in his review of the film: "It is useful to reflect that racism, xenophobia, grandiosity and fear are still with us, and the defeat of one of their manifestations does not inoculate us against others."

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/downfall-2005

Movies About or Around Europe: "Generation War"

I've been sick the last few days which means that I've spent a lot of time on my couch watching movies. One of the things I watched was the popular German mini-series from 2013, "Generation War", or in German,"Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter" (Our Mothers, Our Fathers). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1883092/  The show chronicles the journey of five friends through World War II, starting as two of them are about to go of to war, and ending after the surrender. Three of the friends are men - two brothers, Wilhelm, the golden boy and Friedhelm, more of a reader than a fighter; and Viktor, the Jewish son of a tailor. The women are Greta, who is in a romantic relationship with Viktor and wants to be singer; and Charly, who is setting off to be a nurse on the Eastern front and is in love with Wilhelm, but doesn't say anything.

Improbably celebrating the young men going off to fight Hitler's war.

I had read a fair amount of criticism of the show before watching, but even without that reading, my knowledge of history, especially Holocaust history made the show seem a bit fantastical at best and revisionist at worst. Mainly the show tries to simplify a friendship among five people that, if it existed at all, would surely have been more complicated. The idea that there would be no real discussion of what's happening to the Jewish people among these friends seems rather absurd, as the movie begins in 1941, well after Kristallnacht http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/kristallnacht (the only allusion to Nazi atrocities given in the first part of the movie), and in the same year as the first deportations from Berlin. "The Eternal Jew" - the notorious propaganda film that compared Jewish people to rats, among other things - was released in 1940 alongside other films which had been laced with anti-Jewish messages. Hitler had already announced his intention for the annihilation of Jews in Europe. It seems like the five friends would have to be enormously naive and/or insensitive to talk as they do in the beginning of the film about hoping for Germany's early victory and serving a country which was so openly hostile and threatening to one of their friend's very existence. I kept thinking about the much more interesting, complex film that might have been made had it followed five friends from say 1933-1941 and seen the changes they must have inevitably undergone as the culture changed under Nazism. This film was not made to that end, however. A very interesting documentary which interviewed people from the time can be found on youtube  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zocAaqp4AG4and gives a more realistic account of the youth of that period.

As the mini-series develops, the main complaint I had was that the characters really don't have enough time to earn the changes they undergo. Certainly the motives of Charly (and Greta towards the beginning) are barely fleshed out, and you have to sort of fill them in yourself. Same goes for Friedhelm, who completely flips personality at some point in the mini-series, leaving me feeling as if I'd missed something. 

Friedhelm becomes a hard-ass soldier, but I must have blinked and missed the moment where they told us why.

 There are exciting battle scenes, which I'm sure does it for some people, but it was hard to care about characters who seemed like little more than archetypes. Viktor was really the only character who seemed fully fleshed out, but even in his case I had to do some filling in from what I knew about the Holocaust, since some of the greatest horrors he must have undergone are never shown. This is a man who had probably seen a fair amount of people die, (as it's mentioned that he's traveling from one camp to another), but the daily horrors of a concentration camp (not just gas chambers but starvation, sickness, punishments and shootings) are never shown. Instead we see Viktor hanging out with the Polish resistance fighters, but undercover, since the Polish resistance are themselves portrayed as anti-Semitic. The Polish government was angered by this portrayal, although in that much I can't necessarily fault the filmmakers, as there is evidence to show that many partisan groups would not accept Jewish people in their ranks. That said, it creates quite an imbalance in the film when the sympathetic leads' own anti-semitic tendencies, or if not tendencies, then at least their participation in an anti-semitic war, are rarely if ever taken to task

 

The portrayal of the Polish resistance fighters as anti-semitic and complex is a realistic element inserted into the film. The more favorable portrayal of the German main characters would seem to justify the Polish criticism of the mini-series.

SPOILER- In fact Charly at one point betrays a Jewish person to the Nazis. In terms of the rest of the story, however, she faces no real consequence for this. She looks a bit upset about it for a moment and then goes back to the more important business of pining for her unrequited love. Then, she finds out that the person she betrayed, who, let's face it, would probably have been taken out back and shot in real life, is still alive and somehow improbably in a commanding position in the Russian army. So, no harm done, after all. What a relief. This seemed like an enormous cop-out to me, denying the character any real, sustained damage from the war, allowing her Nazi moment to be just a little "oops", a blip in her life. -SPOILER-

At any event, the story suffers from oversimplification, weak characterization, and a tendency to elide the worst of the atrocities - oftentimes there is a moment where we're almost going to see something horrible happen, but then it either happens off-screen or it is miraculously prevented from happening at the last moment. In World War II there wasn't a lot of deus-ex-machina to go around to keep up such a pleasant facade.The moment that struck me most deeply, in fact, was a single shot of Greta watching Jewish people being evicted from their house after she's realized that she's neglected to save Viktor's parents. In her look you can tell she suspects or knows the worst that's in store for them. Then as she averts her gaze and asks to be taken home, you understand the fear and paralysis that's prevented her from acting and is in the process of hardening her heart. Though Greta shows considerably more understanding for the fate befalling her country and especially the Jewish population, she is treated in the narrative as aloof from the war, as almost comically clueless compared to Charly, as someone afraid to get her hands dirty, as perhaps vain and selfish.

Greta, averting her eyes from atrocities, seems like one of the more realistic moments in the mini-series.

Is this to say I didn't enjoy the film? No, it was interesting enough. It is an antidote, perhaps, to the other idea in Western popular culture that all Germans were evil caricatures, a la "Inglourious Basterds." However, viewed by the wrong eyes, the eyes of someone who hasn't fully confronted the horrors of the Holocaust or come to terms with the way anti-semitism and fascism had infected the population so thoroughly, this film could be a dangerous revisionist history in which the Nazi war was fought primarily by some hapless kids who didn't really mean any harm and just wanted to get back to Berlin to hang out with their Jewish best friends. I think that that proposition is as false as the "Basterds" premise, however. The truth lies in the middle somewhere. Reading books such as "Hitler's Willing Executioners", watching documentaries such as that linked above, reveals that the German population was not so naive, that Hitler was not simply a dictator who inspired fear but a loved figure who made no secret of his hatred for the Jews. I hope that the popularity of this film does not indicate a new desire to gloss over their history on the part of the Germans, who, heretofore, have seemed more than willing to accept responsibility for their past.

At any rate, this is not a terrible film, but it's a film that should be taken with several grains of salt, and I would recommend that people read up on their history and watch some documentaries before digesting any of it at all.

That said, it was a great way to practice my German listening skills. I'm still a beginner at German, (Ich bin eine Anfänger), so I didn't pick up much. However, it's good to immerse yourself in the second language when you can. I figured that catching up on what's popular on German TV at the same time would be a good two-for-one language and cultural lesson.