'The Lives of Others' feature

Time Out talks to the director of ’The Lives of Others‘ – the Oscar-winning German film that looks back to the paranoid world of East Germany in the 1980s

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's 'The Lives of Others'

The concrete wall between Stasi-controlled East Germany and the free West was physically pulled down in 1989, by popular uprising. Since then, quietly, almost imperceptibly, a new wall has arisen in its place. Some call it Ostnostalgie – a term expressing something between fake nostalgia and a collective amnesia which chooses to overlook worst excesses of a repressive ‘dicatorship of the proletariat’ which employed one state security officer or informant for every 50 East German citizens.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s debut feature, the spy-thriller ‘The Lives of Others’, is one of the most impressive films to come out of Germany in recent years and describes the destructive experience of a playwright and his actor partner who are arbitrarily singled out for state surveillance in East Berlin in the mid-1980s. It won the 33-year-old director this year’s oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and aims a hammer at that new psychological and metaphysical wall.

Donnersmarck certainly has the bulk to wield a hammer. He’s tall. When I meet him in an office in Fitzrovia, he stands up to greet me and the lights in the room are extinguished. He’s beaming, blonde-haired (in the curly, Art Garfunkel-style) and speaks with English that is as American and Russian-inflected as it is German, reflecting the globe-trotting lifestyle he has led as the child of an East German-born airline pilot and as a student in Moscow, London and the US. I ask him whether he thought himself brave to raise these ghosts.

‘I don’t shy away from a conflict. I don’t mind fighting if I have to fight. I don’t believe in harmony for harmony’s sake. But the reasons that I made the film weren’t that dogmatic or didactic or pedagogical.’

The idea for the film came, not from a desire to grind a political axe, but from a cinematic image. ‘I had this picture in my head of a surveillance guy sitting in his attic not hearing the words of an “enemy of the state” in his headphones, but just hearing beautiful music. The film’s basic plot structure stayed the same from that first evening where I had that idea right down to finishing the editing of the film five years later. It was always going to be a psychological nail-biter.’

Those five years were mainly spent on exhaustive research; recent newspaper articles – from Neal Ascherson and others – testify to the convincing accuracy with which Von Donnersmarck’s film conjures up the era (often shot in the real locations) and its atmosphere of uncertainty, paranoia, betrayal, duplicity and fear. But Von Donnersmarck is keen to express his intentions were not simply to expose the darkness of the era. ‘I’ll stress the thriller element. I’ll stress the love story and, if that word didn’t have its negative connotation, I’d probably use the word melodrama. I actually like that genre quite a lot, but the word has this connotation of being over the top. That’s not what I mean: I always think that a good melodrama is one that goes to the very border of emotion without overstepping that border towards bad taste.

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