Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Director of "The Lives of Others"

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Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck studied at the University of Film and Television in Munich.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut film The Lives of Others (2006), tells the story of Gerd Wiesler, an East German  secret police officer who faces a crisis of conscience when he begins to sympathize with innocent artists he is ordered to spy on.  Germany.info interviewed Donnersmarck in November 2006, a few months before the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and made him one of the most prominent representatives of German cinema today.

You spent part of your childhood in New York. How did that affect your identity as a German?

I remember when I went back to Berlin at age eight in 1981, it felt like the third world to me, really. Back then, Germany was not what it is right now. Globalization had not progressed as far as it has today. For instance, in those days, you didn’t get to see American films in Germany until about two years after they came out.

I remember that on the Clayallee in Berlin, the American forces had this gated compound, and there was a theater there called the Outpost. You couldn’t get in as a German, and my brother and I used to go there to look at it, and it was like looking through a gate into your own glorious past and childhood. We would stand there and see that they were playing all these great films we wanted to see. It was a great period, with films like Indiana Jones, and E.T., and we saw people eating pizzas and buying peanut butter and watching these movies – all things we couldn’t have.

Later, when we started going to East Germany to visit friends and relatives, I realized – this was the third world, and not West Berlin.

Did that experience of being something of an outsider within Germany help you gain the perspective you needed to make a film about life in East Germany?

Well, I will say that you won’t ever find a filmmaker or a writer who was the leader of the in-crowd. That’s not what artists are like. The fact that I was always forced to be an observer, because I never spent very long in one place, did help me to tell stories more objectively, I think.

The setting of this story, the former German Democratic Republic, will be incredibly obscure to most outsiders, with its arcane ideological language and institutions. Yet you went to great lengths to portray the setting accurately – why?

At the end of the day, the setting of a film is just that, a setting. If you inflate the importance of the setting, you lose any audience except the people who happen have lived in that setting.

That said, your setting better be accurate. If the people who have lived in the world you recreate in your film don’t recognize themselves in the story, if you don’t strike the right tone, then you’ve made a big mistake.

You were quoted in “Der Spiegel” as follows: “German cinema has tended to portray the GDR as this funny place with quirky characters that no one takes seriously. This is really different [from the true] atmosphere of great fear, of great mistrust.” While your film is clearly not a comedy in the vein of Goodbye Lenin or Sonnenallee, it contains moments that are laugh-out-loud funny. Is this just comic relief or something more?

Well, it would be terrible if you just had to cry for two hours, wouldn’t it? A film that is exclusively and consistently depressing cannot depict life accurately in any respect, because there is always humor, even in the most terrible situations.

In fact, the communist countries in particular had a huge movement of black comedy. I just don’t think that it would have been accurate if there hadn’t been moments of humor.

Why did you choose to put artists at the center of the story?

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Ulrich Mühe plays Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi officer ordered to spy on an artist and his girlfriend.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

Section XX/7 of the Stasi [the “cultural” department that spied on artists] was very large and grew continually. The Stasi’s declared goal of knowing everything and being able to predict everything was a very hard thing to do in the case of artists. It drove them crazy, never knowing what these people were going to do next, so they kept adding more and more people to watch over them, as if that would help.

It’s the most extreme case of polar opposites you can imagine: An ideologue dedicated secret service agent and a free-thinking play it by ear artist.

It was absurd, the magnitude of their efforts – millions spent on things like cataloging the forensic signatures of different typewriters so that they could keep tabs on who wrote what. These things were never of any use to anyone. And the humor comes through for that reason as well.

A number of prominent East German writers and dissidents, including Wolf Biermann, have praised your film. How does it feel to receive that kind of affirmation from people who lived stories like the one the film tells?

Even someone like Thomas Brussig, from whom I never expected it, wrote a beautiful piece about it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and made a prediction that we would win the Oscar. It’s a crazy prediction even now, but at the time he wrote it sounded even crazier.

After praising the film and saying how much it reflected his experiences, he said that it wasn’t [nostalgic comedies] like Sonnenallee [which Brussig wrote] that misrepresented the GDR, but the lack of serious films like The Lives of Others. I thought that was an intelligent thought. He himself was often accused of portraying the GDR in the wrong way.

Wolf Biermann also wrote a piece in Die Welt calling the film “insane and true and beautiful”, but also said that you had sent him a script for the film years ago, and that at the time he didn’t want anything to do with a film about the GDR by “a naive upper-class kid who had been graced with being born so late in the West.” Were you anxious about the reaction from Eastern artists and intellectuals like Biermann while you were making the film?

I had a clear feeling that they would recognize themselves in the film unless they approached it from the perspective of some political agenda. I had done a lot of research – one and one half years before I started writing, so I was not that concerned about it. I felt that if they spoke out against the film rather than for it, it would be for reasons other than telling the truth.

I kept sending Biermann the screenplay, and I would try to find reasons to send him new drafts. And he never answered me. So I went to a performance of his and even stood in line to have him sign a copy of his translations of the Shakespeare sonnets, which I didn’t even particularly like, just so that I could talk to him. I asked him to sign the book to ‘Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’, and he reacted with a funny look but didn’t say anything. So I offered him new draft of my screenplay and asked him why he hadn’t responded, and he told me, ‘I haven’t responded to you on purpose. If I want to say something about the Stasi then I will say it myself.’

I was a little bit offended by that, but I understood. It’s a touchy subject for him. It’s not as if I had just asked him about some recipe or something.

I was also very impressed when, after the film came out, he had the grandeur to say that he liked it and that he had been wrong. But I never expected anything less from him, because he is a truly great figure and a great poet.

What about the reactions of the people on the other side of the story? You met personally with former Stasi officers in your research for the screenplay.

I knew they wouldn’t like it. They probably felt that, while I was talking to them, I was friendlier to them then the film turned out to be.

I did have respect for some of them. They did terrible things, but you had to respect them for their intelligence and, in some weird way, for the fact that they weren’t remorseful about what they did just because they lost. I actually invited one of them, Lieutenant Colonel Wolfgang Schmidt, to the premier. He led department XX/7. So, in real life, he would have been reading all of the reports submitted by someone like Gerd Wiesler.

Afterwards, he told me, ‘I suppose your film was moving, but isn’t it strange that the only way you could portray a Stasi officer as a hero was by making him a traitor to his sacred mission of defending the principles of the GDR.’

It was so strange to me that someone could see that character as a traitor. As the saying goes, where you sit is where you stand, but I just couldn’t believe it.

The German film industry is heavily subsidized. Is this money necessary to support films that wouldn’t get made otherwise, or does the art of filmmaking suffer because of a lack of accountability to an audience?

That is a tough one. I have benefited greatly from the system, because my film was made with 99 percent public funding. I did feel awkward making the film knowing that the money was taken away from people at gunpoint. Luckily, we’ve been able to repay that money.

Of course art is less free if it’s so closely tied to government. In an ideal world there would be no government in art. We haven’t gone as far as the GDR, where everything is made for the government, but we aren’t as free as the U.S., where you have great orchestras and a great film industry without government money. But unfortunately, it just wouldn’t be possible to make films in Germany without government support right now.

Doesn’t it allow people to realize creative visions without worrying about whether they can make money at it?

Look at how many obscure art films are being made in the U.S. without government money. Legions. You don’t need the government to help you tell stories.

I can say that I have never seen a movie I liked that didn’t make its money back. I think quality in the end will prevail.

It’s a weird new thought that quality and commercialism somehow have nothing to do with one another. Look at Leo Tolstoy. He was the most commercially successful writer in his time. William Shakespeare was like the Steven Spielberg of his time. The same goes for musicians.

This is a very new thing, this impression that art and success are separate. It’s a dangerous thing. I think journalists have cooked up this conspiracy, and it’s destroyed classical music. The only people who go see classical music now, the Arnold Schönberg mis-understanders of today, are journalists and other musicians. Let’s not let that happen to film or literature.