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The Week in Germany: Culture November 16, 2006D.C. Talks to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Movie fans in the nation’s capital crowded into the AFI Silver Theater last Saturday to watch a special screening of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s new film about the second German dictatorship, the German Democratic Republic. They didn’t let Donnersmarck, who breezed through D.C. on a whirlwind promotional tour that took him from Telluride to Washington, and on to Japan, get away without asking him a few questions about the film.
How did you recreate the atmosphere of the GDR? “Silke Buhr, the production designer, and I, spent months looking at old films and photographs from East Germany, and we noticed that it had a very particular color scheme. More oranges than reds, more greens than blues. So, we completely omitted reds and blues and used pale, desaturated colors. A chemist told me that the GDR didn’t have patents for the technologies needed to create the super-saturated colors we take for granted in the West. I moved to the Soviet Union to study just before it collapsed in 1991, and I remember when the first western ads appeared in the subway after that. That bright red was so amazing, like nothing else in the landscape there. The only other place in the world that still looks like that is Cuba. It has this eastern color feeling, and that’s one reason people go there and think that it is so beautiful and special. What was it like working with Ulrich Mühe, who plays the Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler? “Mühe is an amazing actor, and he was one of the biggest theater stars in the GDR. He also suffered in that regime. They knew that he was going to be a star even while he was in school, so when it came time for his mandatory military service, they stationed him at the Berlin wall, which was a very unusual post for an ordinary recruit. He had orders to shoot and kill anyone trying to escape to the West. To force his loyalty, the Army told him that if he refused that order, he would never act on a stage in East Germany again. He is an incredibly sensitive person, and this literally made him sick. He developed terrible ulcers and eventually collapsed on duty. He had to have part of his stomach removed, and he was dismissed from the rest of his term in the Army. Later, he was allowed to make a movie in the West with Klaus Maria Brandauer. The authorities decided he was getting too arrogant, and they threatened to force him to serve the rest of his army term if he didn’t remain loyal. To add insult to injury, he discovered after the wall came down that his ex-wife, also a famous actress in the GDR, had been an unofficial agent of the Stasi, and had filed 500 pages of reports on various cultural figures while they were married. Do you see any parallels between what is going on in the U.S. right now and the GDR? Well, if we take that parallel very far, you could me asking me that question tonight, and tomorrow you might disappear suddenly. Obviously, that isn’t going to happen. I think that whenever there is power, there will be abuse of power. But as long as we can talk about it like we are here tonight, I think that we are doing okay. How could you make a Stasi officer the hero? I think it’s clear from the film that this was an exceptional case, and I also doubt that you got the impression from the film that the Stasi was a friendly organization. I also think that you have to allow people the freedom to make decisions to act morally. If I hadn’t given Gerd Wiesler that chance in the story, it would make room for the perpetrators of the crimes, 100,000 in the Stasi and an additional 200,000 unofficial agents, to excuse themselves by saying that they didn’t have a choice. They could say, ‘We were just cogs in the machine following orders.’ When you look at the history of the fall of the wall, you realize that the GDR, with its army and the Stasi, could have made Alexanderplatz into Tiananmen Square in November 1989. Instead, I think that enough people were prepared to stop following orders and refuse to carry out their missions for that not to happen. Links:
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