The lives of others

This is the name of the film by German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which I watched the other day, and which you may have already heard about. If you haven’t watched it yourself, then a retelling of the plot will make you sad: the GDR, the Stasi, a seasoned agent who follows a couple of artists who are disillusioned with socialism. Along the way, he becomes disillusioned with him and, in the end, saves the heroes at the cost of his own career, although the main character dies. In the finale, the Berlin Wall comes down. Taking into account the fact that the film is German, which has collected a lot of awards, and, moreover, without shooting and chases, one can assume that this is something boring, abstruse and popular anti-communist.

This is wrong. That’s why films should be watched, not retold. I don’t remember when recently the epithet “human film” came into my head. “The Lives of Others” is indeed a very human film, but I am not a film critic and do not write film reviews. It’s just that a good film makes a person think about something else besides the twists and turns of the plot.

And I thought that for all the horrors of Honecker’s socialism, ours was even more terrible. In the film, Stasi agents do their best to collect EVIDENCE. And in the end, both the suspected dissident and the agent who saved him are released only because there is not enough evidence. There are many more such moments when they talk about ways to force a guilty person to admit his guilt as a whole science. In our country, I think, no one would bother with such nonsense. Our “authorities” did not collect evidence, but CONFESSIONS. And not only the guilty, but also anyone else was forced to confess. And, of course, no one would release a suspect simply for lack of evidence, especially if the suspect turned out to be his own security officer.

However, these are, of course, particulars. A dictatorship with a half-human face is still a dictatorship. I thought that our people have suffered much more, but do we have any good “humane films” about this? There have been some attempts, some even relatively successful, but in general the situation is such that not only is there no such cinema, there is no need for such a cinema. And not because the people are tired of the revelations of Stalinism or the nonsense. People enjoy watching all these series about the zone, some “brothers”, killers, anti-killers, as well as a gallery of “road patrol” programs on TV.

Somewhere late in the evening the amazing films of Svanidze passed without much resonance, somewhere else something else. But that’s exactly what they “passed.” Indeed, like “the lives of others” - that is, not ours, it didn’t happen to us, but to some other country, which in a war with itself destroyed millions of compatriots!

The Germans also had a hard time. Hitlerism is a terrible thing. Hitler, defeat in World War II, and for half of the country also a communist regime for forty years. But the Germans survived this and overcame it. They understood the main thing - this is bad! Fascism is bad, communism is bad! They repented to the rest of the world, apologized to their own people, they want to move forward, putting an end to the past, but not forgetting it.

When will we have the same? I think that it will take a long time, because we lack two important things: historical memory and the ability to distinguish good from evil. Well, how can it be that in a country where, during collectivization, industrialization, repression, the fight against cosmopolitans, draft dodgers and spies, millions and millions were imprisoned, shot, deported, and crippled, that in such a country there would be serious discussions on the topic, good Was Stalin a man or a bad one? They say that there is no family where someone did not die during the war. But the repressions, one way or another, affected almost everyone. If not your family personally, then friends, acquaintances, neighbors. But it’s as if we forgot all this!

How many times will we go in circles, now debunking, now exalting Stalin? Each new generation seems to begin to comprehend the history of the country anew. And he doesn’t draw any lessons from this story.

There is a moment in the film when the main character comes to the archive and receives his “case”. There, in the file cabinet, he calmly finds out the name of the agent who followed him and actually saved him. But he could just as easily have found out the name of any other agent. I don't know if this is good. This is a delicate ethical point. In Poland, the Baltic states, and some other former communist countries, they intend to compile and publicly disclose lists of everyone who collaborated with the communists. I don't think this is correct. It is not for us to judge these people. But those people who were directly harmed have every right to know who denounced them, who mocked them and ruined the fates of them and their loved ones.

However, in any case, in these countries they have already decided unequivocally: being an informer is bad, being an agent of the political police and participating in repression is bad. What about us? It’s bad for us that the monument to Dzerzhinsky has not yet been returned to its original place - that’s what’s bad. A former employee of the Stasi or Securitate Ceausescu is a stigma, but in our case a former KGB employee is like a medal.

And what future of the country can we talk about, what kind of forward movement, if we go in circles all the time? What kind of national idea, moral ideals and patriotism can we talk about if we are not able to simply distinguish bad from good, we confuse good with evil, weighing this way and that whether it is possible to exterminate our people and rape them for decades? Or is it still not worth doing all this? Are there many other places in the world where such questions have not yet been answered? Iran, North Korea, Libya, Cuba? Are we happy in such company?