It has been acclaimed as the best German film of the year and nominated in 11 out of 15 categories for the German Prize, Germany’s version of the Oscars. But The Life of Others, a film about the Stasi, East Germany’s ubiquitous secret police, is at the centre of a row after its lead actor claimed he too had been a Stasi victim, spied on by his own wife.
The plot revolves around a Stasi officer, played by Ulrich Muhe, who is ordered to listen in on a famous couple. Muhe’s character moves into an attic above the couple’s flat. His activities have terrible results.
Muhe, one of East Germany’s most famous actors, claims that in 2001 he was ”shattered” to discover that in the 1980s his then-wife Jenny Grollmann had met regularly with the Stasi and spied on him.
Grollmann has vehemently denied the claims, saying the Stasi ”invented” the bulky file on her. She has also won an injunction against the publisher Suhrkamp, which had published an interview with Muhe, along with the film’s screenplay, halting publication of the book.
”It’s amazing the power of denial,” said Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the film’s 33-year-old director, who wrote the screenplay.
”There is a 254-page file detailing her involvement with the Stasi. She was an informer for more than 10 years.”
Nearly 650 000 Germans have seen the film, while the number applying to see their Stasi files has doubled. It is only now, it seems, that East Germans are beginning to confront their communist past — and each other. In April a former high-ranking Stasi officer, Peter Pfutze, published an unrepentant memoir. Several Stasi victims disrupted the book’s launch.
Critics have hailed the film as the most important German film for a generation. Its success is all the more remarkable in that Von Donnersmarck, a West German, was only 16 when the Berlin Wall fell.
Writing in Die Welt, Wolf Biermann, East Germany’s leading dissident, said the film worked because it gave an identity to the ”faceless scoundrels” who worked for the Stasi and are now ”drawing pensions”. — Â