Anyone interested in the history of freedom of expression in Europe must see the German film Lives of Others. 
It is a fantastic piece of cinema with great acting from a wonderful ensemble of convincing and moving performers. The pace and plot is like a spy thriller and there’s a heart-rendering romantic core to what is one of the best political films for the last ten years. At the centre of the story is the dramatic attempt by an East German author in the Communist DDR to publish an article exposing the moral terror of the state. I won’t spoil the plot but it reminds us of
a world before the internet and before digital broadcasting when repressive regimes could block the free flow of information in a way that is still possible, but much harder now. The sheer clunkiness of the secret police in the DDR only worked because of the complicity population who became a nation of informers. Ironically, today’s new technology may have served the surveillance purposes of the regime. But that same technology would also have made free expression easier as well.
I am amazed the there haven’t been more films like this that show the dark history of the bits of our continent that fell under Communism. I suppose our heavily subsidised film-makers are too busy making movies condemning the capitalism that pays for their lovely lifestyles.
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I think, there are more than enough films, articles, books on the horrors of stasi opression, but maybe I am more aware of them as they are about the history of the country I was born in. In fact, I find that everything written, shown and said about the GDR focuses on this dark, oppressive, grey side of life. I get the impression that the Western world – said capitalist forces, that are supposedly featured in many movies (like which one?) – is extremely scared that people might start getting the idea that there were actually some good, beneficial, pleasant sides to socialism, that in fact it had a few advantages to the system we are currently living in, that it wasn’t the brutal, inhumane demon they would like to make us believe it was. It makes for a good piece of sensationalist journalism, a gripping movie to concentrate on that aspect of East German life. But quite honestly it is getting tiresome hearing the country you spend your childhood in being called “a nation of informers” all the time.
That was not what it feld like to live there. I feel way more spied on in London, where Oyster cards are tracking my every move, where my name and address is recorded every time I buy something.
I’m sorry to say I don’t share the enthusiasm about the internet as the saviour of personal freedom and freedom of expression. It has made us transparent and the amount of data gathered through it about us way surpasses anything the Stasi would have ever been able to do. Not only that, the information can also be keyworded, sorted, much more easily accessed than a pile of handwritten notes in a dark bunker somewhere that say what someone had for breakfast.
If one day the government decide to pass a law against blogging, which they won’t because it is not dangerous enough to them, there’d be people standing next to you at your computer before you could say the words “electronic revolution”. And I really hope that that is only my very grim sci-fi reading of a potential future. Of course the amounts of data gathered are totally beyond what any human could manage to analyse for purposes of controlling others. But the potential is there, I think.
I don’t believe that the internet would have made a difference to the lives of people in East Germany, even though the regime would have been scared of it, just like they were scared of everything, just like we were scared of the Stasi – a dictatorship is based on fear on all parts. But a smuggled-in, unregistered typewriter could do so much more damage than any internet ever could have. It is not the facility of the internet that would have resulted in change, it is the attitude of the people towards information. If you think there is a lack of information and a lack of truth you will go and find the information and the truth you are looking for. So in a way it is a much more effective way of controlling the population’s potential and opinions to give them all the information, lots of information, way more information than any one could ever be bothered to look at and say “you have freedom of expression”. It was the communist regime’s “mistake” to try and control information. If people would have been allowed to numb their brains with Big Brother and the like, they might never have thought of protesting.
For me what was at the heart of Live of the Others, and what made it interesting and a worthwhile film to see, was the human intention behind all these centrally controlled structures and procedures. It was deeply moving for me to relive such situations where human beings were torn between the right thing to do and the good thing to do. One would land you in prison, the other would make you betray those dear to you.
The performance of Ulrich Mühe as the stasi informer Gerd Wiesler was great in that respect. He has his eyes opened to another dimension of human existence beyond grey conformism and his character was interpreted perfectly.
Sebastian Koch as the writer was a bit wooden and one-dimensional. The kind of person he portrayed would have been much more edgy and quirky, I feel.
The film felt very slick and Hollywood-like and I was never really quite reminded of life in the GDR. Everything felt very staged. The East German props were all so clinically arranged. Amazing that we can make utterly convincing movies about the second world war, but something that happened not even 20 years ago is already so utterly lost to us.