In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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First, the trigger for the events in the film is the corrupted minister of culture who wants to get rid of the top GDR playwright Georg Dreyman, so that he will be able to pursue unimpeded his affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror inscribed into the very formal structure of the system is relegated to an effect of a personal whim—the point lost is that, even without the minister’s personal corruption, with only dedicated and devoted bureaucrats, the system would be no less terrifying.
The writer from whom the minister wants to take the woman is idealized in the opposite manner: if he is such a good writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, personally close to the top regime figures (we learn that Margot Honecker, the party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn which is strictly prohibited for ordinary people), how is it that he did not come into conflict with the regime much earlier? How is it that he was not considered at least a little bit problematic by the regime, with his excesses nonetheless tolerated because of his international fame, as was the case with all famous GDR authors from Bertolt Brecht to Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf? One cannot but recall here a witty formula regarding life under a harsh Communist regime: of three features—personal honesty, sincere support for the regime, intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does actually combine all three features.
Second, during a reception at the start of the film, a dissident directly and aggressively confronts the minister, without consequences—if such a thing was possible, was the regime really so terrible? Last, it is Christa-Maria who breaks down and betrays the husband, which later leads to her suicidal flight from the apartment, crushed under the wheels of a truck, whereas in the overwhelming majority of real cases of married couples when a spouse betrayed his partner and spied on her, it was the men who became “IM,” “informelle Mitarbeiter (informal collaborators)” of the Stasi.8
The most extraordinary Cold War love story was the one between Vera Lengsfeld and Knud Wollenberger who, in the now defunct German Democratic Republic, got married and had two children together. After the fall of the Wall, when Vera, a GDR dissident, gained access to her Stasi file, she learned that Knud, a Stasi informer codenamed Donald, had married and lived with her on the orders of his masters, so that he was able to report on her activities; upon learning this, she immediately divorced him and they have not spoken since. Afterwards, Knud sent her a letter explaining that he wanted to shield her and that his betrayal was, in fact, an act of love. Now that he is dying of a galloping form of Parkinson’s, Vera has announced that she has forgiven him . . . No wonder Hollywood is considering making a film with Meryl Streep as Vera.9 Betrayal as an act of love—the formula had already been proposed by John Le Carré in his masterpiece, A Perfect Spy.
The only way to account for the shift in The Lives of Others is to evoke a weird undercurrent of the story: in a blatant contradiction to the known facts, is the reason for this odd distortion of reality not the secret homosexual undercurrent in the film? It is clear that, in the course of his spying on the couple, Gerd Wiesler becomes libidinally attracted to Dreyman, effectively obsessed by him—it is this affection that gradually pushes him to help Dreyman. After die Wende, Dreyman discovers what had gone on by gaining access to his files; following which he reciprocates in amorous terms, including tailing Wiesler who now works as a postman. The situation is thus effectively reversed: the observed victim is now the observer. In the film’s last scene, Wiesler goes to a bookstore (the legendary Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung on the Stalin Allee, of course), buys the writer’s new novel, Sonata for an Honest Man, and discovers that it is dedicated to him (designated by his Stasi codename). Thus, to indulge in a somewhat cruel irony, the finale of The Lives of Others recalls the famous ending of Casablanca: the proverbial “beginning of a beautiful friendship” between Dreyman and Wiesler, with the intrusive female obstacle conveniently disposed of—a true Christological gesture of sacrifice (no wonder her name is Christa-Maria!).
In contrast to this idyll, the very appearance of light-hearted nostalgic comedy in Goodbye Lenin is a façade which covers a much harsher underlying reality (signalled at the very beginning by the brutal intrusion of the Stasi into the family home after the husband escapes to the West). The lesson is thus much more desperate than that of The Lives of Others: no heroic resistance to the GDR regime was ultimately sustainable, the only way to survive was to escape into madness, to disconnect from reality.
This, of course, in no way implies that Goodbye Lenin is without faults of its own. A comparison with another recent political thriller can be of some help here: John Malkovich’s Dancer Upstairs. In both films, violence is framed by love: the love of a son for his mother (Goodbye Lenin), the love of a man for a woman (Dancer). In both cases, the function of love is stricto sensu ideological: it mystifies and thereby domesticates, renders tolerable, the confrontation with the Real of brutal, traumatic violence—the violence of the GDR regime, as well as of its collapse and the Western takeover; the violence of Sendero Luminoso’s ruthless revolutionary terror. While both Lenin and Dancer confront a recent “radical” political past, significantly, one was a big hit and the other a box-office failure.
Goodbye Lenin tells the story of a son whose mother, an honest GDR believer, has a heart attack on the confused night of the demonstrations which accompanied the forty-year anniversary celebrations in 1991; she survives, but the doctor warns the son that any traumatic experience could cause the mother’s death. With the help of a friend, the son thus stages for the mother, who is restricted to her apartment, the smooth continuation of the GDR: every evening, they play on the TV video-recorded fake GDR news, and so on. Towards the film’s end, the hero says that the game has gone too far—the fiction staged for the dying mother has become an alternative GDR, reinvented as it should have been . . . Therein resides the key political question, beyond the rather boring topic of Ostalgie (which is not a real longing for the GDR, but the enactment of a real parting from it, the acquiring of a distance, detraumatization): was this dream of an “alternative GDR” inherent in the GDR itself? When, in the final fictional TV report, the new GDR leader (the first GDR astronaut) decides to open the borders, allowing the West German citizens to escape consumer terrorism, racism, and the hopeless struggle to survive, it is clear that the need for such a utopian escape is real. To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi-nostalgia—“Goodbye Hitler” instead of “Goodbye Lenin.” Does this not bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential, distorted and thwarted as it was, in Communism but which was completely missing in fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany towards the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a statue of Lenin being transported by helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address/interpellate her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may first appear.
The weak point of the film is that (like Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful) it sustains an ethics of protecting one’s illusions: it manipulates the threat of a second heart attack as the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty. Does the film here not endorse unexpectedly Leo Strauss’s thesis on the need for a “noble lie”? But is it really that the emancipatory potential of Communism is only a “noble lie” to be staged and sustained for naive believers, a lie which actually only masks the ruthless violence of Communist rule? The mother is the “subject supposed to believe” here: through her, others sustain their belief. (The irony is that it is usually the mother who is supposed to be the care-giver, protecting her children from cruel reality.) Is the mother in Goodbye Lenin not the one who makes the law on behalf of the (absent) father here? So—since, for Lacan, therein resides the genesis of male homosexuality—the true question is: why is the hero not gay, as he should have been?
In contrast to Goodbye Lenin, Dancer Upstairs sees no redemptive potential in the figure of Evil with which it is strangely fascinated; it should rather be