The Suffering of “Others”

The film, originally released in Germany last spring as Das Leben der Anderen, examines the life of a couple in mid-80s East Germany under the surveillance of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi or MfS for short). It has been hailed by not only movie critics but also respected public figures such as dissident songwriter and Stasi surveillance victim Wolf Biermann for its creepily authentic portrayal of life under the dictatorship and its emotional poignancy.

Savvy Hollywood culture hawks are even discussing an American re-make in English.

The horrified-yet-fascinated viewers driving up ticket sales in the States, however, have the luxury of leaving their discomfort in the movie seat and returning to a thankfully removed existence.

Stasi prison director spoke out in Berlin

Yet here in Berlin, this past is not quite so buried. The film’s 2006 springtime release coincided with a public meeting led by Siegfried Rataizik, in which former Stasi employees accused their victims of lying.

Rataizik is the previous director of Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi’s secret jail complex nestled in an otherwise unremarkable neighborhood of slab-concrete socialist housing. Here the psychological torture so neatly showcased in The Lives of Others’ opening scenes was carried out, aided by sleep deprivation and solitary confinement, among other tactics.

Today the jail is a memorial site accessible only through guided tours led by former prisoners, and it is these guides that Rataizik accused of inaccurately framing the jail as a “cabinet of horrors,” while the then-Culture Senator Thomas Flierl stood by, lamely citing each side’s right to “have its say.”

Touring the "cabinet of horrors"

Despite Flierl’s conviction that we ought to listen to the delusions of bitter Stasi pensioners, I decided to favor the prisoners’ perspective and visit the jail myself. Fittingly, the day I chose to tour the complex’s courtyards and cell-lined, concrete hallways was one of the coldest all winter. A few Germans, some French teenagers, and I stamped our feet and shivered while trying to listen politely to the gruesome descriptions of prisoner treatment.

I was happy to get home that day and cook dinner, then settle on the sofa and watch a comedy on television. It was easy to push the ugly, unpleasant images out of my mind, and view the experience later with intellectual distance.

This is a luxury unavailable to most victims. Some, like Anatol Rosenbaum, suffer long-term health problems; at a recent memoir reading he entreated listeners not to stand too close to him, fearing what his failing immune system could contract. He explained he believes contact with radioactive substances while in custody at Hohenschönhausen has brought on the rare form of blood cancer that has so debilitated him.

Outside the packed hall in which Mr. Rosenbaum gave his talk, an agitated man handed out fliers in protest of recent federal attempts to limit the compensation given to retirement-age Stasi victims, pointing out many receive less money than Stasi ex-employees.

Some say Stasi criminals went unpunished

Indeed, fate is cruel these days. A brochure for the BStU, the office charged to sort out the left-behind Stasi paperwork, plainly states “most [of the criminals] got off scot-free.” In grand irony, Stasi head Erich Mielke was briefly imprisoned in Hohenschönhausen in the early 1990s, but was transferred after he complained about terrible conditions. (He was later convicted of murders that took place before German division.)

Some think the relatively low level of prosecution stems from early concerns to keep the fragile re-united Germany together as one state, and by now, most crimes have exceeded the statue of limitations.

Even the BStU employs 52 former Stasi co-workers, a scandalous conflict of interests nonetheless set in stone by pension laws relating to their length of employment. (They were originally hired, argues the first BStU director, because their skills were needed to sort out the labyrinthine documentation and 180 kilometers of files.)

At first, the more I learned about Stasi abuses, the perpetrators’ relative lack of consequences, and the victims’ continued suffering, the more foreign it seemed to me. Here was a society struggling with a recent tyrannical, horrific past -- not something I could relate to, having grown up in the United States in the prosperous and peaceful Clinton era.

Close-to-home connections

Until I began reading the news a little more closely. Sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, psychological torment -- this was familiar territory. But it wasn’t a prisoner discussing the past or a museum placard cataloging previous horrors: It was the media expose of contemporary torture the American government is carrying out in Guantanamo Bay -- to say nothing of the secret prisons located worldwide -- against terror suspects.

Every time I saw a headline about Rumsfeld alternately justifying torture or denying its existence, my heart dropped from disappointment with my government. What is the substantive difference between the denials of Rumsfeld or Rataizik?, I asked myself.

Despite last week’s nationwide anti-war protests, concurrent with the four-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, massive anti-torture protests have not been a feature of the American political scene. Perhaps this is because we see the lives of torture suspects as the lives of others. If Berlin is any example, the wounds of this attitude will be festering for a long time to come.