Reel 55a: Another Brick in the Berlin Wall, Part 1

Or, Claude Writes Another Too-Clever Title Prompting Sean to Send Perplexed DMs.

In this episode of our Around the World in Twenty Films series, we look at a pair of films in which German citizens are forced to confront their own past. This isn't in a whole "The Nazis were us the entire time!" kind of attitude but rather in the way that some of the tactics that were employed in the past are coming back in subtle ways to haunt their present.

And we start with The Lives of Others, from 2006, which was written and directed (his directorial debut) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It's 1984 and the fall of the Berlin Wall is still a few years away, which means that everyone in East Germany is subject to surveillance of one kind or another. It's a Communist country and everyone is equal, but clearly some people are more equal than others. And people like Georg Dreyman, a playwright of some renown, is subject to extra scrutiny not because of his political views, which generally align with the government's, but because the Minister of Culture is hot for Dreyman's girlfriend. And Gerd Wiesler, the agent assigned to monitor Dreyman, spends most of his time listening in on Dreyman's life. What happens when Dreyman's work starts to turn its political eye in another direction? We talk about that, and a bunch of other stuff in Part One of our episode.

In Part Two, we jump to the other side of the Berlin Wall and 2008's The Baader-Meinhof Complex.

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