Later this year, I will hold an Anti-Communist Film Festival in Washington, D.C. The idea began months ago with an article in the Washington Examiner. It is now becoming a reality.
The centerpiece of the festival is The Lives of Others, the great 2006 film about the East German Stasi. This year marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and winner of the best foreign film Oscar. It is, as critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “An indictment of the sinister brutalities of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, whose network of informers was so vast that fully 2% of the entire civilian population was on the payroll — a network of fear and shame worthy of George Orwell’s 1984.”
The Lives of Others tells the story of Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright in mid-80s East Berlin. He is in a relationship with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Dreyman is spied on by Stasi functionary Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), who, seeing the love and artistic freedom of Dreyman and Sieland, slowly starts to question state tyranny.
The Lives of Others stands as a sharp metaphor for America in 2026 for both the way the Stasi, like the modern American Left, uses shame as a weapon, and the way too many artists in both cases went along with totalitarian oppression. Whereas tyrants cut as Hitler and Stalin repressed artists, the German Stasi worked with them, understanding their potential for spreading propaganda. In 2026 America, too many actors, writers, and comedians mindlessly go along with the Left.
On Oct. 25, 1991, the German singer and poet Wolf Biermann was awarded the Buchner Prize, Germany’s highest honor for literature. During his acceptance speech, Biermann, who was once branded an enemy of the state by the communist regime, lamented how many writers had informed for Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party. Biermann blasted writer Sascha Anderson, one of many writers who was an informer for the Stasi. Biermann noted that there were few “bright stars” and “upright citizens” under the communists. Instead, Germany saw too many “self-pitying, well-nourished subjects,” while even opposition groups were “eaten away by the Stasi metastases.”
The other theme that is central to communism, and which has been adopted by the Western Left, is shame. As journalist Laura Williams described it, “If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. Some forms of harassment were almost comical: agents spread rumors about their targets, flooded their mailboxes with pornography, moved things around in their apartments, or deflated their bicycle tires day after day. Others were life-altering: Individuals labeled as subversives were banned from higher education, forced into unemployment, and forcibly committed to asylums. Many suffered long-term psychological trauma, loss of earnings, and intense social shame as a result of Stasi lies.”
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There is a direct parallel to how leftists in America operate. They chant “shame” at rallies and use opposition research to shame opponents. However, as Christopher Caldwell observes in his book The Age of Entitlement, shame is an evil way of governing that produced terrible results: “There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.”
In an academic paper on the great film The Lives of Others, Hans Lofgren explores the deep power of shame to alter our lives, writing, “Stare long enough into the eyes of a dog who does not know you, and he will begin to bark. Many animals, human beings among them, experience the stare as threatening aggression. But, unlike other animals, human beings can feel shame at being exposed to an unwavering look, a look which threatens the private self that is only shared in deeply trusting relationships.”
