Band Way Podcasts

After seeing the film The Lives of Others, I was reminded about what is history, and what isn't, these days. The German movie, which won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, is a grim portrayal of life in East Germany before reunification and the twisted relationship between cultural elites and the Stasi secret police. Set in 1984, appropriately, the film depicts the everyday reality of totalitarianism in the GDR through the surveillance, intimidation, blackmail and psychological torture used by "the sword and the shield" of the communist state. It shows how dictatorship demands conformism, promotes corruption, breeds betrayal, and destroys lives, but it also offers hope that some can rise above the evil system and do the right thing in a triumph of the human spirit. The movie deftly captures the look and feel of the East Berlin which I remember well from a number of visits in the 1980s, the grayness of life, drab clothes, socialist pop music, antiquated technology, and decaying buildings. While leaving the cinema, I thought that the film would make a fine addition to the syllabus I use to teach European History to undergraduates. But as I spoke to my friends in Minsk, read the websites with news from Belarus, and recalled travels to that country, I realized that in some parts of Eastern Europe, the film was more about current events than the past. I heard and read about a youth group meeting raided by police because of a tapped phone, a demonstration of small entrepreneurs held in the shadow of special forces and their unique buses (called "avtozak") to take detainees to prison, students expelled from universities for their political activities, and a political prisoner who was punished for reading after lights out in jail. Like East Berlin of old, Minsk today remains full of uniforms, socialist realist monuments, crumbling apartment blocs, popsa music, and bad consumer goods. The prison featured so prominently in the movie, Hohenschoenhausen, is now a museum to Stasi ruthlessness, but the KGB prison in Minsk remain open for business. The Marxism-Leninism of East Germany is only a memory, but "Europe's last dictator" hangs on in Belarus . As the anniversary of the March 2006 events draws closer, I hope that more Belarusians will be able to resist dictatorship and do the right thing. Sooner or later a day like November 9, 1989, will dawn in Belarus and statues of Lenin will fall like the Wall. I look forward to that triumph of the human spirit and to the day when my friends and I, like characters in the film, will be able to read our secret police files in Minsk. Someday, Belarusians will echo the words of the movie's leading actor, who declared in an interview that "This is what dictatorship looked like." Celluloid Hero read less