Abstract
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others (2006) is anchored in two politically and aesthetically opposed acts of writing emerging from two comparably opposed authors. As the film identifies and then tracks the incremental erosion of this opposition, the suspicions that attach to author figures in the literarily censorious GDR before 1989 come under scrutiny. The self-preserving imperative to anonymise a dissenting piece of work is here shown to be matched by the institutional imperative to deanonymise such a work. And the series of counterposed quests to discover the author of a work – the Stasi operative’s desire to know the playwright, the state’s desire to know the dissident writer, the playwright’s desire to know the writer of his surveillance report – illustrate, in hyperbolised form, a psycho-social ‘desire’ for the author that arguably informs every act of reading.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Writer on Film |
Subtitle of host publication | Screening Literary Authorship |
Editors | Judith Buchanan |
Place of Publication | Basingstoke |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 218 - 235 |
Number of pages | 18 |
ISBN (Print) | 0230313841, 978-0230313842 |
Publication status | Published - 15 May 2013 |