In collaboration with Dialogue Books, Cultural Connections creates a link between our book of the week and an idea, a place, a film, a work of art or an object. Each book of the week featured in Cultural Connections has 10% off for that week, so head down to the bookstore (Schönleinstraße 31, 10967) to pick one up or just type in the discount code at the online checkout: connections10
Delivery within Berlin is free!
BOOK OF THE WEEK
The File: A Personal History – Timothy Garten Ash
This classic of modern reportage by one of Britain's most distinguished non-fiction writers describes what happened when he got access to the file on him kept during his years in East Germany by the Stasi, the infamous secret police.
In 1978 a romantic young Englishman took up residence in Berlin to see what that divided city could teach him about tyranny and freedom. Fifteen years later Timothy Garton Ash - who was by then famous for his reportage of the downfall of communism in Central Europe - returned. This time he had come to look at a file that bore the code-name 'Romeo'. The file had been compiled by the Stasi, the East German secret police, with the assistance of dozens of informers. And it contained a meticulous record of Garton Ash's earlier life in Berlin.
In this memoir, Garton Ash describes what it was like to rediscover his younger self through the eyes of the Stasi, and then to go on to confront those who actually informed against him to the secret police. Moving from document to remembrance, from the offices of British intelligence to the living rooms of retired Stasi officers, "The File" is a personal narrative as gripping, as disquieting, and as morally provocative as any fiction by George Orwell or Graham Greene. And it is all true.
CULTURAL CONNECTIONS: FILM
The Lives of Others – Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen) is the brilliant 2006 German film, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
The film involves the monitoring of the cultural scene of East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Dreyman's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland.
"A remarkably assured work, it paints an altogether darker picture of life under East Germany’s Communist regime than the almost cosy existence nostalgically evoked by the likes of ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ Set for the most part in East Berlin during the mid-1980s, it charts the consequences of the Minister of Culture’s decision to investigate, by means of the intense surveillance practised as a matter of course by the Stasi, the political affiliations and activities of playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress lover Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) – for whose sexual favours the politician brazenly lusts. It’s not just the artists and their friends whose lives are profoundly affected by the bugging of the couple’s apartment, but also that of Captain Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), the surveillance expert put in charge of spying on them, who gradually comes to question the ethics of his work for the state police.
Von Donnersmarck’s complex but lucid script, with its wholly credible twists, and Hagen Bogdanski’s sombre, noir-inflected camerawork together serve not only to establish a brooding atmosphere of fear, doubt and suspicion but to create a suspenseful thriller of no little contemporary relevance to a world where fundamental civil liberties are increasingly at risk of being undermined. Only a slightly distended ending weakens the film’s grip; even then, however, the performances remain superb, ensuring that the movie succeeds both as unusually convincing historical recreation and as an utterly compelling tale of individuals whose lives are shaped – tragically – by the society they live in." Geoff Andrew, Time Out
