‘The Lives of Others’ and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    As was recently reported on Hot Air and Breitbart, I am organizing an Anti-Communist Film Festival for the fall of 2026. The response has been tremendously enthusiastic.

    At this point, I have spoken to several theaters in the D.C. area about rental and licensing fees. The management of these places has been very accommodating and even enthusiastic.

    As things move ahead, I’d like to update supporters and donors about why I’ve chosen the movies I have. I’d like to give other anti-communists and movie fans the chance to offer their own suggestions and debate the lineup. Over the next weeks and months I will be posting at Hot Air to explain why I chose a particular film. Readers are free to offer their own suggestions.

    The first film on the list is The Lives of Others, the great 2006 German film about the East German Stasi. 2026 marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others. Written and directed by first-timer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, and the 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 tentacular 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 Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

    The Lives of Others tells the story of a playwright in mid-80s East Berlin, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). He is involved with his leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Dreyman is spied on by Stasi functionary Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), who, in seeing the love, artistic freedom, and humanity of Dreyman and Sieland, slowly starts to question state tyranny.

    One of the themes that is central to communism, and which has been adopted by the Western left, is shame. As journalist Laura Williams has 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.”

    Of course, there is a direct parallel to how leftists in America operate. They chant Shame! Shame! Shame! at rallies, and use opposition research to shame opponents. However, as Christopher Caldwell notes 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 two alter our lives.

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. For the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was other people, the gaze of others in a room that was never dark, a place of no exit in which no one could close their eyes. 

On a broad historical scale, it was not long ago that the punishment of public shaming was abolished in Europe; readers  of  English  literature  may  recall,  for  example,  the  laughing  stock  in Shakespeare’s King Lear. While this practice no longer exists in modern society, the expression “to be a laughing stock” persists as do, obviously, situations which provoke shame. But it is not just the exposure of guilt that elicits feelings of shame, nor even the violation of one’s integrity, or being personal and vulnerable without receiving a reciprocal confidence. It is an anxious concern with the self, the feeling that  the  other  has  taken  possession of  us  and  that  we  have  lost  something  of ourselves past control and recovery.

Shame was a tool of the Stasi and is a cool of the modern left. It is brilliantly explored in The Lives of Others.

Note: You can contribute support for the festival by donating at the GoFundMe page for the project. 

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