As Joan Didion wrote in the beginning of The White Album, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This applies to governments as well as people. The legitimacy of any regime in part depends on the story it tells about itself, and the breakdown of those public narratives can have grave consequences for that regime.
Set in East Germany during the waning years of the Cold War, the 2006 German drama The Lives of Others is sometimes portrayed as a film about the bitter hollowness of Soviet Communism. Sent to spy on a playwright, a member of the Stasi becomes enchanted with the playwright’s world and undergoes a conversion, from Communist ideology to human sympathy. While The Lives of Others does illustrate the sterility of the Communist regime, it also casts light on a much broader topic: the corruption involved in a hollow government, when the governing elite no longer abides by the principles it purports to govern by.
Comments