Hearts of Darkness

Robert Gellately: Lenin, Stalin and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe

The New York Sun, September, 19, 2007

In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust as the stout, solid bourgeois architecture then transforming their cities.

This self-satisfaction we now know was pure hubris, a lethal, beautiful, boastful illusion. Confronted in 1914 with the reality of industrialized warfare, that illusion died. As the war progressed, if one can use that word, the social and political restraints keeping man's atavistic ferocity at bay began to fray all across Europe, and nowhere more dangerously than in the Russian Empire. By 1917, this most backward, and therefore most fragile, of the continent's great powers was a society on the precipice. It only took the slightest of shoves, in the form of the Bolsheviks' opportunistic and initially bloodless coup, to topple it over into the abyss. The consequences were worldwide, appalling, and destructive on a scale that had never before been seen.

When in the subtitle of his new book, "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler" (Knopf, 698 pages, $35), Professor Robert Gellately refers to an age of "social catastrophe," it is no exaggeration. But his use of that phrase also makes a more subtle point. The devastation of the era he describes (roughly 1914–45) went far beyond the physical, far beyond rubble, ruin, and mass graves. The very notion of society itself was torn apart. As for man's idea of himself, it had been changed forever, and not, in any sense, for the better. Man could now be certain that the barbarian within him would always be there, however advanced the civilization — tempting, terrifying and, given an opening, unstoppable.

While Mr. Gellately explicitly narrows the focus of his book to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, its title still promises more than he manages to deliver. Rather than devoting himself to the wider implications of what he is discussing, Professor Gellately offers a conventional history within a largely conventional framework. For those in need of a serious, scholarly introduction to the subject, it's an excellent overview of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, but despite its great length — with footnotes the book runs to nearly 700 pages — an overview is all that it is. There's not a lot that's new about either the information or the arguments it contains.

Mr. Gellately worries that one aspect of his book may "disturb" some readers — the suggestion that Lenin was a monster to be ranked alongside Stalin and Hitler. As he himself might acknowledge, however, this insight is not particularly original: Historians Dmitri Volkogonov and Richard Pipes (to name but two he cites) have already covered much of this ground, and done so highly effectively. Nevertheless, despite their efforts and those of quite a few others, the real nature of Lenin's ideology remains poorly understood. In repeating the message that the story of Bolshevism is not one of good intentions gone awry, but of an evil that worked all too well, Professor Gellately is performing a very useful public service.

That the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did owed a great deal to the collapse not only of the old order, but of order itself. The rise of the Nazis was made possible by almost exactly the opposite, the desperation of a nation willing to try something, anything, to hang on to what it could of its former way of life. If that meant throwing democracy — and with it, the Jews — to the wolves, too bad.

Hitler's mandate was no blank check, however. As Professor Gellately explains in some of the most intriguing sections of his book, the prewar Third Reich was, in marked contrast with its Soviet rival, a "dictatorship by consent." Compared with what was going on in the USSR at the same time, the use of coercion was limited, largely predictable, and rarely truly murderous. The awful exception, of course, was the ever more hideous persecution of the Jews, but prior to 1939, even that was incremental, a slow-motion pogrom both camouflaged and reinforced by the language of bureaucracy and the law.

That Hitler found it necessary to proceed in this way was a paradox of his earliest years in power. The restoration of social calm was key to his popularity but difficult to reconcile with his long-term agenda of military adventure, unending conquest and relentless genocide. With the invasion of Poland, that paradox became an irrelevance, but neither the frenzy of war nor the intoxication of a victorious blitzkrieg, can fully explain the speed with which so many of the Wehrmacht's "ordinary men" either descended into barbarism or demonstrated their willingness to act as its accomplices. In some cases, it was merely a matter of days. That they did so was a sign that pointed the way to Auschwitz. It also suggested that, even before the tanks had begun to roll, the German people had already moved far, far down that most terrible of roads.

Disappointingly, Professor Gellately never fully succeeds in explaining what it took to make this possible. He takes refuge instead in the observation that, by the time World War II had concluded, it had "raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization." That is right, so far as it goes, but it's too simplistic. The more troubling questions posed by that war are not limited to any one civilization: They concern the essential nature of mankind itself. And there's no comfort to be found in the answer, none at all.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Frederick Taylor: The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Berlin, August 1978, © Andrew Stuttaford

To cross over into East Berlin in the 1970s, as I did on a couple of occasions, was to take a trip that, even then, seemed like a voyage back into a lost, almost unimaginable era. The rampaging ideologies, cruel and convinced, that had done so much to wreck Europe were in retreat across the western part of the continent, their fervor dimmed by exhaustion, bitter experience, sweet, if uneven, prosperity, and, credit where credit's due, careful American supervision. In East Berlin, by contrast, it was still 1945 or, if you prefer that date of a future that already appeared to have passed the West by, 1984.

There were occasional ruins and countless bullet holes, relics of Hitler's Götterdämmerung; there were the apartment blocks that proclaimed a utopia with no room for humanity, and then there was that sense, deadening, clammy, gray, of an oppression that Winston Smith would have understood all too well. Not just a sense, a reality: the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, was more than 100,000 strong, with at least another 200,000 informers, all for a population of just 17 million.

And then there was that wall, a symbol of horror, tyranny, and finally, deliriously, liberation. In his highly readable new book, "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89" (HarperCollins, 512 pages, $27.95), Frederick Taylor attempts to combine the tale of the Berlin Wall with a more general history of the German Democratic Republic, an approach that is understandable, yet sometimes a little frustrating: Mr. Taylor's account is very far from being a comprehensive study of what was one of the last century's most peculiar, disturbing, and interesting states.

Nevertheless, there's an undeniable logic to looking at the "other Germany" from the perspective of a wall that was both an admission of its failure and the key to its survival. While Mr. Taylor has no sympathy for the communist regime, the picture he paints is more complex than the usual Cold War cartoon. The wall was, he shows, the desperate response of the dictatorship to the prospect that its state would collapse from within, emptied out by the lure of West Germany's remarkable economic recovery. For many East Germans freedom and an increasingly higher standard of living were there for the taking. All it required was a train ticket to East Berlin, and a little luck.

For all of Berlin, East and West, was supposedly still under the shared control of World War II's "big four." As a result, the border within the city continued to be porous in ways inconceivable elsewhere on the intra-German frontier. In the first 12 years of its existence, the GDR lost around a sixth of its population to the west. As the 1950s progressed, and the barbed wire and death strips went up around the rest of East Germany, Berlin was the escape hatch, the way out. This was unsustainable. If that hatch wasn't locked tight, East Germany would collapse, and if East Germany collapsed, it would almost certainly take the fragile Cold War truce down with it.

As 1960 turned into 1961, the rush for the exit only intensified. Torschlusspanik ("panic that the door will be closed") gripped the GDR. If anything, however, the panic was underdone. The door wasn't just closed that year. It was bricked-up. In chilling, precise detail, Mr. Taylor explains how the regime made its preparations (meticulous, cynical, and, somehow, very German), kept the Soviets onside (one of the many strengths of this book is its focus on the tricky relationship between the Kremlin and East Berlin), and then succeeded in incarcerating an entire nation in the course of one August weekend.

Critical to that success was the passivity of Britain, France, and America, nominal guarantors of a nominally united city. As Mr. Taylor makes clear, they huffed, and they puffed, but they never tried to blow that wall down. To have done so would almost certainly have meant war, and who was prepared to risk Armageddon for the right of East Germans to travel? It was an exercise in Realpolitik that condemned millions to imprisonment in their miserable abomination of a republic for nearly 30 more years, but the obvious implication to be drawn from Mr. Taylor's narrative is that this was the correct thing to do. And so it was.

That is not the same as saying that this was a morally straightforward decision, yet to read this book carefully is also to see the traces of another story, that of the West German politicians (mainly on the left) who appeared to have few qualms about accepting, and perhaps even liking, the idea of that socialist sibling of theirs. When in 1987 Gerhard Schröder pronounced (with, it seems to me, unseemly relish) that reunification was a "big lie," he was not, as Mr. Taylor reminds us, alone.

Fortunately, the future chancellor got it wrong. Two years later, time caught up with East Germany. When it did so, it came rushing in at a pace that suggested it was desperate to make up for those wasted, frozen decades. Mr. Taylor describes those lovely, wild, exhilarating weeks movingly and with undisguised enthusiasm. But, while he does mention some of the difficulties and ambiguities that have followed reunification, it's difficult to avoid the feeling that his head, like his heart, remains caught up in the optimism of 1989–90. History, however, moves on, remorseless, relentless, and forgetful. As Mr. Taylor himself notes, the PDS (essentially the old East German Communist Party in unconvincing democratic drag) is now an important part of the coalition that runs Berlin.

Some people never learn, and others never give up.

Taking Lives in Stasiland

The Lives of Others

The New York Sun, February 9, 2007

If there is nothing else to East Germany's credit (and, frankly, there isn't), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years.

The first, Wolfgang Becker's sweet, enchanting "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003) used one family's crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker's then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, "internal emigration," and illusion had helped its citizens to weather those penned-in decades of repression, futility, and waste. Nevertheless, as moving and wonderfully perceptive as that film was, it's impossible to watch it without detecting occasional traces of Ostalgie, the nauseating, sugarcoated nostalgia that some Germans (of East and West) claim to feel for a kinder, gentler Volksrepublik, which never, in fact, existed.

The second of these films, the novice director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others," shows no signs of falling into that trap. From its concreted landscapes to its muted colors to its clammy betrayals to the black Volvos of the party bosses prowling the streets of their wretched blind alley of a capital, this wrenching, stirring, magnificent movie portrays East Berlin as it was. In this, it undoubtedly helped that Mr. von Donnersmarck was brought up in the western half of the city and was a frequent visitor to the mysterious, unsettling land on the other side of the wall.

Adding further to the film's credibility, a number of the cast began their careers in an East German state that, nearly 20 years after its demise, retains the power to haunt their lives. During an interview last week, Mr. von Donnersmarck told me that Ulrich Mühe, the film's star, had spent more than he was paid for "The Lives of Others" in legal costs incurred after the actor's ex-wife sued to stop publication of a book linked to the film in which it was to be revealed that she had "allegedly" (as, I suppose, lawyers would insist we must say) informed on him to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Meanwhile, the father of another cast member was unmasked as a former Stasi officer following publication of the photographs of him that appeared in the press after he attended the film's premiere.

But then that's really not so surprising. East Germany was the most spied-upon society in history. Neither prisons, nor torture, nor executions, nor even that wall were enough to keep it all together. To supervise a population of 17 million, the Stasi, with some 100,000 officers, grew to be more than twice the size of the Third Reich's Gestapo, and, just to be sure, it recruited at least another 200,000 informers, probably many more. In her 2003 book on East Germany, the Australian author Anna Funder dubbed this police state that was more police than state as "Stasiland." She was right to do so.

It's as a model citizen of Stasiland, a skilled interrogator doing his brutal business, that we first encounter Mr. Mühe's Captain Wiesler. He is Stasi, a member of the elect, a true believer, and, yet, even in the movie's early stages, there are hints that all is not well. He is hunched, buttoned-up, withdrawn, his demeanor as much captive as guard. Contrasted with the deprivation that was the lot of most East Germans, Wiesler's bleak, spotless apartment might be a token of his privileged position, but it is little more than a cell. The only sign that anything remains of the captain's emotional life is a brief request to an appallingly unattractive prostitute (assigned to him, we must assume, by his employers) to stay with him a little longer. He knows enough to know that he is lonely.

"The Lives of Others" tells the story of what happens when, at the request of a government minister, Captain Wiesler puts famous playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) under close surveillance as someone who may be disloyal to the republic. Intellectuals, you know. Eventually, Wiesler discovers that the politician's real motive is sexual rather than ideological. He has his eyes on Dreyman's girlfriend (nicely played by Martina Gedeck) and wants Dreyman out of the way. And that's not the most important thing that our Stasi officer discovers. As (courtesy of bugs installed in the playwright's apartment) he sits listening day after day to the minutiae of Dreyman's life, the captain begins to find out some truths both about the evil of the regime he has served so loyally and, ultimately, about his own capacity for good.

Mr. Mühe's subtle, deadpan, and compelling portrayal of a bad man possibly stumbling toward redemption is one of the most profoundly moving performances I have ever been privileged to witness on-screen. He's ably supported by a cast that never seems to put a foot wrong. In particular, it's worth singling out Mr. Koch's Dreyman, a plaything of the regime as well as its playwright, a man who comes to realize that his carefully preserved detachment is no longer enough. Look too for the clever way that Dreyman's milieu is depicted as a licensed, micromanaged Bohemia that, like so many aspects of the German Democratic Republic, is at best a feeble facsimile of what was available in the West and, at worse, a dangerously comforting delusion.

"The Lives of Others" comes to America garlanded with the prizes it has won in Europe. It has now been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Win or lose (and it deserves to win), it's already achieved something far more significant than that little statuette.

Sometimes a movie or, even, for that matter, a TV show, can transcend its entertainment value and become a device that compels a nation to reconsider its history. When NBC's "Holocaust" was first shown in West Germany (roughly half the adult population caught at least one episode), it shattered that country's long-standing taboo on open discussion of Nazi genocide. Now "The Lives of Others" has forced large numbers of Germans to start facing the truth about what former dissident Wolf Biermann has referred to as their "second dictatorship."