Anti-fascist cinema: 'The Lives of Others' and 'The Pianist'
Two films that revolve around the notion that classical music can penetrate the hardened heart
The Lives of Others (2006)
Written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Based on a novel by Ann Patchett
The Pianist (2002)
Directed by Roman Polanski
Based on a memoir by Władysław Szpilman
These two movies were made during the George W. Bush years, a time when the U.S. reacted to the Sep. 11 attacks by trading its status as a victim of a terrorist attack to that of a nation ready and willing to perform its own terrorism. The government used the attacks as a pretext to heighten its surveillance and intelligence gathering powers, but the country was still stinging from the hijackings, and the Patriot Act seemed like a good idea at the time. We were just defending ourselves, the administration reassured civil liberties groups.
But then images and reports from the Abu Gharib1 and Guantanamo2 prison camps once and for all resolved the question of whether the U.S. did or did not torture its prisoners. This led a British television comedy show to broadcast, almost exactly five years after Sep. 11, 2001, a skit in which one German officer asks another nervously, “Hans — are we the baddies?”
Perhaps it was time to humanize the enemy, to depict him as yes, wearing skull emblems and committing mass murder, but also as family men3 or animal lovers or, in the case of “The Lives of Others” and “The Pianist,” subject to the humanizing appeal of classical music.
“The Lives of Others,” set in East Germany in 1984, is about an officer in the country’s feared secret police. In this movie, a Communist Party boss, Culture Minister Hempf, wants to possess an actress, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), so he gets the Stasi to surveil the man she lives with. Playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is a model citizen of the GDR, but if the Stasi can find something they can use to imprison him, Hempf would sweep in and take her.
Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is given the assignment. Sitting in the attic above the apartment occupied by Dreyman and Sieland, Wiesler is attentive to every sound. The first quarter of the film has shown how single-minded and professional Wiesler is, with few scruples and no sympathy for “subversives.” At one point he delivers a lecture to Stasi recruits about how to use sleep deprivation to break down subjects in an interrogation. When one student asks if this isn’t an inhumane tactic, Wiesler replies coldly, and also marks an X next to the student’s name so he can keep an eye on that one.
The story’s turning point comes when a friend of Dreyman’s, a playwright who had been blacklisted for several years, succumbs to despair and hangs himself. When Dreyman hears the news, his response is to open a book of piano scores — titled “Sonatas for a Good Man” — that his friend had recently given him. He begins to play one of the numbers. The camera cuts back and forth from Dreyman to Wiesler, sitting over his head in the attic, listening on headphones. It seems that Wiesler is as shocked as Dreyman about the suicide. Perhaps this is why, while listening to the music, Wiesler appears to undergo, if not a change of heart, and least a softening. Dreyman finishes playing the piece, then says to his lover, who has come into the room to listen: “Can anyone who has heard this music — really heard it — be a bad person?”
From that point on, Wiesler’s patriotic resolve and tenacity are shaken. He subtly interrupts Hempf’s scheme to influence Dreyman’s lover Sieman, then begins to edit his own reports. Once he has started covering for Dreyman, he has to continue, if he doesn’t want his superiors to notice inconsistencies. The music has uncovered Wiesler’s humanity.
As with many feature films that address dictatorships,4 “The Lives of Others” received a great deal of criticism from the people who actually went through the times and events of the film’s setting — in this case, Germans who lived during the years when Germany was divided into east and west. They said that the film trivialized the dire situation they had faced during the forty years of the GDR before the wall fell, and that depicting a Stasi officer as being repentant was unrealistic and infuriating.
They have a point, and so do the critics of “The Pianist.” This 2002 film is set in Poland between 1939 and 1945. Based on a memoir by Polish musician Władysław Szpilman, the movie shows the pianist (played by Adrien Brody) and his family suffering the early years of the war and being interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the Jewish uprising, Szpilman is separated from his family and survives the remainder of the war in hiding.
The key scene is when Szpilman is finally discovered by a German officer, Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), and made to play for him on a piano in a wrecked building. As in “The Lives of Others,” the Chopin piece moves the German, who allows Szpilman to hide during the remaining months of the war and provides him with food.
Hosenfeld — who wears the uniform of a regular army officer, not one of the SS — thus epitomizes what was known as a “good German.” This was a category defined by the American State Department and popularized by Hollywood, and it was meant to refer to people who lived through the Third Reich and may have even served in its bureaucracy or its armed forces but who were not really Nazis.
The U.S. found it necessary to create this category of Germans who had not committed crimes — or whose wartime deeds the U.S. found it expedient to ignore or cover up — because it wanted to put many of these people to work on U.S. defense projects, and to send vast sums of money to rebuild the country. Germany — “West Germany” — was going to be an important ally and shield against the Soviet Union, which at war’s end became the new enemy.5 Even as late as 2002, Hollywood found it necessary to demonstrate the difference.6
But don’t ignore who else in this production craved forgiveness and redemption: the film’s director, Roman Polasnki. He was convicted of child rape and in 1978 fled the U.S. before his sentencing, and has lived and worked in Europe ever since. And before that, his personal experiences during World War II, when his Jewish parents were marched off to camps, after which he somehow survived as a child wandering alone across Poland, must have included some morally ambiguous behavior just for the sake of survival. So Polanski has reasons to show, on screen, a man who is on the surface a villain in the service of/at the mercy of a murderous state, but within whose heart lives a “good man.” Such is the character of Wiesler in “The Lives of Others” and of this German officer in “The Pianist.”
Notice that in both stories there are already more obviously good men. In the former, the playwright who is being surveilled; in the latter, Szpilman, the titular pianist. Notice also that the character of Szpilman, despite being forced into many life-or-death situations during the war, is never shown to choose, or even to be forced to choose, the path of evil just to survive.
I think the bad people who seek the kind of facile redemption depicted in these movies also need the good people as a contrast. For if everyone were equally bad, who would provide the necessary inspiration (or piano performance) that opens the door to redemption?
People who abhor Trump and what he represents — call us Democrats, anarchists, socialists, or just the sane — have had to listen to well-meaning people tell us for years now that in a country that has been poisoned by propaganda for decades until 47% of the people have forgotten how to think, the way forward is not to turn our backs on those who would deport, imprison, or kill us, but to listen to them. Whole forests have been logged so that the New York Times can go, several times a year, to a diner somewhere between Bakersfield and Pittsburgh and quote resentful rednecks who think the problem is Haitians or trans people or immigrants or feminists or East Coast intellectuals and globalists, both of which mean Jews.
We’re supposed to listen to these people, who have lost the faculties of logic and empathy, because doing so will somehow unite us. And that will redeem not them — not the Fox watchers and incel-podcast listeners and owners of pickup trucks larger than their own houses from the front seats of which they record their own rants and cast them into the whirlpool of social media — not them — but us! Because it must be our elitism, our college degrees, our tastes, that are the problem — like it’s a crime against the flag to know the difference between shitty behavior and good behavior, or between a terrible education and a good one. We’re the ones who need to listen, and repent.
It’s stupid advice. Because there are no good Germans — by which I mean Trumpists. The people who say “He says things I’m not allowed to say” and “Oh he was just joking” and “Yes, it seems chaotic now, but I trust him more than I trust the libtards” and “Oh, he’ll just deport the criminals, not good ones like me” and “He’s not a paragon of morality, but I believe God can use anyone to further His will” and that’s not even quoting the t-shirts. There are no good Trumpists, and if some day they want redemption, they can do it on their own time.
So, obviously: Don’t debate them online or off. Not at a bar, not in line at the supermarket, and definitely not at Thanksgiving dinner, which you’re probably already sorry you got on a plane for. Even better, be your own queer or wild self, knowing that your mere existence makes them mad. But best of all: In the coming months and years, it’s going to take more than just ignoring them; we must prepare ourselves for action.
I don’t know what that’s going to look like for me, much less for you, but I finally figured out that one of the good things about this weird moment in history, when most of our supposed leaders have forgotten how to act and have no idea what we, as half the country, could do if we rose up, it’s actually a good thing not to have leaders. They’ll just disappoint7 and betray you8 in the end. If you have an idea for action, enlist your comrades, whom you can trust to tell you if your idea is stupid. Then act together. You won’t need to seek redemption.
“Findings on Abu Ghraib Prison: Sadism, 'Deviant Behavior' and a Failure of Leadership.” New York Times, Aug. 25, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/findings-on-abu-ghraib-prison-sadism-deviant-behavior-and-a-failure.html
“AFTEREFFECTS: PRISONERS; Detainees From the Afghan War Remain in a Legal Limbo in Cuba” by Neil A. Lewis. New York Times, Apr. 24, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/us/aftereffects-prisoners-detainees-afghan-war-remain-legal-limbo-cuba.html
A trope you can see in everything from the Godfather movies to the current “Love Hurts,” in which one hit man gives advice to another about how to improve his marriage.
My review of “Argentina, 1985” listed some of the objections the people of that country had to the movie. “El Conde,” which depicts Augusto Pinochet as a vampire, was similarly criticized by Chileans as unserious compared to the crimes committed by that country’s junta during the Dirty War.
Ó Dochartaigh, Pól; Schönfeld, Christiane. "Introduction: Finding the 'Good German,'" in Representing the Good German in Literature and Culture After 1945: Altruism and Moral Ambiguity. New York: Camden House, 2013. For more information, read a review of this book by Julian Preece, Sage Journals, Aug. 27, 2014. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0047244114541374q
Yes, presumably the scene was derived from Szpilman’s 1946 memoir and merely dramatized by the film. But it’s more useful to wonder, if that is so, what Szpilman’s own motivation was for including the scene — which frankly is a little too good to be true. But by this time, late in the movie, viewers have seen so many horrors that we eagerly grasp at this moment of humanity. If it did not exist in real life, they would have had to invent one.
“Newsome faces backlash after French laundry dinner party.” Politico, Nov. 13, 2020. https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/11/13/newsom-faces-backlash-after-attending-french-laundry-dinner-party-1336419
“Gavin Newsom breaks with Democrats on trans athletes in sports.” Politico, Mar. 6, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/gavin-newsom-breaks-with-democrats-on-trans-athletes-in-sports-00215436 FUCK that asshole.