Abstract
The Nazi era and Holocaust dominate discourse about German identity, reanimated by the 1989 fall of the Wall, one reason to link The Lives of Others (2006) with Rome Open City (1945). German oppression and a spectrum of collaboration and resistance are the subjects of both films. Donnersmarck develops as his centerpiece Rossellini’s narrative of an actress who betrays her lover, and the dominant metaphor of an extended Roman family is mirrored in reverse in Lives, which emphasizes enforced isolation of characters whose lives are frozen under Stasi surveillance. While citation of Rome Open City in The Lives of Others is oblique and partial, a consistent pattern of response to Rossellini’s ideas encourages us to read Donnersmarck’s film as a rewriting of Rome Open City.
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Notes
- 1.
Cooke, 224–232. “Von Donnersmarck’s Dialogue with Hollywood: from The Lives of Others to The Tourist (2010)”, in The Lives of Others and Contemporary Film.
- 2.
Sternlieb, 26.
- 3.
Fullbrook, 272.
- 4.
Lebow, 27.
- 5.
Lebow, 107–108.
- 6.
Ibid., 108.
- 7.
Ibid., 119.
- 8.
Ibid., 117.
- 9.
Ibid., 116.
- 10.
Ibid., 124–125.
- 11.
Cooke, 157.
- 12.
DVD Interview.
- 13.
Der Spiegel, February, 22, 1961, reported that the film could now be seen for the first time by the German public.
- 14.
Forgacs, 14–18. Details of the events and resistance actions in response were widely publicized. As Forgacs writes, “some of this source material was in circulation … in the form of narratives and visual representations. The narratives were either fictional texts, like the story of the boys [forming their own resistance group], or were part of a tradition of oral and written accounts of events that had begun to form as soon as these had taken place.”
- 15.
As Forgacs notes, the same year as Rome Open City’s release, these executions could be seen in a documentary directed by Luchino Visconti, Giorni di Gloria (1945), 108.
- 16.
Gottlieb, 108.
- 17.
DVD interview.
- 18.
Cooke, 39.
- 19.
Donnersmarck, NPR.
- 20.
Cooke, 47.
- 21.
DVD interview.
- 22.
Cooke, 32; Donnersmarck, NPR.
- 23.
Hubertus Knabe, director of the museum that the prison has become, refused to let Donnersmarck shoot on location because his story was fiction, as Knabe testifies on screen in Karl Marx City (Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 2016).
- 24.
Fisher, 79–98. In footnote 41 on page 97, Fisher writes “there is some controversy as to whether she actually reported the material [in the Stasi files] attributed to her.”
- 25.
Forgacs, 9–10; Gottlieb, 134.
- 26.
Rogin, 136–137.
- 27.
Zavattini, 52.
- 28.
Bondanella, 64. Bondanella makes the point that realism was not Rossellini’s goal in Rome Open City , 60.
- 29.
Abel, 10–15.
- 30.
Cooke, 8.
- 31.
See for example, Zavattini, who calls neorealism as a “moral discovery…. I saw at last what lay in front of me, and I understood that to have evaded reality had been to betray it.” 51.
- 32.
Rentschler, 243.
- 33.
245.
- 34.
Cooke, 8, citing Günther Jeschonnek.
- 35.
Rupprecht.
- 36.
Cooke, 27.
- 37.
Eva Horn has compared the surveillance in The Lives of Others with that in Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928).
- 38.
For further description of Bergmann’s “controlling view of the city from above,” see David Forgacs, who in turn cites Peter Brunette. Gottlieb, 113.
- 39.
In the comparison of The Lives of Others with Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928), Eva Horn emphasizes a banker named Haghi (Rudolph Klein-Rogge), his surveillance technology, and his impact on lovers who are spies working for competing interests. Horn’s observations apply equally to Major Bergman in Rome Open City and the impact of his forces on Manfredi and Marina as well as on family and social formations generally.
- 40.
Wagner interview, cited in Sternlieb, 30.
- 41.
Oddly, Sternlieb ignores this parallel entirely, preferring to focus on models for Sieland that include Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in Casablanca (1942), Anna (Alida Valli) in The Third Man (1949), and Victoria (Moira Shearer) in The Red Shoes (1948).
- 42.
Anna in The Third Man , as Sternlieb points out, creates yet another instance of this type, the woman entertainer caught between the government and her lover. She, however, is protecting the evil, if charming, Harry Lime (Orson Wells) and represents the position that love is more important than his crimes, the opposite of the view in Rome Open City and The Lives of Others.
- 43.
Sternlieb emphasizes this citation of Rome Open City , 36.
- 44.
For Rogin’s well-argued contrary view that defeat dominates the film, see Gottlieb, 139–143. Rogin seems to me to ignore the role of children in the film and its final shots.
- 45.
131.
- 46.
132.
- 47.
As Sternlieb has pointed out, this is a clear citation of the scene in The Third Man 1949 where a bouncing ball precedes the moon-faced child’s appearance at the door of the apartment where Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli) are questioning the porter (Paul Hörbiger) about the last moments of Harry Lime (Orson Welles). 34. For Sternlieb, Anna Schmidt in The Third Man is among the models for Christa-Maria Sieland—I find little resemblance between the characters except for Anna’s employment at the Theater in der Josefstadt, where she, like Sieland, is shown briefly acting in a women-centered drama, in this case in an eighteenth-century drawing room comedy.
- 48.
Brunette, 50.
- 49.
I fundamentally agree with Rinke’s emphasis on melodrama in The Lives of Others and on the centrality of Sieland, although Rinke, while correctly refuting readings of Sieland as a “ ’bad woman’ who deserves to be punished,” undercuts Sieland’s active role by describing her as a “virtuous victim.” Cook, 118.
- 50.
232.
- 51.
Bärbel Bohley, for example, who after brief exile for demonstrating against the government returned to help form New Forum when?, a reform group equally disdainful of the FRG. Bohley was an artist who would have fit perfectly with the dissidents in Donnersmarck’s film.
- 52.
Attributing the power of the scene in part to Martina Gedeck’s adjustment of Donnersmarck’s stage directions, Andrea Rinke convincingly corrects the surprising resistance of some reviewers to calling Hempf’s attack on Sieland a rape. I largely agree with Rinke when she writes, “Through the moral indignation at this brutal abuse of male power, the spectator’s allegiance is drawn to the (innocent) female victim of a patriarchal totalitarian power” (113).
- 53.
The absence of diversity of sexual orientation in The Lives of Others is noteworthy especially in the context of Rome Open City . Even in the background at the cast party or in Sieland and Dreyman’s apartment for his birthday, we see only heterosexual couples. By contrast, the question of race in West and reunified Germany relative to the GDR is raised by casting a woman of color in Sieland’s role for the post-Wall reprise of Dreyman’s play.
- 54.
Another representation of culture giving way to power occurs when Don Pietro is shown “books without words” in which the pages have been replaced by printed currency. Artistic expression that is closer to everyday life is embraced—in contrast to Hartmann’s piano recital—when Don Pietro whistles a popular song as a signal when delivering the money.
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Mooney, W.H. (2021). Rewriting Roma città aperta (1945) as Das Leben der Anderen (2006). In: Adaptation and the New Art Film. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_5
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