Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others–this year’s Oscar-winning film on life under the Stasi, the East German secret police–has often been favorably compared with Ulrich Becker’s 2003 comedy Good Bye, Lenin!. The claim is that it provides the necessary corrective to Lenin’s sentimental Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East), illustrating how the Stasi terror… Continue reading The Dreams of Others