Pick-me-ups

I have a bunch of stuff I turn to when times get dark. Music, especially classical piano artists like Alexander Malofeev, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, the Jussen Brothers and many many others, heads the list. Naps always work wonders. So do friends who answer their phones when I call out of the blue.

But when I get in that space where I hear myself thinking things like, "I wish I loved people as much as I love dogs," or "maybe the Christians are right and we are all born in sin and in need of redemption," I turn to my reservoir of good books and movies. Not the usual feel-good sort like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - although that's a really good one - but my own private repertoire, ones that speak to me usually on more than one level.

I won't go down the list. I just want to mention one that I actually paid to get on Amazon Prime last week when I discovered that my DVD player is no longer working and I couldn't play my personal copy the other day, The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).

In the early 1960s I worked for the Army Security Agency listening in on East German party officials doing business in the German Democratic Republic. I was in my early twenties, unmistakably wet behind the ears and susceptible to both harsh and kind words. The U.S. Army was providing the harshness, the cadre in East Germany I was listening to provided the other extreme. Most of the people I listened to knew each other and chatted about birthdays and their children and things other than broken water mains in the city of Leipzig. I came to understand how it could be that people might be tempted to cross the wall from west to east as well as the other way around.

But I never lost sight of the fact that by far the greater number of people fleeing their homeland went from East to West Germany. The wall had gone up between the first time I visited Berlin and now. I understood the logic of East German administrators - they were providing free health care and education for all its citizens and couldn't continue if people ran away just as they were able to begin paying back. They had to find a way to keep people in line.

It's hardly a secret that they went way too far. They formed a vicious police state and turned the entire country into collaborators, neighbor against neighbor, children against their parents. Nobody felt safe from prying eyes and a hyper vigilant police force.

Virtually all of my friends and family who lived in Berlin had friends and family in the East, and I came to share their dream of reunification. When it took place in 1989 I cried like a baby alone in my living room in Tokyo, having left Germany behind and moved on. My colleagues all wondered aloud about whether the Germans were going to become dangerous again. I felt particularly isolated. My sentiments were with the Germans now challenged on how they were going to put two hostile societies back together. And I didn't feel comfortable sharing my view that I had more than a bit of sympathy for the socialist project, and concern that the new narrative was going to make them into bad guys.

That is exactly what happened. Most Germans, Americans, other Europeans today now combine the two great evils that Germany suffered under: naziism and communism. With good reason. Both were nasty regimes, although I see a very important distinction. The Nazis were arguably pure evil; the socialists were idealistic dreamers who got corrupted, just as democracy and religion is readily corrupted by less-than-perfect human beings who work their way into leadership positions for self-serving ends.

Which brings me to The Lives of Others. Released in 2006, almost two decades ago now, it holds up as a perfect illustration of what my grandmother termed "good Germans" and "bad Germans." If you're not familiar with the plot line, it concerns a state security (Stasi) agent who spies on a writer and his actress girlfriend and comes to question his convictions that socialism as practiced by the GDR is what he always believed it was. I won't go into detail. For that you should see the film for yourselves. What the producers of this film have done is move beyond the goal of using entertainment to teach history and to drive home the fact that the GDR was an ugly authoritarian state to stress the point that we all contribute to the society we live in. The spy had a conscience. It served him well.

And if you need a pick-me-up when you believe the world is overly populated by shady characters, get hold of this movie and renew your faith in the human race.

It always works for me.

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