Your Anonymity Gone With The Wind

I wrote before about the 2006 Oscar winner for the best Foreign Language Film, “Das Leben des Anderen” (The Lives of Others), a German drama that describes in painful detail life in the communist East Berlin of 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police. The movie begins in the Hohenschonhausen prison which is now a memorial dedicated to the victims of Stasi repression. It is alleged that the movie director, Florian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck, was not allowed to film there because the memorial’s administrator, Hubertus Knabe, objected to making “the Stasi man into a hero.”