Post-Totalitarianism inThe Lives of Others

This article argues that The Lives of Others contains a particularly powerful portrait of what the Czech dissident–philosopher Václav Havel called “post-totalitarianism.” I will explore Havel's understanding of this concept and the film's evocation of its key features. In Havel's view, these regimes preserve themselves through the principle of “social auto-totality.” They make every person, every citizen, an accomplice in their own oppression. Even more troubling for Havel is that these regimes do not continue to exist because of the evil will and historical misunderstandings of their originators. He suggests these horrors “can happen and did happen only because there is obviously in modern humanity a certain tendency toward the creation, or at least the toleration, of such a system.” Donnersmarck's brilliant film explores how it is that people are capable of living within a lie. This leads to a consideration of an important but heretofore unexplored question: What is the meaning of the movement of a totalitarian regime to a post-totalitarian regime? Was what seemed for many in the West to be a sign of Communism's ability to moderate itself actually the emblem of its true evil? Keywords: totalitarianismpost-totalitarianismVáclav Havelcommunism Notes 1. Peter Grieder, “In Defence of Totalitarianism Theory as a Tool of Historical Scholarship,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (September–December 2007): 578. 2. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 50. 3. Václav Havel, “Stories and Totalitarianism,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–1990 (New York: Vintage, 1992), 331. 4. Timothy Garton Ash, “The Stasi on Our Minds,” The New York Review (May 31, 2007). 5. Anna Funder, “Tyranny of Terror,” The Guardian (May 5, 2007). 6. See Corey Ross, “The GDR as Dictatorship: Totalitarian, Stalinist, Modern, Welfarist?” in The East German Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 2002), 24–5; Mike Dennis, The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945–1990 (London: Longman, 2000), 185–8; and Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 42–51. 7. In what follows, I am indebted to James Pontuso, Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in a Postmodern Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). 8. See Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Random House, 1990), chap. 3. 9. Ash, “Czechoslovakia Under Ice,” in The Uses of Adversity (New York: Random House, 1989), 63. 10. Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” in Open Letters, 56. 11. Milosz, The Captive Mind, 77. 12. Ibid., 76. 13. Ash noted, “I have never been in a country where politics, and indeed the whole of public life, is a matter of such supreme indifference.” See his “Czechoslovakia Under Ice,” 63. 14. Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” 59. The second play in Havel's Vaněk trilogy, “Unveiling,” is a biting portrait of a couple who is perfectly emblematic of this naked consumerist retreat. See Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, The Vaněk Plays: Four Authors, One Character (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987) and Pontuso, 85– 7. 15. Havel, Letters to Olga (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 341. 16. Havel, “Stories and Totalitarianism,” 340. 17. Funder also questions whether a Wiesler could really have kept his activities hidden from his superiors. 18. Santiago Ramos, “Why Dictators Fear Artists,” First Things, On the Square Blog (July 23, 2007). 19. See the interview with Donnersmarck included on the DVD. 20. Havel, “Dear Dr. Husák,” 55. 21. Havel, “Dear Dr. Husak,” 61–2. 22. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Open Letters, 143–4. 23. Ibid., 145. 24. Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government,” Review of Politics 15:3 (July 1953): 323, 325. 25. Funder, “Tyranny of Terror.” 26. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 134. 27. See “Language and Power in Soviet Society (Part I): A Conversation Between Alain Besançon and George Urban,” Encounter (May 1987): 11. 28. Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” 136. 29. Ibid., 144. 30. Ibid

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