Cultural Perspective

K and I watched a fascinating movie the other night called “The Lives of Others”, it’s a German film that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006. And holy crap was that a great movie. It’s about a Stasi (state police) officer in East Berlin in the 1980s who is conducting surveillance on a playwright and author, and his girlfriend, and how he becomes emotionally involved in their lives. I was telling a German guy that I work with about it, and he said that he’d seen the movie and thought it was excellent, and then kind of sadly said “yah…the Germans are very thorough about everything we decide to do. Sometimes this is a very bad thing…”, and then he mentioned the Holocaust, the actions of the Stasi, etc.. I thought that it was an understatement, perhaps attributable to a loss for words, perhaps attributable to English as his second language, but it made me think about the uneasy peace that most of us have to strike with our own country’s histories. Because the Germans weren’t the first, or sadly, the last, to perpetrate genocide – just ask the Native Americans. Or the Rwandans.

I can acknowledge that my country has done, and continues to do, some terrible things here and abroad. Things that I find to be unconscionable and profoundly disturbing. Does this mean that I’m ashamed of where I’m from? No…no, it doesn’t. Does it mean that I’m proud of our actions? No…doesn’t always mean that, either. It means that I disagree with actions taken by my government, presumably on my behalf (in that larger, I-am-part-of-the-American-public sense), and that I want I want that to change, although I often haven’t the slightest clue as to where to start. But why do I bother to talk about it or think enough to disagree with it in the first place? It’s because I care about my country and I think we can do better. It’s for this exact reason that I hope for better - because I know we’re capable of it. If I didn’t care about my country and where I’m from, presumably I wouldn’t care what my government did. But then I also probably wouldn’t call it “my government”, either. There’s been a notion in recent years that disagreeing with the government is considered unpatriotic – that it’s something undertaken by people wanting to undermine America. I think that’s an insult to thinking people, and that if you do care about your country, you have a moral and ethical obligation to speak up when you see it doing something that you feel is wrong. Because squelching dissent and smothering people’s ability to express themselves is something that this country has always supposed to have been against. It’s what separates our country from what we claim to strive against.

In any event, it was a highly thought-provoking movie, and one that I would strongly recommend. A fascinating and humanizing look at life in East Berlin in 1985, and well worth the 2 hours.