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Between Authors and Agents: Gender and Affirmative Culture in Das Leben der Anderen
Author(s) -
Schmidt Gary
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-1183.2009.00047.x
Subject(s) - legitimation , cornerstone , semiotics , intellect , aesthetics , materiality (auditing) , wright , humanism , sociology , fraternity , art , philosophy , art history , epistemology , theology , law , visual arts , political science , politics
Criticisms of Donnersmarck's highly successful film Das Leben der Anderen (2006) have focused primarily on historical inaccuracies, but the issues at stake in the film have little to do with the reality of life in the GDR and far more with the film's self‐legitimation within a humanist aesthetic tradition. I argue that the film's semiotics of gender—which ascribe to the masculine the qualities of spirit, intellect, and reason, and to the feminine the qualities associated with materiality and corporeality—form the cornerstone of a manifesto for affirmative culture that, surprisingly, even enlists Brecht in order to create a consensus on the apolitical timelessness of art. The vanishing of the feminine at the end of the film coincides with play wright Dreyman's turn to the novelistic form, which eschews the problematic feminine vehicle (Sieland as actress) and allows direct communication between the minds of agent Wiesler and author Dreyman.