Florian Von Donnersmarck on The Lives Of Others

The writer-director of the Oscar-winning drama about life under the Stasi in 1980s East Germany says the issues the film raises are still raw, and explains why emotion is an enemy of the state

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Nowhere in Europe was the Cold War colder than in the divided city of Berlin, where for 40 years East Germany's Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, monitored hundreds of thousands of people, and moved ruthlessly to punish those whose views ran contrary to the paranoid Communist regime.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 drew the era to a sudden and dramatic end, yet the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others is the first significant drama to shine a light on life under the Stasi's ever-vigilant eyes and ears. For its Cologne-born but internationally educated writer-director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, 33 when the film was released in Germany, revisiting the era re-opened a tender wound within both his own and in the national psyche.

"The issue is still pretty raw", says Von Donnersmarck. "Everyone was under surveillance by the Stasi. Both of my parents are originally from the East. We lived in West Berlin, but if you wanted to drive anywhere you had to go through the East. My parents were on special Stasi lists for having left the East. Whenever we were talking to relatives in the East, they were always looking over their shoulder, thinking, 'Who's watching this? Who is aware that we are talking to people from the West?' It could damage people's careers. It did damage people's careers."

It could also put them in prison. One source puts political prisoners incarcerated by the Stasi between 1949 and 1989 at 300,000. Von Donnersmarck's own parents' files were made available after the collapse of the regime at the start of the 1990s, but the director says his family still haven't claimed them, fearful of what they might discover about the state's perception of themselves and those they knew.

Next page • "Lenin said Beethoven's 'Appassionata' makes me feel soft inside, and I cannot kill people anymore"