Remembering the Stasi : The Lives of Others as a foreign past

This article places the domestic and international reception of the German film, The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck, 2006), within a larger debate about popular and official memory and, in particular, what has been both applauded and derided as the film’s historical authenticity. I explore the notion of sacralising history in order to ask what broader role of witnessing, observing and remembering the former East German state the film offers to viewers outside Germany. I argue that the act of remembering the Stasi and Germany’s ‘second dictatorship’ as a sacred site of memory is part of a wider postmodern project in screen memory and posttraumatic cinema.