The Stasi Files of Hans Kramer tells a story from the GDR from three different angles: The dissident writer and his friend who secretly reported to the Stasi, the GDR secret police and was responsible for his imprisonment. 16.000 pages of Stasi files make the third perspective and reveal their own unique light on the story.
West German filmmaker Heike Bachelier has filmed the reunion of two middle-aged East Germans, one a Stasi spy, the other his former best friend and victim, in a private Truth and Reconciliation encounter, which for Germany is as courageous as it is rare.
If the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others had a documentary counterpart, this surely would be it.
Immediately after the fall of the Wall in October 1989, the secret police tried to destroy the immense mountain of files, in which a high number of the population had reported on their friends and relations. Now an enraged crowd stormed the Police HQ to preserve the evidence. Among them was Hartmut. It was some weeks before it dawned on him that he too had been a Stasi spy.
This 52-minute film is about his fight to remember.
Hartmut still lives in a small East German town, while Peter moved to West Berlin on leaving prison in early 80’s. In their first reunion, Peter greets Hartmut courteously, who, 30 years earlier, had systematically betrayed him to the State Security apparatchik. Peter was finally jailed for smuggling his critical book to a Western publisher. The 22 months Peter spent in prison also ruined his marriage and his daughter’s health.
The film charts their intense and moving search for closure, as victim and traitor together revisit the turning points of their younger lives, detailed in Hartmut’s daily reports covering 12 years. Bachelier spent 5 months reading and editing the 10 000 pages down to the essential 83 which the men read out loud, re-live and comment on, sometimes with surprisingly wry humour.
Her calm camera records Hartmut, incredulously re-reading his 30 year-old reports, often incoherent at his own deep duplicity. Gradually it emerges that he’s buried the memory of his worst betrayals. He doesn’t remember getting cash rewards. He insists he was just an unpaid “Voluntary Operative”, doing his bit to protect the Socialist State from its enemies. Confronted with his own evidence and unable to explain his “schizoid” behaviour, yet desperate for Peter’s absolution, Hartmut’s babbling remorse is all the more moving.
In contrast, Peter’s impassive face shows little of his own suffering, nothing of his rage, and he treats his traitor with remarkable forbearance. Only his intellect is meeting with Hartmut, though his feelings can be sensed. He says he’s doing it to preserve our civil-rights from the threat of Guantanamo, but it’s also to enable Hartmut confront his demons. As Peter points out in the film, of the 39 people who are known to have spied on him, only Hartmut has expressed any regret. As for Hartmut, he just wants to understand his behaviour – and regain Peter’s respect.
This remarkable film perfectly illustrates the practise of dispassionate deconstruction which has produced both the vilest horrors and the very best of German culture. A quiet masterpiece, Bachelier’s film took 9 years to get commissioned, and is now reaping audience acclaim at European festivals.
