WHEN IN 2006 THE DDR MUSEUM opened on Unter den Linden, the prestigious Berlin address that is home to a range of expensive boutiques, up-market hotels, and embassies, its (western German) director, Robert Rückel, was accused of treating GDR history rather too lightly, a charge that both he and the museum’s head of research, the respected (eastern German) historian Stefan Wolle, rejected. That the museum sought to provide insight into the GDR in ways that would “combine education and entertainment” was criticized as an inappropriate approach to the representation of the East German state, though the museum was also nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award in 2008. By contrast Das Leben der Anderen, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film, a drama following a devoted Stasi officer’s transformation and redemption, which had premiered just three months before the museum’s debut, was widely praised as an authentic view of life in the East German state. Writing in Der Spiegel, Susan Stone considers the museum with reference to recent debates about German history and in the context of the continuing appeal of Ostalgie. Although Stone concedes that the museum does in one of its rooms acknowledge “the troublesome past,” it has, she suggests, fallen to films such as Das Leben der Anderen to remind audiences what the GDR really was “a terrifying police state that monitored and persecuted tens of thousands of its citizens.”

On its release the film, which the director originally had trouble financing due to German producers’ apparent lack of interest in the subject matter (it was eventually produced by Wiedemann and Berg Filmproduktion and distributed by Disney’s influential Buena Vista), was quickly endorsed by an array of public figures. Shortly after its triumph at the Oscars (one of the many awards it won) the CDU politician Friedbert Pflüger stressed the pedagogical significance of Donnersmarck’s film and called for it to be used in classrooms in order to ensure a continued focus on and analysis of Germany’s “second dictatorship.