Zizek on Lives.

Just days after an assessment of The Lives of Others in the New York Review of Books by Timothy Garton Ash, the very sort of liberal democrat neo-Leninists like Slavoj Zizek condemn more harshly than the most hegemonic-minded neo-con ("So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth"), Zizek offers his own take for In These Times. You can't help but grin as his signature, "But is this really the case?", appears in the very first paragraph. Zizek - and don't get me wrong, I loved The Pervert's Guide to Cinema; it's truly a grand entertainment - then raises a series of actually quite pertinent questions about the depiction of the East German regime and the character of Dreymann, the writer played by Sebastian Koch, before veering around an unlikely corner: "[I]n Lives, it is the woman, Christa-Maria, who breaks down and betrays her husband. Isn't the reason for this weird distortion the film's secret homosexual undercurrent?"

Then it's back to politics and a but-seriously-folks sort of question: "[W]hile Ostalgie is widely practiced in today's Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: Good Bye Hitler instead of Good Bye Lenin [I wouldn't, but some would counter with the example of Downfall]. Doesn't this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism?"

Posted by dwhudson at May 18, 2007 6:00 AM