Christian Petzold's "Barbara'

Germany, having discovered that currency rather than arms is the way to dominate Europe, now gives marching orders to the Continent. Not very long ago, things were different. The Germans, having repeated Napoleon's mistake in invading Russia, found themselves politically partitioned at the end of World War II.

For more than 40 years, the eastern quadrant of their country was a satellite of the Soviet Union in what was called the Democratic Republic of Germany and was known more familiarly here as East Germany. While the German Federal Republic, better known as West Germany, was sponsored by the U.S. and prospered under Marshall Plan aid and a revival of the industrial giants who had served Hitler so well, East Germany became an involuntary donor to the task of Russian reconstruction and a one-party state that enforced authority by means of a system of well-nigh universal surveillance.

Although East Germany refrained from a cult of personality after the Russians decommissioned Joseph Stalin, it may well have been the closest approximation to a 1984 society the Western world has ever seen. Put simply, everybody spied on everybody, and the state security apparatus, the Stasi, sat like an invisible spider at the center of the web.

Personal betrayal

East Germany collapsed almost overnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but the experiment it represented— a society built on the systematic erosion of trust and the consequent poisoning of all personal relationships— lingers in German cultural memory. It's an experiment unlikely to be repeated, for the simple reason that in our era of the Internet, the drone and ubiquitous sensors and surveillance cameras (Orwell's telescreen), the state needs no human intermediaries to spy on its citizens.

The hermetic totalitarianism of East Germany now appears as crude and quaint as a Univac does beside a modern computer microchip, and has even acquired a kind of chic in some quarters. Nonetheless, it embodied a feature difficult to replicate in our modern, post-privacy world: personal betrayal. This makes it grist for drama.

Christian Petzold's Barbara, set on East Germany's Baltic coast, circa 1980, is an effort to evoke this world. Petzold, like Emil Nolde and Siegfried Lenz, likes the lowering landscape of northern Germany, which, with its dun colors and flat skies, gives tyranny an appropriate cast. Everyone in Barbara is clinically depressed, with only an occasional flicker of vindictiveness to lift the general gloom. In effect, everyone has been lobotomized by the absence of autonomy and therefore of hope.

Physician's downfall

The condition is symbolically represented by Mario, a young patient at the local hospital where Barbara, the film's protagonist, works. Mario has suffered brain trauma, which has left him apparently rational but bereft of emotion and with little interest in anything but his next meal— in short, in a waking vegetative state. That, Petzold intends us to understand, is the soul of man under socialism, or at least in the official worker's paradise of East Germany.

Barbara herself (Nina Hoss) has been exiled here after a prison term for an unspecified but presumably political offense, and assigned her apartment, job and the agents who periodically search her rooms and person as if to remind her that even her body belongs to the state. She had been a distinguished physician at the country's best hospital in Berlin; now, she must adjust as well to a medical director, André (Ronald Zehrfeld), who although competent and as decent as circumstances permit (he too, of course, must report on Barbara), is clearly her professional inferior.

Barbara can't help but notice that André is falling in love with her, or that he runs his small domain as caringly and conscientiously as possible. But she has one secret the authorities haven't ferreted out: a lover from West Germany who plans to spirit her out of the country in a small boat.

Professional inhumanity

Her situation becomes complicated, however, by a pregnant teenage runaway, Stella, who clearly won't survive the brutal youth work camp where she's confined. Barbara is thus presented with a painful choice: her happiness, or her humanity.

Nina Hoss, a Petzold veteran, is a superb actress. Her job, for most of the film, is to mask her emotions; nonetheless she expresses the inner life of her character with subtle shifts of expression and attitude.

The other characters, apart from the naturally gentle André, try to survive humanly by dividing their private lives from the work they do; thus, the Stasi agent whose job is to harass and humiliate Barbara sits stone-faced while her apartment is turned upside down, but suffers as the husband of a terminally ill cancer patient whom André visits. We see him soon after on duty again, his professional inhumanity firmly in place. He knows that Barbara has seen him at his most vulnerable, but it makes no difference. On call, he is the implacable servant of the state.

More effective than prison

George Orwell's insight into the nature of totalitarianism was its programmatic effort to destroy civil society— the relationship, personal as well as political, between man and man. The German Democratic Republic achieved this with a reasonable minimum of terror— no chain of gulags, and certainly a lower incarceration rate than that of African-Americans in the U.S.

You don't need to lock people up to take away their freedom. You just have to make it impossible for them to look one another in the eyes.

As in Petzold's Jerichow, his camera frames the action with a clinically objectifying eye of its own. Occasionally, this approach is undercut by the unruly turbulences of observed nature— choppy waves, or a stand of trees that seem to shake every time Barbara goes by on her bicycle.

The world out there— of freedom or even simple otherness— seems to beckon beyond the reach of any human control. Or is it simply the farther horizon of confinement?