"The price of Liberty is eternal vigilence", nicht Wahr?

Rating: 10/10 (19 May 2007)

This is a piece that well represents the pressure-cooker cultural experiment that was the DDR. We are privileged to observe it from our cinema armchairs and to see an unblinkered view. One gets the feeling that for the citizens of East Germany this was not the norm. It is interesting how much mundane living must have been documented by the regime in its attempts to root out all opposition.
As might be expected, the 'usual suspects' are the literary minds of this world and their potential to preach to their audience something subversive. However, it is actually jealousy from a high Party official over his girlfriend that instigates our fishing expeditionary investigation in Operation Laszlo.
Following the persecution of a colleague who has not worked for seven years, the playwright at the centre of the action receives a call to tell him of his friend's suicide. After the funeral, he learns that, despite the intensive statistical self-analysis of his society, no figures are available to indicate the prevalence or otherwise of death by suicide. He is convinced, against his deep-rooted loyalty to the regime, to write an anonymous propaganda piece to be published in West Germany exposing and denouncing the Eastern regime through this tiny fact.
The true hero of the piece is the mid-ranking investigating officer in the Stasi who is set the task of bringing down this inconvenient playwright. Discovering him to be a loyal and likable chap and his own superiors corrupt, this erstwhile cog in the socialist machine's control network decides to try to protect the girl from the unwanted attentions of the letcherous old Minister for Culture and his doctored reports place him in a very difficult position. Furthermore, he resents being ordered to set up the playwright to further his boss's political ambitions and the Minister's sexual ones. He rebels - hiding the identity of the author of the tract from his reports and removing incriminating evidence - on suspicion of which he is demoted for life ... or until the Wall came down.
There are some truly spine-tingling moments when we feel the fate of our protagonists balancing on a knife-edge.
The cold and methodical Stasi are an object lesson for us all. And we should not really feel so comfortable in our theatre armchairs. Some of the worst of them emigrated and now live under completely new identities. I have met the victim of one such person on a rapid and murderously ruthless path to quiet fortune and power in my own country.