The Decomposition of the SoulDirected by Nina Toussaint & Massimo Iannetta
"[...] a documentary, thoughtfully made. The title is The Decomposition of the Soul, and florid though that may sound, it is exact. Nina Toussaint and Massimo Iannetta, the directors, keep their film entirely within the buildings of Hohenschönhausen in East Berlin, which was the Stasi jail and interrogation center. The place is now completely deserted, but the directors make its blank walls and steel doors and antiseptic office furniture redolent with what happened there.
The subject is not torture in the Nazi way. (Some physical torture is mentioned, but it is not the center.) Two people, a man and a woman who may not even know each other, who had been Stasi prisoners in this place some forty years earlier--the film was made in 2002--take us on a tour. The film treats them separately, and each explains in simple yet seasoned terms what happened to him or her, as they show us their cells and the various offices where they were questioned. The passage of time has provided them with at least a mask of philosophical consideration.
[...]
Sigrid was a dental assistant who had been hustled off by agents one morning in 1964 and held incommunicado. (Much later she learned that her husband had been arrested, too.) She was accused of helping students who wanted to escape, and she explained what the circumstances were, which her interrogators didn't believe. [...]
This questioning went on for nineteen months, here and in another prison, burrowing for her confederates and plans and opinions. Quite calmly she describes to us the method of interrogation. Smooth. Sometimes coffee was offered, sometimes cigarettes.
The only physical harassments, clever ones, were being seated on a stool with her hands under her for many hours, being deprived of sleep, having whatever sleep was allowed interrupted.The interrogation of Hartmut was longer and deeper because he had once been a Leninist and had changed--and had helped people to escape East Germany. (After all the questionings, he served a five-and-a-half-year prison term.) Hartmut recreates the gist of the interrogations. They were sometimes almost in the vein of café conversations, but he felt that the questions dug more and more deeply into the core of his being.
Hartmut understood (as did Sigrid) that the Stasi were actually less interested in confessions about actions and associations than in something more profound. They wanted to decompose and recompose his soul. (Sigrid's and Hartmut's comments are sometimes braided with excerpts from a book by Jürgen Fuchs, a writer who had been through similar experiences and had been released.) [...]"
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Excerpts from: STANLEY KAUFFMANN ON FILMS Being Watched
The New Republic, Issue date 02.19.07
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