The Lives of Others: The Defeat of Evil or the Evil of Defeat?

Abstract

Surely the defeat of evil can be nothing but good? The almost universal praise in the Anglophone press for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film, Das Leben der Anderen, translated into English as The Lives of Others, suggests as much. The film has been widely read as a response to the evil of Communism and its peculiar manifestation in the East German state. Historically, however, artistic and particularly poetic responses to evil have been ambivalent, and have even tended to the dark side. Dante’s Inferno is a better poem than his Paradiso. Milton’s Paradise Lost is more accomplished than Paradise Regained. Most would put William Blake’s ‘Songs of Experience’ above his ‘Songs of Innocence’. Blake himself explained that the ‘reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’.¹ In poetry at least, an ambivalent stance towards evil has also been associated with the experience of defeat. Dante wrote La Divina Commedia after being forced into exile from Florence. Paradise Lost is a meditation on the failure of the short-lived English Commonwealth. Blake’s poetry was written in the shadow of the English counter-revolution.