“Karl Marx City” — Documentary 2016

A Conversational Walk With the STASI

“Karl Marx City” is a documentary film that doesn’t have much to do with its East German namesake, Karl Marx City. The city serves as an allegory for the whole of the German Democratic Republic.

It stars those who suffered through the German version of Karl Marx’ always and inevitably fatal experiment in social engineering, and introduces us to a few of the survivors, and is for the most part narrated by the stylishly strolling figure of Petra Epperlein.

“Karl Marx City” gives us subtle, less than horrifying insight into the more than horrifyingly efficient East German secret police, the STASI. The film fails, it was always doomed to fail, because it’s impossible to interview the STASI’s real victims — they’re dead — we can only speak to people who’s lives were made dull and drab, or those who cooperated in the repression.

Instead of a “Schindler’s List” holocaust of the body, we see a holocaust of the spirit, far more difficult to convey. Dead bodies are cinematic. Repressed thoughts aren’t. How does one point out depression in a sea of the depressed? Graphs? Bar charts? How does one dramatize lives limited but not lost?