Episode 56: The Lives of Others (2006) (Guest: Mark Drumbl and Barbora Hola)

Episode 56: The Lives of Others (2006) (Guest: Mark Drumbl and Barbora Hola)

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This episode looks at The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s haunting exploration of surveillance, complicity, and the brittle architecture of authoritarian legality in the final years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany). The critically acclaimed 2006 film examines how law can be co-opted into an instrument of domination, how bureaucratic routines of “security” normalize repression, and how small acts of resistance acquire profound moral weight under systems built on fear and an extensive system of informers. The Lives of Others raises enduring questions about the ethics of observing and informing in Cold War Eastern Europe. To help unpack these themes, I’m joined by Mark Drumbl and Barbara Holá, whose recent book Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford Univ. Press) offers a deeply researched, empirically grounded look at informers within repressive regimes and transitional justice processes.

Guest: Mark Drumbl

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. He has held visiting appointments and has taught at law schools world-wide, including Queen’s University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Université de Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, Masaryk University (Czechia), and John Cabot University in Rome. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts; he has served as defense lawyer in Rwandan genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in the Ongwen case; and has been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalize racist hate speech. His books include Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law (Cambridge 2007), Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (Oxford 2012), and Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (Oxford 2024, with Barbora Holá); and co-edited volumes Research Handbook of Child Soldiers (Elgar 2019, with Jastine Barrett), Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions (Brill 2024, with Caroline Fournet), Children and Violence (Routledge 2025, with Christelle Molima, Jastine Barrett, Mohamed Kamara and Karl Hanson), and The Character of International Law (Bloomsbury, 2025, with Emma Breeze and Gerry Simpson).

Guest: Barbora Hola

Barbora Hola is Professor in Empirical Legal Studies of International Criminal Justice at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR).  She has an interdisciplinary focus and studies transitional justice after atrocities, in particular (international) criminal trials, sentencing of international crimes,  rehabilitation  of war criminals and life after trial at international criminal tribunals. Barbora is  alsoa fellow at the Center for International Criminal Justice and a co-chair of the European Society of Criminology Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional Justice In 2018 she has been appointed as a member of De Jonge Akademie of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2017, Barbora was one of the four candidates who received the prestigious ‘WISE’ (Women in Science Excel) fellowship from the Dutch Organization for a Scientific Research to develop her research line on empirical studies of international criminal and transitional justice after atrocities.

Timestamps:

0:00      Introduction

4:23      East Germany in 1984

6:32      The universality of informing

7:35      The surveillance state in the Eastern bloc

13:27     Informers and informing

19:36    Informing's afterlife

23:26    The book’s methodology and illustrative cases

33:26    The corrosive impact on social relations

35:02    Who becomes an informant and why

38:22    Informers and transitional justice

44:57    The opening of the secret files

50:39    Informers and agents

55:54    Resistance and historical revisionism

1:00:46 How the book came about

Further Reading:

Ash, Timothy Garton, The File (1997)

Burkhard, Bilger, “Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi,” The New Yorker (May 27, 2024)

Cords, Suzzane, “Stasi: How the GDR kept its citizens under surveillance,” DW (Aug. 1, 2025)

Drumbl, Mark A. & Holá, Barbora, Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague (2024)

Alford, C. Fred, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power (2001)

Lindenberger, Thomas, “Stasiploitation: Why Not? The Scriptwriter’s Historical Creativity in ‘The Lives of Others,’” 31 (3) German Studies Review 557 (2008)

Publication Date

3-31-2026

Disciplines

Law

Episode 56: The Lives of Others (2006) (Guest: Mark Drumbl and Barbora Hola)

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