So why was the thought of making the movie distasteful to people? And why did the pooh-bahs of Germany's most important film festival reject it?

We can only speculate about the answer. Donnersmarck believes it's because Germany has never really dealt with its Communist past--there was little effort made to bring East Germany's murderers and monsters to justice--and that, by making The Lives of Others, he had upset a cultural consensus to let the past lie.

I think there may be another reason for the reluctance of the makers of pop culture worldwide to reckon with communism, and that is shame. The ideological struggle against leftist totalitarianism was something that did not arouse the interest or enthusiasm of cultural elites in the West during the Cold War. Far from it; from the 1960s onward, the default position of the doyens of popular culture was a presumption in favor of the Communist struggle, as personified by Mao, the Viet Cong, Castro, the Sandinistas, El Salvador's guerrillas, and the so-called African liberation movements.

This was not a reasoned, or thought-through, view. It was little more than fashion. And rarely, if ever, has history rendered a more devastating verdict on the wrongheadedness of fashionable Western groupthink than it did when the walls and statues came down, and Lenin was removed from his unholy pedestal.

They got it wrong. And though they may not know it, they are ashamed of it and do not wish to be reminded of it. Perhaps that's why it took a 33-year-old to make this masterpiece--a 33-year-old who was too young during the Cold War to have joined any camp in any meaningful way. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck found a great story to tell with a great setting and he told it with peerless skill while bearing none of the scars of past ideological battles.

Maybe he will be followed by other young filmmakers and writers who can bring fresh eyes and a new perspective to the great struggle of the second half of the 20th century.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic.

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