Collin (1981)

East Germany, late 1970s. In an East Berlin clinic reserved for the state’s prominent figures, two men meet who have only one thing in common: both have heart conditions and are gravely ill. But the heart condition of Hans Collin, once a celebrated, award-winning star author and writer for the state, is primarily psychosomatic, because denying obvious truths that must never be spoken in the GDR has worn him down inside over the years. His long-unacknowledged tendency as a writer to paint things in rosy colors first made Collin, who is married to a much younger chanson singer, a conformist, and then made him ill. A few rooms away, the widely feared and extremely power-conscious Stasi chief Wilhelm Urack (modeled on the real-life Erich Mielke) has been admitted. Urack represents everything Collin abhors and everything that has put him in his predicament: the old Stalinist is the personification of the GDR system’s fundamental self-deception, which has driven Collin to inaction and thus to illness. Yet the two once stood side by side in the fight against fascism, as members of the International Brigades fighting Franco during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). But while one refused to abandon his ideals when the GDR was founded and believed in an idealized form of socialism, the other made a career in the SED state apparatus and began steadily and deliberately to help suppress freedom of opinion and justice. These diametrically opposed choices in their lives eventually not only drove Collin and Urack apart, but made them enemies. Now the two old combatants face one another, unreconciled, and wager on which of them will outlive the other. Collin’s writer’s block will not lift as long as conditions in the GDR remain as they are, and those conditions are rooted in Wilhelm Urack and his role within the SED power apparatus. The disillusioned socialist Collin is certain that if he ever sits down at his typewriter again, it will be only to write in his memoirs about Urack and his failings inherent in the system. In this, the once-celebrated writer receives support from the hospital doctor, Dr. Christine Roth, who encourages him to start writing again. Havelka, Collin’s old commander in Spain, who became one of Urack’s many political victims after the war, also urges the former state author not to remain in self-imposed isolation any longer, but to denounce Urack and, through him, the system’s moral failings in his writing. Urack, meanwhile, has a hard time accepting that his own grandson, Peter Urack, has become a fierce critic of the regime and joined a dissident movement taking shape. Before long, the old adversaries begin an intellectual debate that grows into a psychological duel between two eloquent GDR antagonists. Once again, Urack brings all his instruments of power to bear, building up an intimidating threat against Collin: in the old Stasi fashion, he searches Collin’s hospital room and examines the first manuscript page of the memoir Collin has begun. When Peter Urack, disillusioned with state and society, flees to the West, the old Urack briefly seems like a broken man, now forced to fear for his office and standing. For a moment, Collin seems to have won, but in the end he suffers a heart attack. So everything stays the same? No, because after recovering and being discharged from the clinic, Collin continues writing his memoirs.