Enemy of the State

Enemy of State is about as difficult to reach him as to get to him. Director Annekatrin Hendel trudges through a lot of snow in the middle of nowhere in the Uckermark (a region in north-eastern Germany). It is the first day of shooting for a film on 75-year-old writer Paul Gratzik, former Stasi informant, turned apostate, turned dissident. The first thing Gratzik defiantly announces is that there will be no discussion on the Stasi... She will just have to get that out of her head. Full stop. But now we have the film. On one hand it is a psychological profile of one of an extraordinarily paradoxical figure, a “man of extremes”: satyr, seducer, radical and hermit. On the other hand it tells a story about the GDR, its critics and the Stasi of the kind that has never been told before in all the 20 years since the end of East Germany.