If a young man is waiting at a deserted intersection and a steppe runner rolls across the street in the brightest sun, then the genre classification “Western” is obvious for such a film scene.

In Leander Haußmann's "Stasikomödie" this calling up of genre-typical images leads astray just as much as the film title.

Instead of a comedy dealing with the machinations of the Stasi, Haussmann shot more of a love story.

The GDR's state security serves only as a crude instrument that is there to plunge the young man into the adventure of the heart at the deserted crossroads.

Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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Right at the beginning you can see where this ends: Jörg Schüttauf walks through Berlin as a much older version of that young man;

he is now a celebrated author, is retrospectively considered an opposition figure in the GDR and has requested his Stasi files to be inspected.

At home in the large apartment in the old building, the whole family is already waiting in a nostalgic mood with Haloren balls and Spreewald gherkins to celebrate the unveiling of the files.

Instead of clues to former scouting activities, however, a letter falls out of the cardboard clip as evidence of a long-forgotten affair.

The wife becomes jealous, the grown children are embarrassed, the husband storms out of the apartment.

Flashback follows, a wafting of the desaturated veil of old color films, back to the crossroads where the life of Ludger Fuchs, as the young man was called, changed forever.

The wait at Berlin's Leninplatz is a test, because the crossing is monitored by the Stasi.

Anyone who remains standing despite the eternal red phase is recruitable material.

And so Ludger Fuchs (David Kross as clumsy naivety personified) ends up in front of a tough Stasi officer with a heart (Henry Hübchen with a cognac blush on his cheeks and teeth yellowed by nicotine addiction), who gives him the job of infiltrating the decadent art scene in Prenzlauer Berg.

For Fuchs, that means primarily: parties in a gay bar, improvised drug cocktails with deadly nightshade and datura and women who would like to eke out a life as a muse.

Because he is always at the typewriter so much, people quickly mistake him for a writer, and at some point his reports also take the path in the direction of sophisticated prose.

Mielke as August with a wig

Anyone who suspects a critically funny metaphor is already digging too deep.

Politically and humorously, the ideas that this film arranges rather than stages remain rather flat.

Discussions about open relationships that would have fitted just as well, if not better, into a late '60s western hippie flat share when the muse woman yells, "You haven't understood, not Sartre and not Beauvoir." Keller is taken to the Stasi authorities to get his promotion there, Hübchen laughs in his puzzled face: "Did you think that Keller is only there for interrogations?" The slapstick reaches its climax when Bernd Stegemann plays the role of Stasi Minister Erich Mielke at a costume ball when August the Strong in a wig and gold waistcoat has him hoisted onto a wooden horse.

Now one could shrug one's shoulders and dismiss the whole thing as another German comedy with shallow humor, if it weren't for the Stasi theme promised by Haussmann in the title and, invoked like a devil by an incantation, the question of how uncritical one is can and may deal with the historical fact of mutual spying on huge parts of a society that no longer exists.

Against this background, the director's indecisiveness about what the film actually wants to tell gets a different note than that of mere incompetence.

The spy comedy “Kundschafter des Friedens” (2017) recently showed that films about former GDR agents can be made without any nostalgic gaze.

Haussmann, however, does not trust his chosen genre, uses it for another, but does not develop a punch line that could be related to a relationship between these two genres.

So instead of telling the story of the spy, he tells the old fairy tale about the boy who meets a girl and then just meets another girl and then somehow has to choose between these great women.

The fact that neither one nor the other shows much personality is not due to the actresses, but to the characters in this film, exaggerated to the point of caricatures.

The only exception to this is Ludger Fuchs, whose character undergoes the ironic transition from a spy pretending to be an artist to an artist pretending to be a spy.

Some critics already criticized the fact that Haussmann dealt too kindly with his problems with “NVA” (2005), a comedy about life in the National People's Army of the GDR.

In the third part of his GDR trilogy, Haußmann remains true to the tone he set in this film and in "Sonnenallee" (1999).

What is new, however, is that the atmosphere at the end already slips into the fairytale-like and fantastic.

A Stasi employee suddenly becomes pious from the ringing of church bells, another flies into the Berlin night sky with an angel's tail after a gas explosion, and a choir sings Reinhard Mey's "Good night, friends" to herald the fall of the Wall.

One wishes, if it's already like this, then almost more pathos of this kind and maybe the courage to break the fairy tale with dark nuances.

But the fairy tale is sufficient in itself, if not for the subject.