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The foundering Greek government, in a state of disastrous financial decay, has begun referring victims of crime to the fascist Golden Dawn party for protection.

The Guardian reports on the experience of a civil servant who went to police with complaints about immigrant neighbors from Albania:

"They immediately said if it's an issue with immigrants go to Golden Dawn," said the 38-year-old, who fearing for her job and safety, spoke only on condition of anonymity. "We don't condone Golden Dawn but there is an acute social problem that has come with the breakdown of feeling of security among lower and middle class people in the urban centre," she said. "If the police and official mechanism can't deliver and there is no recourse to justice, then you have to turn to other maverick solutions."

The Guardian also reports that Golden Dawn, which recently opened a New York office only to immediately have its website and phones attacked by Anonymous, also assists the poor and infirm with social outreach, providing food and clothing--in return for loyalty to the party.

Golden Dawn's savvy in capitalizing on widespread anger at Greek austerity measures has led to a recent 10 percent rise in the positive opinion about the party, which currently holds 18 seats in the Greek parliament.

The rise of a formerly fringe far-right nationalist party in an economically devastated European nation is not new; it happened in Germany after World War I.

Financial writer Robert Gottliebsen noticed this parallel in May and published "A Weimar warning for Greece" in Australia's Business Spectator. Mr. Gottliebsen didn't mention Golden Dawn but he didn't need to. Referring to the economic devastation across the country he noted that "[out] of such chaos comes political political movements of the extreme left or extreme right."

Mr. Gottliebsen noted that 1920s Germany flirted with the extreme left, but ultimately chose the opposite. He concluded with a warning:

Greece has all the ingredients for a Weimar Republic if it exits the euro and its new currency becomes worthless... then Weimer Republic style chaos will be its destiny.

American neo-nazis are watching the rise of Golden Dawn. The following video was recently posted in a discussion of the party on the white supremacist message board Stormfront.org. It was posted on YouTube in late July by "Race Realist GR," who wrote that the video was from a "closed meeting of Golden Dawn."

We can't be certain of the validity of the translation, but the first speaker appears to call Golden Dawn 'a flaming river' which will sweep away 'whatever has deprived us from dignity, freedom and the Greece of our dreams.'

The uploader, whose full description of the video appears supportive of the neo-nazis, continued, "I translated one of these to show you the booogie-men who will destroy Greece and Europe lest we stick to the EU-ECB-IMF-MULTI-CULTI-GOD-SAVE-THE-BANKERS plan."

Even if the English subtitles are inaccurate, the red and black flags, the swastika-like symbol and the stagecraft speak louder than words.

Peter Halley, Up & Down.

Geometry is destiny, at least in the work of Peter Halley, whose Day-Glo prisons, cells and conduits have been familiar icons since the mid-’80s. Mr. Halley has proved to be reliably consistent, from his choice of acid-hued paints to his use of Roll-A-Tex, a gritty product that lends his work an architectural edge. At first glance, the artist’s airy studio at 526 West 26th Street, filled with rows of colorful paint containers surrounded by canvases in various stages (and dominated by a huge classical cast of Poseidon that Mr. Halley acquired from the Athens Museum), could be a day-care center for child prodigies. But Mr. Halley, 57, who recently stepped down as director of Graduate Studies in Painting at Yale, has an enviably stable midlife career. A Halley installation is included in this year’s Venice Biennale, and he has his first show at Galerie Thomas Modern in Munich this September: eleven canvases and one huge digital wall installation—a multipaneled grid of exploding cells.

Mr. Halley has been playing with permutations of the same modular building blocks—three basic geometric components—ever since he, Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton and Meyer Vaisman became overnight sensations with what was more or less their very own art movement, Neo Geo, which was as instantly reviled as it was celebrated. The so-called Hot Four, as they were dubbed by New York Magazine, officially made it onto the map in 1986. Three of them had already been showing at International With Monument, on East Seventh Street, which was co-owned by Elizabeth Koury, Ealan Wingate and Mr. Vaisman. But behind the scenes, the ambitious Mr. Vaisman had engineered a deal with Ileana Sonnabend, the legendary gallerist and ex-wife of Leo Castelli. The much-hyped move to Sonnabend’s Soho gallery, which entailed many machinations—even by art world standards of expert manipulation—was widely perceived as Machiavellian. Still, critics, who saw Neo Geo as a welcome antidote to that other neo, Neo-Expressionism, raved about the actual show when it opened that October, praising its “cool calculation.”

If Jeff Koons was the cute one of the fab four, the one even then with a showman’s flair for self-promotion, Mr. Halley (still bespectacled but now gray-haired) was the smart one, whose cerebral paintings weren’t just geometrical abstracts but philosophically linked to such deconstructionists as Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault. Mr. Halley had already made somewhat of a name for himself for his critical writing, even before his first show at International With Monument in 1985. As Mr. Vaisman said at the time, “A lot of people hated Peter’s work in the beginning. Now they love it and claim they’ve always loved it. Some people feel that they have to love it or else they’re going to be seen as fools.”

As Mr. Halley himself puts it, “I always wanted to be a public intellectual. I was interested in Foucalt and Baudrillard and everything they had to say about the social experience of space in our society. And that in turn seemed to reflect Warhol’s ideas, who was, I guess, my most important intellectual mentor.” (A black-and-white Warhol portrait of Mr. Halley, done in 1986, hangs in the studio bathroom.)

Mr. Halley, the son of a prominent attorney and politician, Rudolph Halley, who died when he was 3, was born and bred in New York. His father investigated organized crime for the U.S. Senate and ran unsuccessfully for mayor. There were also art connections: Mr. Halley’s great uncle, Aaron Wyn, published William Burroughs. And Allen Ginsberg’s epic poem “Howl” is dedicated to Carl Solomon, Mr. Halley’s father’s first cousin. Mr. Halley attended Phillips Academy before going to Yale. But after being rejected by the art program, he studied art history. He got his master’s at the University of New Orleans, returning to New York in 1980, just when artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle were exploding onto the scene.

“When I got here I found that there were people like Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger, mostly connected with the Pictures Generation, doing really interesting things,” the artist recalls. “And on the other hand there was Neo-Expressionism, which, with all respect to the individual artists, seemed like the idea of the art world gone mad. It reminded me of Sleeper, when Woody Allen wakes up in the future and Rod McKuen is a great poet, and all these things that seemed like the aspects of art that I consider negative had become dominant.”

In stark contrast, Mr. Halley’s work—brazenly conceptual—was like a cartoon schematic of an urban environment or cross-section of a basic building. Thanks to its linear elements, which reference everything from Abu Ghraib to computer circuitry, it has remained visually timeless. Says Scott Nussbaum of Sotheby’s, “The prison is always going to be a relevant image, as is the cell, particularly in our digital age. And the concept that we are connected electronically is now even more true than it was in ’80s, when the imagery first emerged. These types of images reverberate continuously and powerfully to anybody who is paying attention to world events, whether it’s the stock market or riots in London.”

Says the photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, a longtime friend who was also a contributor to Mr. Halley’s art magazine Index (published from 1996 to 2005, and loosely modeled on Warhol’s Interview) “Peter was way ahead of his time. I think he was way ahead of the digital age. Today we take it so for granted that we have a cell phone. Everything is digital—everything is bits—and Peter was aware of that in the ’80s, when we were still getting used to fax machines.”

While they can look futuristic and almost antihumanistic, the artist says that his paintings are, in fact, autobiographical. Mr. Halley stops in front of a large, bifurcated canvas, depicting an orange prison against a deep blue background above another prison, light blue, bordered in yellow against a red background, with two blue conduits feeding into its top. “These paintings began in terms of the prison being a kind of self-portraiture or self-representation, and they were gender-based,” he says, pointing to the trade-mark bars. “I thought of guys as sort of in prison, if you think of guys being uptight. So it was sort of the imprisonment of even myself as an individual, as I related to myself as a middle-class male. You know the beatnik term for an uptight person is a square? So here’s a square and a prison and also a feeling of isolation.”

Even the painting’s rough surface has a personal meaning. “I started using the Roll-A-Tex to give the square or the prison an architectural feature. Now Roll-A-Tex is a strange thing. I’ve been using it since 1981, and I always shy a little bit from autobiography, but even when I was much younger, I didn’t shave every day, and I usually have a little stubble, so this stubbly surface like a man’s beard sort of fed into that gender identification.”

Although he quickly found his artistic voice, Mr. Halley’s first days in New York were solitary. “I didn’t know many people. It was a very lonely time and it was a very big city, and I began making prison paintings, because I felt very isolated. But the thing that happened afterwards is that I felt maybe I wasn’t so isolated. I began to think about the prisons or cells being connected, or myself being connected to others in terms of technology, telephones and cable TV and the grid in the city, and that’s how I got interested in this spatial system of cells and prisons connected to other cells and prisons, in a sort of human-made technological environment. And I feel I sort of lucked into something—like Dan Flavin with the fluorescent lights—because over the next 30 years that ended up being about the extension of the communications environment and the web.”

Although many people would label Mr. Halley’s work as abstract, he sees his work as not only represetnational but also comical. “I think my paintings are funny,” he says. “They are mostly based on a kind of overly naïve or simplistic schematic theme, almost like in Krazy Kat. And I find that whole thing quite slapstick. And I think sometimes my color is funny. A large part of the root of my creativity is humor. I’ll be working on a painting and I’ll think, this would be funny. If I put this green here, what a joke.”

Soon after the Neo Geo show, Mr. Halley joined the Sonnabend gallery. “I eventually left because the art market was in really bad shape and I had two small children and I felt the gallery’s philosophy was they were content to let people come to them.” But in 1992, when Mr. Halley jumped to the Gagosian Gallery, where Ealan Wingate was then ensconced, Sonnabend lost no time suing Larry Gagosian, the Gagosian Gallery and Mr. Halley for breach of contract. (The lawsuit was eventually dropped.) “For me it was a nightmare,” Mr. Halley says, shaking his head. After that, not only were Ms. Sonnabend and Mr. Halley not on speaking terms, “even worse, I think I was the only person in the art world that Leo Castelli wouldn’t talk to.”

Mr. Halley did one show at Gagosian, where he remained until 1994. “But basically I broke it off because he [Larry] wasn’t able to live up to the terms of the agreement.” Still, he left the gallery on good terms. Says Mr. Halley of Mr. Gagosian, “He has great taste and a great eye and beautiful spaces and subsequently moved in the direction of becoming an unbelievably effective impresario. And in that sense he has created a unique model for a gallery. And I guess just as Larry found out he was an impresario, I found out I was happiest working with a pretty big constellation of smaller galleries each of which had their own signal collectors.” (Mr. Halley has shown with Mary Boone in New York since 2002; he also has half-a-dozen galleries in Europe and one in Moscow, in addition to Galerie Thomas.)

Says Mr. Wingate, who until recently had a Halley hanging in his country home, “I think he is somebody who has a terrific embrace of a palette which is difficult to take, and he’s not afraid of being visually abrasive, which I think is quite thrilling. His work livens up anything in a room. It’s terrific to live with, and it’s jokey. It’s like a Rothko of our time, done after the film Brazil.”

Does he ever long for the stratospheric fame of his youthful Neo Geo comrade Mr. Koons? “I don’t want to be a supercelebrity—I’m not the type,” the artist says emphatically. Still, he takes some credit for Mr. Koons’s initial success. “Early on I had a really key role in Jeff Koons’s career, because I wrote about him and then I introduced him to Meyer Vaisman. I like to remind people that I sort of half-discovered Jeff. As everybody got better known, I was really disappointed in him, because he was really claiming this sort of mantle of genius. And his ideas about self-promotion and money and the artistic persona he got for himself I thought were much closer to Neo-Expressionists than something I had hoped that this new generation would have used.” But, he insists, his primary response is not envy. “I don’t want people to think that’s who artists are.”

The soft-spoken Mr. Halley has a daughter (Isabel, 25, who with Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham’s daughter Lena created the website Original Downtown Divas) and a son (Thomas, 21, who is studying neurobiology) with his first wife, Caroline Stewart. After a self-confessed dry spell of nearly a decade, Mr. Halley married the painter Ann Craven, whom he met at Yale, last January. As for his show at Galerie Thomas, known for its blue-chip artists, “I kind of like being the youngest artist in the gallery. I’m happy as a clam,” he said.

Communist dictators tend to be garishly embalmed. The corpses of Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung and Mao have become tourist attractions. Some of them wanted to be cremated. Instead they were placed in ornate coffins of crystal in elaborate, dimly lit mausoleums that are the focal points of vast city squares. Expert undertakers wage a complicated battle against time to keep the dear leaders seemly for the hordes that file past the coffins to pay their respects.

The most romanticized Marxists, though, are the ones that got away, the locations of their bodies not verified for decades: Che Guevara, who was shot in the jungles of Bolivia; Patrice Lumumba, who was shot in the jungles of the Congo; Salvador Allende, who was shot (or shot himself) in the Chilean presidential palace and dumped in an unmarked grave in Valparaíso for the length of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. And finally there is one whose corpse remains officially missing: Rosa Luxemburg, who was also shot, in a car in Berlin, and dumped in a canal.

Luxemburg, a Polish Jew born in 1871, lived a Pan-European political existence in a time of Pan-European tumult. She was educated in Switzerland but spent most of her adulthood in Germany. She participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and edited and contributed to a number of leftist European newspapers of the era. Today she is most famous for her role as a leader, along with Karl Liebknecht, of the Spartacus League, a left-wing spur of the Social Democratic Party that diverged from the mainstream to maintain adamant opposition to World War I. As a result of her views, Luxemburg spent most of the war in jail, released only in 1918, when political prisoners were given amnesty.

In January 1919, after an attempted workers' revolt, German paramilitaries kidnapped Luxemburg and Liebknecht from the Adlon Hotel in Berlin. After an unsuccessful attempt to kill her by a blow to the head, Luxemburg was put in a car and shot in the head, her body thrown in the canal. When spring came, a body was fished out again. An autopsy at the city's Charité Hospital identified it as Luxemburg's, and she was buried at Friedrichsfelde Cemetery next to Liebknecht. For the next 90 years--at least the ones when the German government was not actively persecuting them--leftists came to pay their respects to Red Rosa, even though the remains in the mausoleum were said to have disappeared after Nazis desecrated the tombs in 1935. In Communist East Germany, her status was elevated to martyr, and today Berlin's Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz U-Bahn stop is at the heart of the glossy consumer district that has sprung up in Mitte since the fall of the wall. The whereabouts of her body, however, remain unknown.

In 2007, the head of Germany's Institute of Legal Medicine, Dr. Michael Tsokos, was assisting in the effort to clear out the basement of Charité Hospital, part of a process of consolidating the forensic institutes of the former East and West Germany into one building. The building that had housed the East German institute was more than a century old, and the basement was filled with macabre detritus dating back to the institute's foundation, in 1833. In the days before photographs, doctors had learned anatomy by looking at actual specimens. Hundreds of these remained--tissue samples, ears, brains. There was also a body. Headless, mummified and missing its hands and feet, it had no identification to indicate its age or identity.

But Dr. Tsokos had heard a rumor, one that the oldest employees haunting Charité would talk about from time to time: that Luxemburg's body had never actually left Charité Hospital and that some other corpse had been fished out of the canal and buried instead. Dr. Tsokos was told that someone had even claimed to have seen Luxemburg's head, which was cut off post-mortem, in a jar of formaldehyde in Hamburg the 1970s. Unfortunately, this key witness died in 2006. Undaunted, Dr. Tsokos considered the possible connection between the missing corpse with the one he had found and set out to solve a mystery 90 years old.

The story of the missing corpse is only the latest chapter in the collected mythology of Rosa Luxemburg. There's no shortage of romancing when it comes to her life: She was the subject of a 1986 biopic, Die Geduld der Rosa Luxemburg, by Margarethe von Trotta; a 2005 historical novel, Rosa, by Jonathan Rabb; and, most recently, a 2010 French musical, Rosa La Rouge. But as the introduction to a new book of her collected correspondence, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Verso, 512 pages, $39.95), points out, only a quarter of her written work has thus far been available in English, the rest inaccessible to the unfortunate "Anglophone monoglot."

The new collected letters is therefore intended as a companion volume to the forthcoming 14-volume collection of her newly translated complete works. It consists of 230 letters to 46 different recipients and spans from 1891 to Jan. 11, 1919, four days before her assassination.

While certainly useful and exciting for the Anglophone monoglot scholar of Rosa Luxemburg, the epistolary Rosa Luxemburg experience can at times be slightly tedious for the casual reader--and this is only a fragment of the 2,800 letters, postcards and telegrams contained in the six-volume German edition.

As Luxemburg wrote, "It's the German thoroughness that prevents a true picture of life or of the times from being created, a picture that should be tossed off with light strokes."

The bulk of the letters in the first part of the book are addressed to Leo Jogiches, an activist who was also murdered in 1919 and was Luxemburg's lover from the 1890s to 1907. Luxemburg variously refers to Jogiches as "precious gold," "my bobo" and "my little mite." Following their protracted arguments and reconciliations via one-sided letter is rather like trying to act sympathetic toward a friend whose boyfriend you hate. "He's a controlling asshole!" you want to tell her. But then you remember that this is a woman who devoted her life to things much greater than mere boyfriends.

There is some soap-operatic satisfaction to be gleaned, however, when she recounts "a brief and soft-spoken but frightening confrontation--during a trip on an omnibus" when, after he has learned that Luxemburg has taken a new lover (the dashing physician Kostya Zetkin), Jogiches declares that he would sooner kill her than lose her. After the bus ride, Luxemburg and Jogiches meet friends at a nice restaurant.

"A fine orchestra was playing, in the gallery, music from the last scene of Carmen," she writes, "and while they were playing L softly whispered to me: I would sooner strike you dead." Yikes!

As for the momentous political developments Luxemburg lived through and her stints in and out of prison, history comes through only in fragments--"Dear Vladimir," she writes to Lenin in Dec. 18, about a month before she died. "I am taking advantage of my uncle's trip to send all of you heartfelt greetings from our family, Karl, Franz, and the others. God grant that the coming year will bring us great fulfillments."

Footnotes assist in historical orientation, but in many ways the letters serve to remind that political movements are made up of incremental bureau
cracy and banal accounting as much as soaring speeches or dramatic marches.

Her best letters, then, are those written from prison, where she was held for almost all of World War I. Here monotony and loneliness provoke a literary unity between the smallest details of her everyday life and the larger political endeavors that she has tried to accomplish. She must face the depth of her commitment, and finds she has "become as hard as polished steel and from now on will neither politically nor in personal relations make even the slightest concession."

But she is drowning in memories. A wasp flies into her cell and she writes, "It's such a reminder of summer, of the heat, and of my open balcony in Südende with the broad view out onto the fields and the groves of trees shimmering in the heat, and of Mimi [the  cat] lying in the sun all folded together like a soft package, blinking up at the buzzing wasp."

She recalls the moving shadows of tree limbs across a cafe table in Berlin, the jubilation of Karl Liebknecht on a country outing one summer, the minutia of a frozen bumblebee "cold and still as though dead, lying in the grass with its little legs drawn in and its little fur coat covered with hoarfrost." In her letters to her friends, who sent her, it seems, a near constant supply of flowers and cookies, she constantly asks them to join her in her remembrance:

"Do you remember the fabulous full-moon night in Südende," she writes, "when I was walking you home, and to us the gables of the houses, with their sharp black outlines against the background of a tender blue sky, seemed like the castles of knights of yore, do you remember?"

She describes singing an aria from Figaro to a flock of titmice on her windowsill, the blackbirds that she feeds, her advances in her botanic studies and a ladybug she has wrapped in cotton wool to protect from the frost. But as soon as one is tempted to begin thinking of her as a nice Disney character who sings to birds, she brings us horribly back to earth.

In her most powerful letter, which must also be one of the most powerful letters of the German experience of World War I, she is merely describing the regular delivery of bloodstained army uniforms that come to the prison to be cleaned and mended for reuse. On one delivery, the cart is being pulled by a yoke of undomesticated water buffaloes, spoils of war from Romania. The buffalo must be heavily beaten to obey, to the extent one's hide had split.

"The one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child," Luxemburg writes. "How far away, how irretrievably lost were the beautiful, free, tender-green fields of Romania! How differently the sun used to shine and the wind blow there, how different was the lovely song of the birds that could be heard there, or the melodious call of the herdsmen." She begins to cry. The prisoners unload the sacks of bloody uniforms while the soldier who beat the oxen paces in a corner, whistling to himself. "And the entire marvelous panorama of the war passed before my eyes."

I first read about Dr. Tsokos and the body from the basement that might be Luxemburg's corpse in the papers. After the discovery, a search ensued for sentimental tokens that might have traces of Luxemburg's DNA. A leftist member of the German parliament styled her updo in honor of Luxemburg. In a photo made public after the discovery, the corpse looked Classical in its repose, lying on white cotton drapery at the mouth of a scanner like a headless Venus de Milo, its surface the color of a used tea bag. The legs ended just below her bended knees and the upraised arms were cut off above the elbow. After 90 years in a cellar, one would expect a skeleton, but the body had served as the object of study for medical students as exemplary of a natural mummification process called adipocere that occurs in corpses that have been immersed for extended periods in an anaerobic environment--such as mud at the bottom of a canal.

In early 2010, I happened to be in Berlin wandering around Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and I started to wonder what had happened to the corpse, so I called Dr. Tsokos and, on a frozen January day, went to the Institute of Legal Medicine to meet him. His office was located in a compound of older brick buildings arranged around snowy courtyards that were scattered with birch trees. It had the feel of a sanitarium, and I half-expected to see nuns pushing invalids around in antique wheelchairs with blankets on their laps, but the sidewalks were empty.

Dr. Tsokos was a media-savvy guy, casually dressed in a sweater and jeans and cavalier about the more chilling aspects of his life's work. His interest in the mystery corpse seemed purely technocratic--he was somebody who was obsessed with his job, and not too concerned with leftist politics. Sitting before a dark wooden cabinet filled with skulls, he proceeded to tell me of all the unsuccessful attempts that had been made to identify the corpse.

He had begun with the original autopsy report from June 1919, which was riddled with inconsistencies. It had noted no signs of head trauma, and witnesses to Luxemburg's murder had said that she had suffered a blow to the head with a rifle before her death. There was no notation of hip disease, but Luxemburg had walked with a limp from a degenerative hip disease she had as a child. The autopsied body was shorter than Luxemburg's recorded height (even though she described herself as "Lilliputian"), and, most curiously, the doctors had not followed autopsy protocol--strange, because one of them was responsible for teaching it.

"I thought, 'Oh, shit, this is really interesting,'" Dr. Tsokos said. He went to the state archive to search for a postcard with a stamp she might have licked, leaving DNA evidence. But Luxemburg had always used water to wet the adhesive. He searched for a hat or a coat that she might have worn and left a stray hair on, but he found none.

He decided that he would instead operate on the exclusion principle, and prove that the body was not hers, but every step he took seemed only to affirm that the corpse was Luxemburg's: radiocarbon dating revealed that the woman had lived at the turn of the 20th century; a CT scan of her internal organs revealed that she was 47 when she died; the body had evidence of hip degeneration and was sufficiently Lilliputian.

Dr. Tsokos sent tissue samples to Munich, where a method of identifying trace isotopes in bones revealed that the corpse had lived in Poland, Switzerland and Berlin, and that it had signs of malnutrition that corresponded with Luxemburg's extended stints in prison. He issued a public call for information and received more than 100 emails in response. Nothing came of the 10 or 20 that were actually of interest: Luxemburg had kept a herbarium as a hobby, and four of her botany books were discovered in an archive in Warsaw, but they had only male DNA on them. A grandniece was located in Israel, but since she was not a direct descendant there was only a 50 to 60 percent probability that they were related. Luxemburg never had children.

Dr. Tsokos was in a bind: He could not prove that it was her, but he could not prove that it wasn't her, either.

"For me I don't care if it's her or not her," he said. "It's just an amazing story. It's a murder case that was 90 years old. I wanted to try and ID whoever it is."

So he did what he had to do: The body was turned over to the police and buried anonymously.

ewitt@observer.com

If so, he's got some justification. He's shown in highbrow gallery exhibitions, made soap opera appearances billed as performance art, published a collection of short stories, persued a Ph.D. in literature, done readings with the likes of Gary Shteyngart, and dressed up in drag for Terry Richardson. He's done all this while tackling weighty and well-received roles in juicy Oscar-bait films. Yet, the public often treats his extracurricular activities as mere curiosities.

What about Europe, then? Instead of opening his first solo gallery show stateside, which he most certainly could do, Franco's chosen to take his artwork to Peres Projects in Berlin, Art Info reports. The space is owned and operated by Javier Peres, who's known Franco for eight years and also worked with Dash Snow and Terrance Koh. The show is set to open in February to coincide with the Berlin Film Festival, and will riff on "The Dangerous Book Four Boys," which showed in New York over the summer.

Peres suggests that his buddy James picked the German city to have the public focus on his work, not his star status.

"Generally speaking, the notion of celebrity in Germany is not what it is in New York or Los Angeles," Peres said. "We don't have the same general fixation on it in Germany. In Berlin, really famous people can walk down the street without problems or bodyguards. Here, James will be judged based on the merits of work."

No word on how exactly he'll fit an art show into his very busy February, as he has to be halfway across the world in L.A. to host the Oscars and film episodes of General Hospital. But that's standard procedure for everyone's favorite phone-throwing writer-student-artist-actor!

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Click for Scandal Report: And Then The Model At Diddy's Party Burst Into Flames

The tech whiz kids penetrated Gaga and the others using programs called Trojans, which are apparently a fairly simple and common way to access private property online. They intended to sell unreleased music for large profits, and when they did, fans of Kelly Clarkson - another star among the hacked - alerted the authorities.

The online-heist perpetrators also claimed that they had in their possession a picture of pop star Ke$ha "naked and having sex," the story in The Telegraph claims, but when they tried to blackmail her with it "no money exchanged hands." So it sounds like she actually wants the picture to leak. Who knew Ke$ha had that much PR savvy?

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

For a moment, Mr. Auster looked at the questioner blankly. “But it’s not a children’s book,” he said. Perhaps she had gotten confused, because the story is told from the perspective of a dog named Mr. Bones?

The woman insisted that she knew what she was talking about—that the book she was referring to was an adaptation, published with full illustrations and packaged as a kids’ book. Mr. Auster said it was the first he'd ever heard of such a thing.

Sherman Alexie, who was also on the panel, asked Mr. Auster if that’s what happens when you write 40 books. Smiling tentatively, Mr. Auster deferred to his literary agent, Carol Mann, who was seated a few rows away from the woman who’d brought the matter up. Ms. Mann indicated she was not aware of a Timbuktu for kids either, and promised to look into it. 

At that point, Picador publicist James Meader, who works on Mr. Auster's paperbacks, submitted in a somewhat sheepish tone that he had a copy of the book in his office, and would send one to him directly. Soon someone in the audience had Googled the book on her iPhone, and raised her hand to share her findings. "It has a gray fluffy dog on the cover looking over its shoulder," she reported.

Had Picador published a Paul Auster book without telling him or paying for the privilege? That’s kind of what it seemed like!

Asked for her reaction after the panel, Ms. Mann said only that she was astonished, and was looking forward to sorting it out.

But no. As Mr. Meader later explained to The Observer,  Picador had had nothing to do with the mysterious book, which had in fact been published by a small German company called Minedition. "It’s kind of a macabre idea for a children’s book," Mr. Meader said, "Because as you may know, the dog does commit suicide at the end."

In an interview today, Ms. Mann said she had gotten in touch with Minedition and that contracts and copies of the book—which is distributed by Penguin in the USA—are on their way to Ms. Mann’s office. Turns out a computer crash was to blame!

"It’s not really a big deal if that’s what you’re thinking," Ms. Mann said. "It was a labor of love by a German packager-publisher, and they came to us with illustrations and an abridgement and then they disappeared. We had looked at it—Paul completely forgot about it but he had seen it, we both had. Apparently this little company’s computer server went down and the computer crashed so all of our back and forth was lost."

"There’s absolutely no duplicity!" she clarified.

Oh, well.

"Germany, a country as cloudy as the Pacific Northwest, is now a world leader in the solar power industry and the quarter million new jobs it has created," Obama said today in Las Vegas.

That echoes Clinton's familiar, and sharper, line about Germany's solar power production. As she said in Fresno on October 24, "Explain to me why Germany gets more of its electricity from solar power than California. This makes no sense. I was in Nevada yesterday--they've got all this sun, all this vacant land--they could be powering Las Vegas with wind and solar."

Then again, he continues to stick with his attack on the gas-tax holiday, an idea that Clinton supported during primary season.

From today in Las Vegas: "I realize that gimmicks like the gas tax holiday and offshore drilling might poll well these days. But I’m not running for President to do what polls well, I’m running to do what’s right for America. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make gas prices go down, but I can’t."

Still, this is unmistakably Sontag—grave and sensual, with the signature white streak of hair. Closing the book between essays, you confront her off-center gaze, finding it pensive, warm or accusatory, depending on what you’ve just read. And if you consider that she died soon after she wrote most of these pieces, it makes reading At the Same Time an eerily intimate experience.

Sontag thought her novels represented her more fully than the essays. “The essays, I’m kind of cranking myself up and trying to say something true and eloquent and useful,” she told an interviewer, “but they are a bit of a straitjacket.” You wouldn’t know it to read them. The book opens with “An Argument About Beauty,” a playful trouncing of centuries of aesthetic theory. Characteristic of Sontag are the meaty, often portentous assertions—“Thinking about the history of beauty means focusing on its deployment in the hands of specific communities”—supported by impassioned arguments and odd examples, all nestled in dense, crackling prose.

To the academic reader, these are provocative, even flashy performances. To the common reader, they’re like shots of intellectual espresso. You want to tear through the Duino Elegies in time to make it to the Whitney, a fringe production of Aristophanes and a coffee-house poetry reading of a Latvian émigré.

Sontag is at her best when she’s advancing her private enthusiasms, like the bookstore bargain-bin discovery of Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden—a virtually unknown novel written with no hope of publication by an obscure, politically disfavored doctor in Soviet Russia. Sontag finds the novel “among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and parafiction.” All her admiration and zeal emerge in “Unextinguished: The Case for Victor Serge,” an introduction to his novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and a grim primer in literary politics of the 20th century.

In a forward to this volume, David Rieff—Sontag’s son—recalls teasing his mother about her essays of appreciation, which he found “more self-revealing than she perhaps imagined.” Her speeches, too, are self-revealing—sterner, stiffer, statelier, as if the face she brought to the podium had to be different from the one she brought to her computer each morning. I endured one of these public talks many years ago and can remember trying to suppress my deep, self-pitying sighs. On the other hand, they include moving passages of reminiscence, in one case a description of Sontag’s childhood reading, and in another—for the German Book Trade award, the Friedenspreis—her relationship (as a Jew, as a writer) with German culture: “[M]y entire childhood was haunted by Germany, by the monstrousness of Germany, and by the German books and the German music I loved, which set my standard for what is exalted and intense.”

As you would expect, the most challenging works in this volume are about 9/11. Sontag’s diatribe against the instant public-relations spin in America was published by The New Yorker immediately after the attacks, drastically edited; it appears here for the first time in its intended form. “The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by nearly all American officials and media commentators in these last days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy,” she wrote. “Our leaders have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management.”

Two essays that follow demonstrate Sontag’s evolving response to the catastrophe. She had been in Berlin on 9/11, glued for 48 hours to her hotel television. “In those first days after my return to New York,” she explains in “A Few Weeks After,” “the reality of the devastation, and the immensity of the loss of life, made my initial focus on the rhetoric surrounding the event seem to me less relevant.”

Sontag was brave to publish her furious first impression of 9/11, which earned her enemies; even braver to temper and expand on it in subsequent statements. Similarly, in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) and in “Regarding the Torture of Others” (collected here), she shrugged off some of the famous views she expounded in her great classic, On Photography (1977). Her new collection includes another short essay on the subject, “Photography: A Little Summa,” in which she argues that photography is not seeing but a way of seeing, and that this characteristically modern way of seeing—this fragmenting and framing, this way of accessing realities beyond our own lives—gives “shape and form to our experience” at the same time that it “denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real.”

That is why we need writers, whose job is to be aware—and make us aware—of more: the messy, thrilling world beyond the edges of the photograph. Although this book is full of vigorous arguments on various topics, its recurrent themes are the importance of literature (Sontag defines literature as works not just worth reading, but worth rereading, translating, advocating) and the writer’s job. She expects a lot from writers.

“Not to have opinions but to tell the truth.”

“To depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture.”

“Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn’t just express themselves differently from the hegemonic discourse of the mass media. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.”

Who will speak over the communal drone, now that Susan Sontag’s is gone?

Regina Marler is the editor of Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex (Cleis Press) and a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Advocate.

The man appointed as chief curator of this department is Klaus Biesenbach, 40, a German national, who has been a curator at the museum since 2004. He’d also worked at P.S. 1, the contemporary art center in Queens that is a MoMA affiliate, since the mid-90’s. Sleepwalkers, jointly commissioned by MoMA and Creative Time, is, in many respects, Mr. Biesenbach’s coming out.

It has many times been said—mostly by people outside the art world who favor ostentation, or those within it who do not—that curators are the new rock stars. Over the past decade, there has been a major infusion of capital, in all its precious metaphors, into the art world. Curators are often the brokers and handlers of this currency, moving among different worlds, drawing from one to complement the other.

“In the young, hip group, there are not so many people interested in having the, you know, Van Gogh scholar over to dinner,” said P.S. 1 executive director Alanna Heiss. “It’s very much related to this sense of tension and anxiety and drama, the sexiness of contemporary art in general.”

Mr. Biesenbach has always unashamedly invited celebrity personalities into his purview. He began his curatorial career in Berlin, immediately after the Wall fell. That’s when he and a group of young art enthusiasts occupied an old margarine factory on a street called Auguststrasse in the largely abandoned former eastern city center. They gave it the name Kunst-Werke (now called just KW), and bit by bit built it into a major center for contemporary art and theory. Then Mr. Biesenbach, looking around at what was still missing from the Berlin art scene, founded the Berlin Biennial in 1996.

The openings of exhibitions he curated at KW were often glamorous affairs. He even got someone to open a nightclub in the basement.

“Soon there was this mixture, which is now common to the art scene—this mixture of pop stars, cinema stars, the glam world and the art world,” said Niklas Maak, the chief art critic of the influential German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “But at that time in Berlin, it was shocking, because the art scene was something completely different from the pop and glam business. So, the moment I described in my little article, where Matthew Barney and Charlotte Rampling were dancing the tango in Auguststrasse, which now is the cliché of the merger of two scenes and, you know, the atmosphere of Auguststrasse—so, I mean, if someone would have told me that that was the first scene of a film of a fiction on Berlin, I would have said, ‘Please, take it out, this is too much!’ But the thing is: It happened.”

Mr. Biesenbach explains his immersion in celebrity culture simply: It’s a German thing; you wouldn’t understand. Some years ago, he wrote a controversial article, also published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he posed the question “Why are there no global pop stars from Germany?” The answer is complicated, involving a messy batch of historical and psychosocial issues. But Mr. Biesenbach wasn’t waiting around for his countrymen to sort it all out.

“I could ask you,” he said, raising one finger, “who do you know, on a pop star/singer/film director/film actor level, who do you know in our generation that in the last 15 years—not a politician! Not like Mrs. [Merkel], our chancellor, or so—I’m thinking about people like Pedro Almodóvar, like Björk, like Hugh Grant—is there anybody from Germany who made it to a certain recognizability? There’s none. So that’s Germany: being against giving too much attention to one person. But if you play that game … it’s really true, there’s nobody.”

Mr. Biesenbach, who has silvery hair that he keeps almost shaved, does play the self-branding game like the best of them. Like Anna Wintour’s bob, Tom Ford’s hirsute sternum, Philip Johnson’s glasses, his trademark is snug-fitting Jil Sander suits and black-on-black shirt-and-tie combinations. This past July, Berlin was caught in a heat wave, and Mr. Biesenbach, who was passing through KW one morning to pick up a set of keys en route to a vacation on the Italian island of Stromboli, appeared in jeans, sandals and an open-necked sports shirt. It might have been less jarring to see him naked, said someone in the courtyard.

Like a faithful godfather, he shows up wherever German cultural producers of a certain edge—the fresh, the new, the prior-connected—are attempting to make their mark in New York. When the young art dealer Leo Koenig, who belongs to an art-world dynasty in Germany, opened his first gallery in Williamsburg in 1999, Mr. Biesenbach attended the inaugural exhibition. He ended up selecting one of the artists for inclusion in a group show at P.S. 1.

Just over a year ago, he went to the solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery for Juergen Teller, the photographer who shoots Marc Jacobs’ ad campaigns. Amid the throng of visitors on the street outside the gallery, he listened patiently to a youthful artist who looked like a big college jock imparting thoughts about his work. Then, during last September’s Fashion Week, he perched front-row at the As Four defector Kai Kühne’s show. The designer’s parents, distinguished-looking seniors, sat nearby. Mr. Biesenbach greeted them formally in German. In these moments, he prefers to step back from the searchlights and let those he’s come to support shine brightest. “Shall we not pay attention to the situation?” he rebuked a reporter interviewing him before the models hit the runway. “Like, it’s disrespectful to Kai. I feel like I’m monopolizing the situation.” Then, for equilibrium, he laughed. “I’m very close to fashion, to music, to film, to architecture, to design,” he said. “Like, we’re here now at a design show. And I know many designers and musicians, but they have to be really experimental and really contemporary and really innovative. That’s the only criteria.”

A few weeks later, on Halloween, he popped in at the launch party for a stylish architecture magazine, Pin-Up, founded by Felix Burrichter, a sociable twentysomething from Düsseldorf. “I can’t stay long,” Mr. Biesenbach said, bypassing the bar. “I have to pick up my costume. I’m going to Courtney Love’s party as a vampire.”

It seems less important to wonder whether Mr. Biesenbach wants to be a rock star and more pertinent to view him as a rolling rock. He belongs to an informal network of foreign-born and transnationally oriented curators with high visibility and mounting influence at American arts institutions. MoMA director Glenn Lowry said that “we had looked over the course of several months at several candidates” to head the new department, but Mr. Biesenbach won out for his “broad international practice.”

Curators similar to Mr. Biesenbach include Okwui Enwezor, of Nigerian origin, who rose from editing a periodical about African art published at Cornell to be selected in 2002 to curate Documenta, the Wimbledon of international art exhibitions, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In the wake of this honor, he was snapped up by the San Francisco Art Institute to serve as its dean of academic affairs and senior vice president. “Okwui is a headmaster now,” his longtime friend, Ike Ude, the publisher of the flashy style mag aRUDE, recently said. In turn, Mr. Enwezor deputized Hou Hanru, a noted curator from China who’d been residing in Paris since the early 90’s, as SFAI’s director of exhibitions and public programs. Mr. Hanru, it was reported on Friday, Jan. 19, will also be the man to direct China’s pavilion at the Venice Biennial this summer. And speaking of biennials, remember the kerfuffle last spring over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s appointment of two foreign-born curators—Brit Chrissie Iles and Frenchman Philippe Vergne—to handle its own biannual best-in-show? “How American Is It?” ran one headline. “Beats me!” came the critically engaged chorus.

At the moment, it’s rough going trying to force a collar of “local” or “national” on culture of any form. Artists are crisscrossing the globe, their works laced with worldwide references. The ubiquitous “lives and works” line on artists’ bios has, for many, become the thing that changes most often from one major exhibition to the next. And institutions are responding in turn, pulling in curators who are themselves as migratory in their lives—hence their outlooks. Case in point: the New Museum, the city’s only museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art, recently tapped the globetrotting Massimiliano Gioni to join its curatorial team. Mr. Gioni curated (along with another Italian national and one American) last year’s Berlin Biennial, Mr. Biesenbach’s brainchild.

“I actually think that there is a change of paradigms,” Mr. Biesenbach said not too long ago. “I think until the 60’s, the linearity of things—as in modernism, as in avant-garde—reflected an idea of time as linear, whereas after this, I think we are understanding more and more that things are happening simultaneously, and it’s not Paris giving modernity to New York and New York being the city where everything happens. We have Los Angeles, we have London, we have Glasgow, we have Warsaw, we have Rio, we have Mexico City, we have Berlin, as huge centers of artistic production. So it’s not New York as a single situation.”

The buzzwords for some time in the contemporary art world have been “transnational,” “transcultural” and “internationalism.” Uttering that hieroglyph of a term, “multicultural,” in contemporary art’s inner sanctum is akin to dropping “politically correct” in a conversation with hard-core activists: It belongs to the discourse of a bygone age. Even the word “curator” as a moniker is being reconsidered.

“I don’t think the title ‘curator’ would be that necessarily important to him,” said P.S. 1’s Ms. Heiss, of Mr. Biesenbach. “I think he could find another title. It’s a very overused word anyway. It goes up and down; it’s a little passé right now.”

Mr. Biesenbach is noticeably tight-lipped about his background, and even more so about his inner life. Like Faye Dunaway’s career-obsessed TV producer character in Network, who can talk about her feelings only in the language of ratings and audience appeal, Mr. Biesenbach responds to questions about his self-image by referring to the various exhibitions he organized.

One example: Is he a different person when in New York than in Berlin?

A long pause. “Not so much,” he says softly, “not so much”—followed by a lengthy disquisition on art installation.

“He doesn’t have his own family,” said the performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has known Mr. Biesenbach since he was 21 years old. “He sacrificed a very large part of his private life for the work. Basically, all his life is the work.”

In the early years of their acquaintance, the two experimented with a romantic relationship, despite the 20-year gap in their ages (she just turned 60 last November).

“It was a very short time, yah, yah, about three months,” she said in her sumptuous Slavic accent. “It was really a disaster. It was really funny. We devoted three months together, and we decided we can have like a ‘house life.’ He would make the apple pies, but they were always burning!”

Hermann Weizenegger, a Berlin-based industrial designer, remembers running into Mr. Biesenbach, whom he’s known for years, while on a trip to Rio de Janeiro. The two went to a nightclub, where at one point Mr. Weizenegger drew Mr. Biesenbach’s attention to a young man with an unusually striking appearance. “He went directly to the boy and he talked with him,” Mr. Weizenegger remembers with awe. “They talked for a long time.” About what, Mr. Weizenegger doesn’t recall, but that wasn’t the point. “Klaus doesn’t stop himself,” he said. “He will talk to anybody he pleases or pleases him.”

“I think that what he has an ability to do is, he sees things very specially, and he has almost a filmic understanding of how people move, the direction they’re going—as if situations could perhaps be described on storyboards,” said Ms. Heiss. “Because he knows a great deal about film, he knows a great deal about theater. So, it would be likely that he can be detached enough—it’s perhaps true or not—to see a social event very clearly, you know. He wants to talk to someone because that’s an interesting person, and that’s what he’ll do.”

“It’s a world of simultaneities,” said Mr. Biesenbach. “I do not feel disconnected; I do not see it so linear. I see it more like simultaneous plots that happen at the same time.”

The film’s target is East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, which held sway over the populace from 1950 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, signaling the end of the Cold War. But what makes The Lives of Others especially compelling as dramatic narrative is its remarkably stirring portrayal by the distinguished East German actor, Ulrich Mühe, as Capt. Gerd Wiesler, a fanatically and almost comically committed Stasi surveillance officer who experiences a change of heart that leads him to sabotage his own investigation of the theatrical people he has come to pity and admire.

Mr. Donnersmarck, the 33-year-old writer-director, recalled the genesis of his project as follows: “Over the years, there were two things that led me to make the film. First were many childhood memories of my visits to East Berlin and the GDR (the German Democratic Republic). As a boy of eight, nine or ten, I found it interesting and exciting to feel the fear of adults. My parents were afraid when they crossed the border: they were both born in the East and thus were more closely controlled by the police. And our friends from East Germany were afraid when other people saw that they were speaking with us, Germans from the West. Without these early experiences I would have had trouble finding the right approach.

“The idea for the film came to me as an image that just suddenly popped into my head: the close-medium shot of a man sitting in a bleak room, wearing headphones and listening to beautiful music even though he did not want to hear it. This man pursued me in my dreams and evolved over the years into Captain Gerd Wiesler.”

The action of the film begins in 1984, seven years before the fall of the East German regime, in an interrogation room where Captain Wiesler is browbeating an escape facilitator into naming his accomplice. Later, he is shown lecturing a class of aspiring Stasi students on his interrogation methods, which some of his pupils find cruel and inhuman. Wiesler insists that these extreme measures are necessary to uncover treasonous conspiracies against the state. His parting piece of advice to the class is to always remember to collect a piece of the suspect’s clothing and store it away in a jar, in case the police dogs need to sniff it later.

At this point, the film begins taking on the aspects of satire or farce. Mr. Mühe’s unchangingly severe expression as Wiesler seems disciplined enough to last for an eternity.

The captain is invited by his superior, Lt. Col. Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), to the opening night of a play by a writer named Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), starring the playwright’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). During the intermission, Grubitz is summoned by a powerful government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), and instructed to begin an investigation of the theatrical couple—not because of any political activities, but rather because the horny Hempf is determined to make Christa-Maria his bedmate by using the investigation as a way to force the girl to comply with his wishes.

Grubitz entrusts the investigation to Wiesler, who promises to supervise it personally. While Dreyman is absent from his apartment, a team of Wiesler’s agents wires every room for maximum surveillance, to the point of tearing up the wallpaper and replacing it after all the wires have been installed.

As the glittering lights of the East Berlin theatrical world swarm into Dreyman’s apartment, Wiesler with his earphones listens to all their gossip—much of it seditious—and types up the gist of these conversations, even the most intimate ones between Dreyman and Christa-Maria. Meanwhile, Hempf presses his advantage, trying to seduce a struggling Christa-Maria in the back of his limousine. We come to see that Dreyman tends to live in a fool’s paradise, assuming that his great theatrical talent makes him immune to the machinations of the Stasi. Christa-Maria is more realistic about the situation, and she is willing to capitulate to Hempf rather than jeopardize Dreyman’s career and her own. But when Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), Dreyman’s favorite director, commits suicide after having been blacklisted for a long time, Dreyman at last becomes sufficiently aroused politically to write an article to be smuggled out and printed in West Berlin’s Der Spiegel, about East Germany’s high suicide rate and the government’s censorship of those statistics. Given all the surveillance of his apartment, this action would normally have ended in a long prison term for Dreyman. But at this precise moment, Wiesler ­becomes disillusioned with the regime and begins to misrepresent the results of the surveillance to his superiors. He even approaches Maria in a bar before her scheduled rendezvous with Hempf and—presenting himself as a devoted member of her huge audience—persuades her that she is too great an artist to surrender herself to the Hempfs of this world. What makes this scene electrifying is the way Mr. Mühe can convey Wiesler’s moral transformation entirely from within his unchanging exterior.

In the end, only Dreyman escapes unscathed from the melodramatic escalation and acceleration of events set into motion by Hempf’s revenge-seeking, and Grubitz’s belated suspicions about Wieland’s lack of progress in his ­investigation. Mr. Donnersmarck may have piled on one or two too many coincidences in his frenzied series of climaxes, but the world he has created never loses its sociological reality. For one thing, the Stasi, for all its diabolical intrusiveness into the lives of the citizens, was never a particularly bloodthirsty organization like Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s OGPU. Its vampirish thirst for personal information, however, is indicated by the mountainous heaps of files that were found in Stasi headquarters when the organization was dissolved. The film was actually shot on the premises where this data was compiled, and Dreyman is shown consulting these files in the film’s epilogue, which is set in 1991 and finally settles all accounts and reveals all secrets after a revival of his play in the unified East and West Berlin.

The Lives of Others is a cautionary tale for all societies, not least our own, with its ominous mantras of secrecy for the sake of a conceivably endless war on terror. Though Mr. Donnersmarck hasn’t editorialized excessively on the subject of state snooping, his narrative is damning enough in itself. Indeed, his film serves as a rebuke to the still-widespread nostalgia, in ­Germany and elsewhere, for the perceived social and economic idealism of the German Democratic Republic, despite its shameful suppression of all civil liberties.

This is not to say that the current globalization of capitalism is producing heaven on earth for all the world’s inhabitants. But whatever system we live by or under, the same problems arise. In the writer-director’s own words: “In the film, each character asks questions that we confront every day: how do we deal with power and ideology? Do we follow our principles or our feelings? More than anything else, The Lives of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path.”

This the film does admirably, with a splendid ensemble cast and a marvelous sense of proportion.

The Gray Areas

Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power (L’Ivresse du Pouvoir), from a screenplay by Odile Barski and Mr. Chabrol (in French with English subtitles), is the seventh film on which Mr. Chabrol and actress Isabelle Huppert have worked together. The collaboration began in 1978 with Violette Nozière, followed by Story of Women (1988), Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995), The Swindle (1997) and Merci Pour le Chocolat. Mr. Chab­rol’s latest excursion with Ms. Huppert turns out to be a very subtly ironic “comedy” at the very thin line separating the uses and misuses of power on both sides of the law. Ms. Huppert’s character, a Parisian judge named Jeanne Charmant Killman, is based on the real-life examining magistrate Eva Joly, whose seven-year investigation into charges of fraud and bribery at the French oil company Elf Aqui­taine launched the biggest and most scandalously publicized fraud investigation in Europe since World War II.

Though much of the film is centered on Jeanne’s professional activities as an examining magistrate, which are much like those of the much threatened and maligned Ms. Joly, the narrative flows freely between the storms of her public life and those in her private life.

The film begins curiously with the last day of freedom enjoyed by C.E.O. Michael Humeau (François Berléand) as he prepares to leave on a brief vacation after arranging tickets for his mother to attend the French Open in Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. As his limousine door is held open by the company driver, Humeau is intercepted and whisked to jail by two detectives, who drive him away in another car. In this way, Humeau is strangely humanized before he is charged by Jeanne the next morning with corruption and embezzlement as the C.E.O. of a gigantic state-supported company. It turns out that Jeanne has intentionally used her power to have the allergy-afflicted past-middle-aged Humeau spend a night in jail before she confronts him with her charges. Jeanne produces one document after another attesting to Humeau’s abuse of his fiduciary authority with the company’s funds for his mistress and himself to enjoy all the luxuries in vacation spots across Europe. As Jeanne continues her judicial torture of Humeau, her own marriage to Philippe (Robin Renucci), a moody physician, begins to disintegrate. Philippe resents Jeanne’s workaholic ways as a magistrate. Her home life is made even more difficult for Philippe because of her greater conversational affinity with her favorite nephew, Felix (Thomas Chabrol), who has been staying in their apartment since the break-up of his marriage. Felix is a happy-go-lucky type, who believes in living each moment to the full, unlike his more work-obsessed hosts.

As Jeanne sweeps more big corporate fish into her net, the male powers that be, with their big cigars and smug, sexist attitudes to women, discuss ways to retaliate against this “female Robespierre.” Their first very crude attempt at intimidation consists of tampering with the brakes on her car. In the ensuing car crash, Jeanne is only slightly injured—after which, she gets two permanent bodyguards. They then decide to smother her with kindness by “promoting” her to a larger office and lightening her workload with a female assistant magistrate, Erika (Maryline Canto). The idea is that two women of the same rank are bound to hate and betray each other if they work together. Here again, the male establishment is confounded when Jeanne and Erika become warm and mutually trusting friends.

If Jeanne has an Achilles heel, it’s the charming Sibaud (Patrick Bruel), who briefly seduced her before she realized that she was being ­exploited. When Jeanne drags in Sibaud for questioning of his own corrupt practices, the wise men with the cigars feel that only an enforced vacation for Jeanne would get her off their backs. At this very perilous juncture in her professional life, Jeanne’s husband jumps out a window in an apparent suicide attempt. Yet, when police discover that he was in possession of a loaded pistol, which the film makes it a point to show us earlier, they begin to inquire why Philippe did not use it to end his life instead. Jeanne ­realizes that in his pathetic way, Philippe was simply trying to get her attention.

At the same hospital in which Philippe is slowly recovering from his injuries, Jeanne encounters Humeau chained to a wheelchair. Their exchanged glances suggest that these two onetime-bitter antagonists now share mutual feelings of sympathy toward the other. Jeanne finally realizes that the powerful forces arrayed against her will never surrender their privileged status, no matter how hard she struggles to bring them to account. The system itself is too corrupt, and the biggest fish will always be beyond her reach. Her final words in the film are, aptly, “The hell with them.” She turns her cases over to Erika, who promises to prosecute them. Jeanne believes in her, and there is a glimmer of recognition on Jeanne’s part that she may also have been corrupted by possessing too much power over others.

One cannot imagine a similarly sophisticated fictional treatment of the Enron case from the point of view of both the accusers and the accused; in Hollywood movies, there is only right and wrong. Mr. Chabrol’s Comedy of Power is much wiser than that, and his audience can derive considerable pleasure from the exquisite ironies that the film generates.

More Morricone!

Film composer Ennio Morricone is the driving force of a three-week, 26-movie retrospective at Film Forum, from Feb. 2 through Feb.22. I would recommend every film on the list, both for Mr. Morricone’s music and the overall quality of the individual entries, which is strikingly high. My own personal favorite is Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) on Sunday, Feb. 4. The series begins with Elio Petri’s somewhat underrated Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 2 and 3.

Mr. Morricone is also receiving a special award at this year’s Oscars, and he is giving a first-ever U.S. concert at Radio City Music Hall on Feb. 3. The honors, as always, are long overdue.