The Lives of others

In the dim and distant past when Left / Right political arguments seemed real and endless discussions ensued about ideological semantics I knew people in Dublin who resplended in titles such as “Secretary of the Irish / East German Friendship Society.” The East Germany they referred to was not the “corrupt capitalist lackey” of West Germany but the splendidly entitled DDR – the German Democratic Republic. To these stalwarts of communist orthodoxy the Berlin Wall was “The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier (!)” and calling East Germany a “Police State” was a “slander on Socialist Realism” etc; etc; Now, none of this rang true at the time and does so even less today. Those “friends of the East German people” (they loved the people you understand, they were never commies) moved onto solidarity with Cuba and then when the Cuban’s lost interest in them (around the time Russian money disappeared) they became involved with “Think Tanks” and “Progressive Journals” on the reasonable grounds that they have never had an original or progressive thought in their lives, indeed prior to that their thoughts had been about different types of tanks used to “correct the errors of the masses.”









The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier - The beginning and the end



Now the German Left Wing has been much maligned and in the 20th Century has had reasonable grounds for angst. They were massacred by right wing thugs in the Weimar Republic (obit; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) and those who survived were systematically exterminated and driven into exile by the Nazi’s, indeed the left wing were the first people that Hitler practiced his coercion and extermination policies on whilst the world was happy enough to look away. After the war it was not difficult to think communism was the way forward and many idealists gravitated to the Soviet Zone to set up what was to be the DDR. Early West Germany was not an attractive state with many “cleansed” Nazis still in place and a corrupt political elite largely directed by the Western Occupying powers, but one was to eventually to find its feet and sense of purpose and for the East, after the Worker’s Uprising in June 1953 suppressed with Soviet tanks it became a Soviet satellite fearful of its own people.







This is the world examined as the endgame of the East German State was approaching in this film. The Lives of Others (original German: Das Leben der Anderen) is a German film, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It is set in the hyper paranoid East Germany before the Fall of the Berlin Wall when East Germany's Secret Police listened to your secrets and maintained an army of up to 400,000 informers. In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.



With The Lives of Others, von Donnersmarck won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards – including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best supporting actor – after having set a new record with 11 nominations. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. The thriller/drama involves the monitoring of the cultural scene of East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreymann, and Martina Gedeck as Dreymann's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland.







It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi - the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honour or, in practical terms, the survival of the state.







The German DVD of this film was recalled due to some statements director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made in his audio commentary about the alleged activities of politician Gregor Gysi and actress Jenny Gröllmann as official agents (IM) for the "Staatssicherheit" (secret police of former East Germany).







The movie tells the story of Stasi agent Wiesler (brilliant Ulrich Mühe), who follows his guidelines with chilling accuracy. His newest assignment is to wiretapping famed author Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) and his companion, actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Listening to their conversations, he gets more and more caught in their lives. Wiesler, as he is played here by Ulrich Mühe, is not an individual, but a symbol for the whole system, where people did everything they were told to do. Clad only in gray and brown, filmed in stark and cold light, he's at first not capable of feelings. On the other hand Dreymann and Sieland represent the anti-Establishment, the intellectuals, who were severely hunted, arrested and killed by the government.



The most frightening aspect here is the banality of it all. The offices are bleak, the people talk about bugging operations etc. with a frightening causality. These men in grey look, talk and behave like boring civil servants, and their approach, the "normality" of their job makes it terribly chilling. Director Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck is also able to recreate a feeling of constant observance and spying. In a disturbing scene a harmless joke becomes the center of suspicion and fear. We can glimpse how it must have been for citizens of the DDR, to live with constant suppression of their free will and opinion. As important it is, not to forget the good things and memories people might have of their past, it's also important not to forget or to reduce the impact and fear that this regime put on their people for 40 years.



This is a powerful film which turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive. Were there people like Wiesler in the Stasi? Some of its victims say not. However, von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Mühe persuade us of that possibility without suggesting such figures were common. But as it unwraps the complex layers of personal motivation, loyalty and betrayal far from being alienated from the characters we are drawn to them as we recognise in their responses to a controlling system echoes of our own possible responses in a similar situation where the individual is always subservient.







The Lives of Others subtly evokes a vindictive society that exists by turning citizens against each other in the interests of national unity and collective security. It serves as a major warning to us and our elected leaders about where overzealousness and a lack of respect for individuals and their liberties can lead.



The subtitle of the German Version “Sonate vom guten Menschen” – Sonata for a Good Man is both the title of the piece of piano music given to Dreymann by his great friend Jerska, a director who has lost his reason to live after being blacklisted and the title of the valedictory book published by Dreymann after German re-unification in honour of the Stasi agent Wiesler who makes a moral choice to help his target but not in time to prevent Christa-Maria Sieland running under a car and being killed distraught that she has betrayed her lover to the Stasi.







At Dreyman's 40th birthday party, Jerska gives Dreyman a gift of sheet music to a piece titled "Sonata for A Good Man" (German: Sonate vom guten Menschen). Shortly afterward, Jerska commits suicide; this finally spurs Dreyman into speaking out publicly against the regime. Dreyman arranges through friends with West Germany's weekly magazine Der Spiegel to anonymously publish an article on suicide rates in the GDR. While the GDR publishes detailed statistics on many things, it has not published any information on suicide rates since the 1970s, presumably because they are embarrassingly high.



After unification Dreymann publishes a novel "Sonata for A Good Man" (the name of the sonata given to him by Jerska shortly before Jerska's suicide). Wiesler sees the book advertised in a bookstore, and finds that it is dedicated "To HGW XX/7, (His Stasi Code Name) with gratitude". Wiesler had been consigned to the bowels of the Stasi HQ for his disloyalty and after unification has a rubbish job delivering newspapers. He goes to buy the book and, when asked if he wants it gift wrapped, he responds quietly with a double entendre, "No; it's for me..."



A powerful and thoughtful movie wonderfully acted, tersely directed and shot with an art direction of meticulous meanness and coldness.





Berlin - Checkpoint Charlie