Changes stirring within Wiesler’s emotional landscape represent how ideologies that once governed his life have begun to erode. He was an anonymous everyman inhabiting a city denuded of reds and shadowed with muted greens, grays, and browns — a palette designed to evoke the uninspiring architecture of the Eastern bloc. When he encounters Brecht’s writing, and listens to Dreyman play “Sonata for a Good Man” on the piano, he is moved to tears. He learns to rejoice over a beautiful verse, and to mourn a stranger’s death. Such an awakening is neither prolonged nor contrived. Mühe discreetly interpreted a personnage who experienced seismic shifts in feelings, but without any freedom to express them. His memorable, nuanced performance is striking in its natural exactitude.

This work does not celebrate heroes, because there are none. As the director notes, “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…” Many ordinary citizens led a double-life during this regime, which interrogated and twisted their own moral upbringing. In an atmosphere where “right” and “wrong” are defined by those in power, even silence is dubious, which is an unfortunate consequence of a failed humanity.

“The state office statistics on Hans-Beimler Street counts everything, knows everything: how many pairs of shoes I buy a year: 2.3; how many books I read a year: 3.2; and how many students graduate with perfect marks:6,347. But there’s one statistic that isn’t collected there, perhaps because such numbers cause even paper-pushers pain. And that is the suicide rate.”

— Georg Dreyman

The Live of Others is an explicit statement about artistic censorship. “I am a poet” or “He is a theatre director” are political self-identifications in a society with selective democracy, whereas confessions like “I write poetry” or “He directs plays” are less of an affirmative self-defense than a perservering voice of conscience. Artists exercise the art of self-censorship, which is in itself an act more punishing than being censored. Escape may be a solution, but many still carry within them a physical embodiment of an exiled memory to their other free world. Dreyman does not choose to defect after his controversial article denouncing the regime is published in a Western periodical. One of the film’s open-ended questions is why he insists upon staying, a key that opens and shuts many doors.

If we are to contest that the entire story about Wiesler and Dreyman — though authentic — is neither “real” nor biographical, it is precisely because the film, as an aesthetic expression, aims to construct and present a subjective vision based upon an objective, unemotive reality. It demonstrates that art in whatever form is a power in itself; it alters one’s emotional landscape, particularly for someone who struggles to survive in a Stalinist society without an individual identity.

While art may manifest as a power in itself, it does not necessarily embody freedom. Dreyman and his artist friends ask a pertinent question: what role can art serve in their society, when the breadth of a contemporary cultural expression is virtually nonexistent, and politicized? The history of the Eastern bloc and the subject of repression has generated a variety of romantic contentions in the Western world. The bloc represented a clear polarity against mainstream, democratic beliefs. Fueled by political arrests, and the molding of a systematic mass political consciousness, this difficult history, however, revealed little about the intellectual, or cultural make-up of the society, by compromising or accomodating the complications of policing dissent. In this aspect, The Lives of Others has indeed differed: it stands out, not in preaching or justifying, but for exploring the texture of the popular imagination or aspiration during this dark period.