Das Leben der Anderen (DIRECTED BY Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2005) Links The Stasi Museum Sony Classics “It took a few years before anyone found a clever way to bring into focus a system that kept 17 million people locked up and under suppression. I was hoping this film would touch a nerve while we were working on it but you never really know how people will react.” — Ulrich Mühe QUOTED BY BBC News “Seven Awards to German Stasi Film” March 13, 2006

The Hungarian novelist, Imre Kertész, once remarked, “It’s easier to write literature in a dictatorship than in a democracy.” On a first read, his comment could come across as too sweeping, even shocking. Yet it contains an acrimonious truth that pricks upon our social conscience, contesting the construct of ideological conformity: the more repressive a political reality becomes, the stronger a will that streams from creative consciousness to resist, survive, and live. A drama of sublime suspense, The Lives of Others recounts the specific details of a Stasi[1] officer’s mission in East Berlin during the mid-1980s. Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is charged by Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) with the responsibility for uncovering incriminating materials about the playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) — the sole “non-subversive writer” — and begins to spy on him and his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). A revered stage actress, Sieland, however, doubts her artistry. She becomes psychologically destabilized, unable to cope with her increasing dosage of a banned tranquilizer and with the sexual coercions of the Minister. Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) IN Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. Wiesler listens to all aspects of their daily lives, using surveillance equipment installed in the attic of their apartment building. While doing so, he discovers an unmasked version of himself. As a Stasi officer, he has regarded people as machines in which fear instrumentalizes and compartmentalizes emotions and personalities. His gradual transformation from a calculating and ruthless man to a sympathetic character — lost, yet willing to sacrifice himself to save Sieland and Dreyman — is a layered performance. In portraying his character, Mühe exposes reservoirs of feeling with a minimalism that is well-suited to the film’s tempo: crescendo misterioso.

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.