Das Leben der Anderen

One of my recent Blu-ray purchases was of the 2006 German film The Lives of Others.

Ulrich Mühe plays Gerd Wiesler, a captain in the East German Stasi, the secret police who spy on the citizenry with the help of a network of informants, in November of 1984. (We of course know what's going to happen to the country in five years' time; they have no clue.) Wiesler is seen interrogating a man, although we learn that what we're watching is a taped interrigation that's being reused at the Stasi training institute by Wiesler's boss, Lt. Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur).

Wiesler and Tukur are friends as well as co-workers, and when they go to the theater that night to be seen by Grubitz' boss, Minister Hempf, in order to curry favor. The playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), is seen as squeaky clean even though he as an artist has a whole lot of acquaintances who are to various degress in the bad graces of the Communist Party (technically, the Party was called the Socialist Unity Party, but everybody understands Communist). But Hempf is insistent that there has to be something wrong with Dreyman. So Grubitz has Dreyman's men bug Dreyman's apartment in preparation for Dreyman's 40th birthday party which is going to be held there.

Wiesler bugs the apartment scientifically and efficiently, setting up a listening post in the attic of the apartment building where he and an associate can monitor Dreyman in shifts around the clock. Dreyman lives with his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) and the two have a rather complicated relationship as Georg has a pretty good clue that she's popping illicit pills. That, and she's probably stepping out on him at night to see somebody (she claims she's meeting old classmates. Among the folks who show up for the birthday party is Dreyman's former theater director colleague Jerska, who has been blacklisted (but don't you dare use that word) and on whose behalf Dreyman has been trying to intercede with Hempf, albeit to no avail.

The birthday party didn't produce anything of note that the Stasi could use as evidence against Dreyman, but other events conspire against him. First is that one day the despondent Jerska finally commits suicide. It's not considered a suicide by the authorities, however, as they want to keep up the fiction that nobody would kill themselves in a socialist paradise, so they've stopped collecting statistics on suicide. Dreyman decides he's going to write an essay on the topic of suicide in East Germany and get it published in the West, which is clearly a politically dangerous thing to do. The other thing is that we learn Christa-Maria is indeed seeing another man -- and that man is Hempf. No wonder Hempf wanted Dreyman surveilled: he wanted Dreyman arrested so that Hempf could have Christa-Maria all to himself.

Wiesler discovers Hempf's true motivations, which is natural since he's leading the surveillance against Hempf's girlfriend and her other boyfriend. But he begins to wonder whether this isn't something he should be doing. At the same time, Dreyman's article on suicide has been published and set off a firestorm. Grubitz is certain Dreyman is involved somehow, and tells Wiesler that his career is on the line if he doesn't get answers. So Grubitz, having found out where Christa-Maria gets her pills, has her arrested and tries to turn her into an informant.

Wiesler leads the interrogation, and it ultimately leads to the inevitable denouement for Dreyman's surveillance by the Stasi, although it's not the one that you might expect. (I won't go any further in that regard in order not to give the story away.) Fast forward several years. First in November 1989, the Berlin Wall falls, the result of several months of various protests that would be the subject of a post elsewhere. (I was visiting my relatives in West Germany in the summer of 1989, and the situation was already a crisis that was the top story on the news every night.) In 1990, East and West Germany reunited as one country, and the government set up a commission to handle all those old Stasi files. Dreyman has a chance encounter with Hempf, leading him to go to the institute to read his file.

The Lives of Others is an outstanding movie, and the sort of movie I'd strongly recommend to people who hate the idea of having to read movies with subtitles and/or think that foreign film is somehow "pretentious". The acting is excellent, especially from Mühe and Koch, and from what I've read East Germans who lived through the era say the film's depiction of their country is highly accurate. I certainly found the set design gray and uninviting.

But The Lives of Others is also a story that's relevant a decade after it was made and 30 years after the events depicted, and not just in Germany, but pretty much anywhere. Consider the sort of surveillance-loving politician (and it's not limited to either of the two big parties) who spout platitudes like "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide." Everybody has done something that someone else could consider wrong, even if it's as mundane as having fallen in love with two men. And when you combine that with nonsense like "If you see something, say something", along with even "just" the NSA surveillance, you're setting up a situation that encourages people to rat out folks they don't like, even for minor infractions. Imagine making a dumb joke to somebody that they should make you a sandwich, and they suggest you should become unemployable. Now imagine them having the power of the state behind it.

I don't think I can come up with the words suitable to describe how strongly I recommend The Lives of Others. See it now if you haven't already done so. Amazon lists it as available, but for some reason the TCM Shop doesn't.