The Lives Of Others (2006)

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s secret police (Stasi) monitored the country’s population. The socialist regime secured its power by creating a culture of fear, paranoia, and denunciation within the society, and an arbitrary state executive to go after potential anti-authoritarian individuals and forces.

The Lives Of Others (2006) is a remarkable film debut by German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, very accurate in its atmosphere and depiction of the GDR (German Democratic Republic), and the first serious major picture that dealt with its socialist regime and Stasi-culture. The film functions brilliantly on many levels: as a historical document, an acribic character study, and love story.

The main character is Stasi Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), code name HGW XX/7. During the film we are introduced to different types of state servants: opportunists who will change like a flag in the wind for their benefits, the power-hungry who often abuse their power, or the sadistic, to name just a few. Gerd Wiesler is none of these, but a precise and mechanical executor of the state power, a middle-aged man who deeply believes in the system, and therefore doesn’t question his role and act within this system. He is driven by a high level of accuracy and commitment, but no man of many words and therefore surpassed by his intellectually inferior former study-mate Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), who climbs up the career ladder due to his flexibility and ability to serve individual authorities rather than the state.

When Gerd Wiesler returns home from work, there is no love or family waiting for him, but he is eating his simple dinner alone in his neat, grey apartment. We can not imagine him having friends either, this rather uptight man who is walking through life without ever changing his straight facial expression. Work is the only content in his life. When he is ordered to spy on writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), this life changes.

The setting is an artistic circle in the Orwellian year 1984: Georg Dreyman is an internationally acclaimed writer who is accepted by the state; he is not overly political but friends with powerful authorities like Margot Honecker, the wife of communist state leader Erich Honecker. Despite his pro-communist views, Dreyman is not actively political and endorsing the system, as he is also not critical about it. Some of his artist friends object to this fact, but Dreyman is not the unsympathetic opportunist that we despise: here we see a man simply living for his art and the art of others, a man that walks through life with intellectual joys, and the joys of his deep love for his partner Christa-Maria.

Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) is a respected and celebrated stage actress that often plays the lead in her partner’s play. She is ambitious and albeit also unpolitical; she seems much more aware of the oppressive system she lives in and that is a potential threat to her art and career. Her relationship to Dreyman is carried by deep affection, understanding, love, and passion. When the Minister of Culture, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) covets her, she starts a reluctant affair with him and we are exposed to repulsing scenes that are equal to rape. Not getting the true affection that Christa-Maria gives her real partner and not having her for herself, the Minister orders a surveillance on Dreyman to destroy him.

Once Dreyman is not in the house, the Stasi-men arrive and within exactly timed 20 minutes, the entire apartment gets bugged and wired: living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom – everything. When we saw them in 2006, the year Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, these scenes were deeply intimidating and troubling for their vile intrusion of privacy. 13 years later, these scenes are still intimidating, but accompanied with the ever subliminal knowledge that by now we are being monitored 24/7.

No men in grey might be walking into our houses, but the NSA and corporations like Facebook, Apple or Amazon intruded our lives and privacies a long time ago. They are in our bedrooms and bathrooms, even on our body with the usage of smartphones, and with our very own permission. In 2019 the fighters for transparency and privacy are labeled as state-enemies and in jail. When we see Julian Assange, he seems like a man from a different time, fallen out of time and concept. We don’t care for him. In 2019, we are watching ‘The Lives Of Others’ under less unrealistic and far-away circumstances, we are not shocked anymore by what we are watching. Rather, the intimidation is accompanied by a lingering feeling of guilt- we allowed all of this, we gave up.

Hauptmann Wiesler monitors the couple from their attic, listening to all their steps and conversations, and in these hours in solitude a change goes on within him. Wiesel is living through the life of these others now and experiencing things that were out of his normality for the first time: gentle affection, unconditional love, close humanitarian friendships, and the beauty of art. Ulrich Mühe’s performance is remarkable: It is not through big gestures and pathos, not through monologues or introspective dialogues that we realize this change, but through a most subtle and gentle performance. It is one of the key scenes of the film when he hears Dreyman say the words: „Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean really heard it,still be a bad person?“
Dreyman doesn’t know about the significance of his thought, but when he then starts to play that ‘Sonata for a Good Man’, we see a tear running down the face of a visibly seized Wiesler. It is the moment when his habitual world and existence collapses, the moment when his change becomes visible and its consequences unavoidable.

When after the death of a befriended artist Dreyman takes actions that truly put him and his lover in the focus of the state power, he is not aware of that he has a secret complice in Stasi agent Wiesler, who now protects him by giving false reports and puts himself into danger by doing so. Wiesler’s character makes us aware that even in an oppressive society, individuals and executives are burdened with a free will. He is the one factor that is the biggest threat for any totalitarian regime: the single ‘weak’ link that flies under the radar. That can accomplish just little enough within his radius, that he becomes one of the lose bricks that make the fundament of this system crumble.

In ‘War Of The Worlds’ (1953) the Martians invading Earth are impervious to mankind’s weapons, but in the end they get defeated and destroyed by an unknown quantity: the bacteria in our atmosphere. In their sum, the littlest things can make for the fall of a totalitarian system. In the case of a system where individuality is being eradicated and humans are turned into numbers, the individual free will is the bacteria.

‘The Lives Of Others’ of others is a film that is more important and urgent today than it was at it’s release in 2006- watch by any means.

for Julian Assange

by Saliha Enzenauer