The Lives of Others (2006)

In December, 1975, I was one of a group of young political and civic leaders on a State Department sponsored visit to Europe. One of the places we visited was pre-unification Berlin.

The initial visit to East Berlin was sobering. On the West Berlin side, the Christmas season lead to brightly colored decorations, shoppers, and a great deal of activity both day and night. I remember that when we were in East Berlin one evening, it was almost as if we were in The Wizard of Oz, going back to Kansas, from color to black and white film.

There were literally no bright lights at all in East Berlin. Well, except for, of all things, a Diners Club sign in a bar that was near the wall on the East side. This blue blinking sign stood out in the grays and whites of everything else.

A discussion of the Berlin wall and the movie after the jump …

The wall, for those who never saw it or saw pictures of it, was actually not just a single wall. It was an initial wall with barbed wire and tanks followed by a second wall approximately 100-110 yards away (I looked up the distance in Wikipedia). All I remembered was being amazed at those people who even attempted to cross over, having not just to scale a single wall as many thought who had never visited Berlin, but having to cross that flat cleared out space between the walls and then a second wall to get to West Berlin.

Two other memories stand-out from that part of the trip.

First, a private conversation with our East German guide, a young woman who took us to visit the various sites, many of Russian memorials, scattered throughout the city. In a conversation with just a few of us, she talked about the fact that only the very old were allowed to travel to the West, since they assumed that they were more likely to return. And that she hoped that one day she would have the freedom to travel wherever she wanted. To college-age or just post-college-age kids from the US, trying to understand what it was like living in a society with such restrictions was hard to understand.

Second, we had, of course, representatives from many different US groups, ranging from hard-line on foreign policy, interestingly consider today’s situation, the most hard-line being from the US labor movement, to College Republicans and Young Democrats, to the NAACP, and others. One person I spent a lot of time talking to was a former Senator McGovern supporter who was a member of the New Hampshire legislation, called the General Court.

We spent time talking about the Berlin Wall. I was convinced that it represented the failure of the East German and communist systems in general and was a mechanism to keep East German’s in. He felt that it represented an attempt by the East German government to keep the negative aspects of Western culture and society out. I thought East German’s, like me, wanted free-market capitalism and political freedom; he felt that they preferred their own, different system of government and economics. In retrospect, while I still feel that I was closer to reality, we were both naïve in the conclusions we came to.

In that context, I recently watched the wonderful, moving The Lives of Others, a 2006 film which won a Best Foreign Film Oscar, tells the story of what it was like to live in the oppressive regime of East Germany during the 1980’s before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A Captain in the Stasi, the East German not so secret police, played by a remarkably controlled Ulrich Muhe, is assigned to spy on a well-known playwright, Georg Dreyman, and his actress-lover Christa-Maria Sieland. Captain Gerd Wiesler, a believer in the state and the role of the Stasi, is given this job by his long-time friend and now boss, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz, hoping to befriend an important, albeit slimy, Minister.

During the course of the film we are introduced to a variety of artistic friends of Dreyman and Sieland, and see how each deals or doesn’t deal with the ever-present police and informants. The slow realization by Wiesler of the humanity of those he is listening to and the inhumanity of who he works for and with is a wonder to watch. Always self-controlled and internally constrained, Muhe gives a performance that will long haunt my memories; an imperfect person struggling to deal with how to achieve some meaning, however limited, in an otherwise wasted life in support of a society that was soon to disappear.

As we move toward the climax of the three-way relationship, only understood by the ever-watchful Wiesler, and then beyond it to events occurring after the fall of the wall, we share in the tragedy and triumph of the creative human spirit even in times of enormous duress.    

A truly remarkable achievement by first-time director Florian Henckel von Connersmarck and by Muhe, who sadly passed away shortly after the film won its many awards, I strongly recommend this ultimately very emotional film.

Rotten Tomatoes: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lives_of_others/