The Lives of Others/Das Leben der Anderen

A film worth seeing is the Lives of Others or in original German, Das Leben der Anderen.
This is a review I have written for the September/October issue of 'Spirituality', which has just appeared.

The Lives of Others (the original title in German: Das Leben der Anderen) was released in Germany in March 2006 and in England and Ireland in April 2007.
It is one of the best films I have seen, if not the best. After three viewings it remains a brilliant piece of cinematography. Indeed, at each sitting new insights gained, new aspects of characters discovered.
The film is set in East Berlin in 1984.
The opening scene shows Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) lecture young recruits to the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (MfS) commonly known as the Stasi. He is showing his students the most efficient ways of getting people to talk – people whom East Germany (The German Democratic Republic), deem enemies of the State.
Wiesler is the archetypical small East German official who offers total allegiance to the system. But he also believes in the communist ideal and hopes for a world where there will in truth be a classless society. But Wiesler is also a desperately lonely man, who lives alone in a soulless East Berlin apartment.
A government minister and a high official of the Central Committee of the SED – the ruling communist party is attracted to the girlfriend of the well-known playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). And so as to make the way free for the minister, the Stasi set about bugging the home of Dreyman and the man in charge of operations is Wiesler.
Wiesler quickly discovers what is going on and why he has been asked to take on this operation.
The purpose is of course to get something on Dreyman so as to discredit him and send him off to jail leaving his girlfriend, Christa –Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), ‘free’ for the high official.
It shows how out of touch officialdom is with the world of life and love. How can the government minister ever expect to win the love of Christa-Maria? But because of the lip service paid to the party and the ideology behind it, the governing class believe they are untouchable and think they know what is always to be done.
Dreyman is considered by the authorities to be party-friendly and he is to a point. But when his friend and fellow artist commits suicide, Dreyman proves to be duplicitous in a surprising way.
All the time Wiesler knows what is going on and has continually to decide how much or what he will tell the authorities.
This film is about the metamorphosis of one poor lonely man, who has been fooled by a rotten regime.
During his eavesdropping on Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland, he sees the power and wonder of real love and friendship, he looks at his own life and realises its pain and emptiness. He also realises that he is being used but also knows that he could redeem himself and in so doing save the lives of honourable people.
Wiesler has choices to make and his dilemma is whether he should or not disclose what he is observing in the operation.
His boss, Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), exemplifies perfectly the middle management class of the old East German State. He is a careerist, who at this stage in his life probably believes in nothing except his own survival and promotion. In that sense the film is not just a portrayal of life in East Germany but may also be an allegory of life in any modern state.
When Grubitz becomes suspicious of Dreyman and Wiesler he calls in Christa-Maria and uses on her all the nasty tricks the Stasi have learned over the years.
Right through the film Wiesler clearly knows that should he not obey the orders he has been given he will suffer the consequences.
Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall comes down.
An early joke against Erich Honnecker told by a young Stasi recruit means that the recruit comes in touch with Wiesler just as the Wall falls. It is a clever detail with great significance and irony.
Once the Wall is down Dreyman checks out his Stasi file. He never knew he was being spied on, something that was a complete mystery to him. He discovers how there was total surveillance on him.
The final denouement gives the seal of excellence to this brilliant film.
The film is in German with clear readable sub-titles. It is a remarkable expose of what went on in the East German State and it is truly extraordinary that the young director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, can capture the mood so perfectly, down to the detail as to how the young Mfs officers wear their uniforms in that characteristic ‘GDR style’.
The film is set in 1984 and it so happens that I was living in West Berlin at the time and my work took me regularly to East Berlin. So naturally, I have a close affinity with what is going on. The film is amazingly true-to-life and when the artists talk about crossing from east to west at their ‘beloved Heinrich-Heine crossing’, any one living in Berlin during the division of the city will know the pain and brutality that those crossing points evoked. And Heinrich Heine was mainly used by Berliners and in that sense had a mix of intimacy and pain about it. So close and yet so far.
Germans and especially Berliners will also recognise all the coldness and horror that went on at Normannenstraße, the centre of Stasi operations.
But the film is much more than a story about what went on in a corrupt communist state, it is very much about how an individual becomes a slave to a system. It is also a powerful analysis of the sort of person a system uses to carry out its dirty tricks. But the great hope in the film is that, in spite of everything, the human spirit has the ability and the potential to rise above all that is nasty and bad and set their sights on the great goodness that is inside the soul and heart of every man and woman.
If it is not now running where you are, make sure to buy the DVD and sit down and experience a film that does much more than chronicle life in old East Germany. This film is a powerful modern allegory warning all of us never to sell our souls to any system or party. It also challenges us to see the freedom and goodness there is when we stand up and face the music that is involved in taking on corruption and indeed, stupidity.
It might be over-simplified to make Wiesler the all-perfect hero. He was a lonely man, also maybe a bitter man and his bitterness might well have motivated him to do what he did. But again, that is another argument for recommending the film – there is no perfect person. Even in his greatness, there is always the nagging contention that had he been higher up the ladder, he would not have done what he did.
The ifs and accidents of life.
See it for yourself.
It’s easy to manipulate people, ordinary decent people. The East German authorities always insisted that any time they said ‘Berlin’ they would always add, ‘Berlin, capital city of the GDR.’ (German Democratic Republic). They had it written on their coins.
One day in 1984 I was near Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin when I got chatting to a middle-aged woman. At one stage I asked her where she was from. Her reply was, “I am a capital citizen”. When I further asked her why she did not simply say ‘Berlin’, she was amazed with my question. It came natural to her to say that long mouthful of propaganda nonsense.
The GDR had it down to a fine art and yet in spite of all its power and control, Wiesler stands out as a man apart and succeeds.
I must admit that while I was living in Berlin – the western part of the city, I was fascinated with the east. I regularly found myself saying, ‘Berlin – capital city of the GDR’ and often when my Dominican brothers would ask me where I had been after a visit in the east, I would tell them that I had been in ‘the capital city’. In some perverse way I was proud to say, ‘Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR’.
Never underestimate the thousands of people who prayed and protested in the church in Leipzig in the months before the wall came tumbling down making the Heinrich Heine crossing redundant.

Ulrich Muhe died in Walbeck on July 21, 2007.