The Lives of Others: A Review

“To think that people like you once ran a country.”

The story is told of Lenin, who reached a point in the midst of the Russian revolution where he could no longer listen to his favorite musical work by Beethoven. Listening to it, he said, made him want to hug people instead of strangling them, something that the revolution required of him. What if he kept on listening? Could things have turned out different?

In the midst of the late August movie doldrums, I enjoyed the absolute treat that was The Lives of Others, last year’s well-deserved Oscar for Best Foreign Film, which sought to deal with this very question. This film transports us to 1984 in East Germany. Taking place not long before Gorbachev’s election as Soviet president, the words glasnost and perestroika are still unfamiliar to most people, and for the people we meet, from artists to politicians to members of the Secret Police, the communist state is well-entrenched and is here to stay. Within that bleak backdrop, we are introduced to Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, brilliantly played by Ulrich Mühe, who sadly passed away from stomach cancer a few weeks ago. A long-standing member of the Stasi, the East Germany secret police that monitored the activities of GDR citizens throughout its existence, our first glimpse at Wiesler shows him teaching a group of new recruits about the art of interrogation. Taking them through the brutal and unrelenting methods that bring out the “truth” from unwilling suspects, we see the cold and calculating approach that has made him brutally effective at his job over so many years.

Wiesler is tasked to open up monitoring on Georg Dreyman, a playwright who is introduced to us as the only East German artist read in the West that isn’t a subversive and remains loyal to the state. Started because of Wiesler’s prompting of his former classmate and now boss, Anton Grubitz, we witness the astoundingly thorough manner in which the Stasi would conduct their surveillance. The writer/director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, apparently meticulously researched the methods and technology of the Stasi, and so what we see is a remarkable reenactment of their work. Wiring Dreyman’s home with microphones and cameras, Wiesler then began a surveillance of every conversation, every phone call, and every visit, throughly documenting Dreyman’s life so that senior officials might find out the truth within this national treasure.

What should have been a routine surveillance, though, goes awry for both the listener and the suspect. For Dreyman, he is surrounded by other artists who have found different ways to express their dissatisfaction with the state. Most of these efforts have cost them, as friends are being denied the ability to publish, are being restricted in travel, and are undergoing other threats and intimidation to bring them in line. Although initially resistant to the temptation to criticize the state, Dreyman is brought to question his loyalty with the suicide of his friend and mentor, another playwright and artist. With the questions coming, Dreyman sets out to publish a criticism of the GDR in the West, bringing to light some of the dark underbelly that hasn’t been exposed to the world.

Meanwhile Wiesler is undergoing his own conflict. Our exposure to his superiors leaves us convinced of their inadequacies. For all of their talk of the great socialist state, his boss is an ambitious politician, who spends most of his time placating his superiors and planning his ascendancy to greater things. The party leader he is trying to win the favor of is a repulsive man who is more interested in seducing Dreyman’s girlfriend than he is in providing meaningful leadership. This is the painting of corrupted power that Orwell gave us in novel form. Slowly, we see Wiesler quietly observe this hypocrisy and, generally without verbalizing it, start to challenge their world.

In contrast, Wiesler is secretly drawn to Dreyman. He hears his music, he reads his books, he listens to his passionate relationship with Christa-Maria, and he seems to find himself wanting more. We get few glimpses into Wiesler’s world beyond his job, but what we see makes us understand that there is a desperation and a loneliness that defines his existence. The more he observes, the more he is drawn in, and so we see Wiesler start to cross boundaries. He orchestrates Dreyman’s discovery of Christa-Maria’s relationship with the party leader. When she declares that she is going to be with this party leader, he confronts her, persuading her to go back to Dreyman without exposing his relationship. As Dreyman’s questioning of the system becomes more profound, so Wiesler finds himself risking more and more to protect Dreyman.

I will leave the details for your own discovery, but within this journey lies the point that some found offensive about the film. For those that lived through life with the Stasi, the notion that there was a gentle and kind person inside an agent waiting to be brought out, a kind of “hooker with a heart of gold,” is difficult in the extreme. From what I’m reading, some want to see the people that participated in this evil regime as irredeemably wicked.

I remember an article a few years ago written by a Rabbi that had a title that was something like “Why the holocaust teaches us nothing about evil.” Essentially, the argument he was making was that the evil of the holocaust was so extreme that it could not be categorized alongside other examples of evil that we encounter. It was evil of a different stripe, not just a more extreme version of evil we encounter.

I hear echoes of this argument in the negative response to The Lives of Others. The brilliance in the movie is that it draws us into Wiesler’s world, letting us see the emerging conflict as he saw a different way of living than the way he had spent his career. His heroic acts, made all the more heroic because of the silent way that he endures their consequences, offer a glimpse into an emerging sense of humanity, a struggle with a moral universe that doesn’t seem satisfied with the choices he has made.

Much like Downfall and Letters from Iwo Jima, Lives lets us glimpse at the perspective of “the enemy.” What we see gives us hope. Hope that evil can be seen for what it is, and that good can emerge even in the darkest of backdrops. Hope that the glimpses of good are worth the heavy price they can exact. Hope that people can change, even if systems seem like they can’t.