The Lives of Others

The Lives of Others is both, a political thriller and a tale of redemption, rather

aptly set in the Orwellian year of 1984 in East Berlin.

Gerd Wiesler, a seasoned agent of the GDR’s secret police, is tasked with spying

on a feted playwright and his actress girlfriend, andfinds himself drawn into the lives of

those he is conducting surveillance on. While he is gradually exposed to the redeeming

powers of art and the joie de vivre of his victims, he falls in love with the writer’s

girlfriend and his intrinsic belief in ideological doctrine slowly fades. When he learns that

the surveillance has been initiated due to personal, not political reasons he tries to save

the couple from being persecuted by his own organisation even if this means permanent

demotion for himself.

It was a quote from a famous Russian dictator about art and beauty being the

most dangerous of distractions in revolution that made director Von Donnersmarck set

out on a three-year quest to put on screen the dichotomy of creative freedom and

political oppression. He decided to make his protagonist start out as a Leninesque villain

who would be forced to listen to the Appassionata while he invaded other people’s lives

for the sake of revolution.

The idea of art's redemptive and humanizing power becomes a key theme in The

Lives of Others. There is a watershed moment in the film for both, writer and

surveillance officer, when the former learns about the suicide of his best friend, a stage

director blacklisted by The Powers that Are. Dreyman instinctively reacts by playing the

Sonate vom Guten Menschen, which his late friend gave him for his birthday, while

Wiesler is listening in from his surveillance post in the attic and is deeply moved by the

intricate chords of the music. Listening to this particular piece of music as well as

reading Brecht’s poetry in the preceding scene adds to Wiesler's aesthetic education.

The film opens to the sound of reverberating footsteps, which any audience

would automatically link to impending military action. Given the film’s provenience, the

sound builds on our collective memory of jackboot totalitarianism , associated with The

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The Lives of Others

Third Reich, adding East Germany’s secret police to the mix, thus prepping the audience

for the story which is about to enfold.

The sound also anticipates the first image of the officer taking a prisoner down a

corridor.The camera tracks behind both of them to heighten the sense of anonymity

prevalent in the opening scene. The sequence is shot ata very wide angle, which renders

the corridor longer and infinitely more frightening because it also makes the walls curve

to convey a feeling ofhopelessness.

The first shot of Captain Gerd Wiesler, the epitome of GDR efficiency, is low-

angle, suggesting his position of authority and power before cutting to Prisoner No 227,

who is never referred to by his actual name, in an over- shoulder shot from behind

Wiesler. Wiesler’s physicality is reduced to the absolute minimum to demonstrate his

self-control. Von Donner later on

The prison sequence is juxtaposed with Wiesler lecturing students at the Stasi

University in Potsdam. The agent-cum-instructor aims at enhancing their academic

findings by playing a recording of the interrogation. This montageobviously draws on the

conceptual banality of evil, by transposing the obvious anguish of an individual into

material for supposed academic analysis.

In The Lives of Others, the repeated use of montage reminds the audience to

focus both on the perpetrator and the victim the interdependence between these two

characters thus being made abundantly clear. This is best demonstrated in the scene

where Wiesler hears the writer play the sonata. Cutting between the two shots, the

camera describes an identical circular motion around both characters, their reactions to

the music being intercut and juxtaposed with each other.

This sequence echoes the emotional content of 1950s Hollywood

melodramas, because it anticipates the dramatic climax of the main narrative arc, the

actress’s suicide, bringing together the three main characters in the same shot for the

only time in the film, effectively both recalling, and then dissolving, the montage of the

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The Lives of Others

earlier sequence. The film as such relies widely on melodramatic devices in so far as it

outlines a rigid moral code imposed on the protagonists by then-contemporary GDR

society, which thwarts any hope of personal happiness or self-expression.

Central to the plot is the operation of bugging and monitoring Dreyman’s flat, as

ordered by the Minister of Culture, who is having an affair with Dreyman’s girlfriend,

actress Christa-Maria Sieland. During the minute surveillance that ensues, Wiesler’s and

Dreymann’s fates become entwined.

As the film’s ending shows, their connection has not even been completely

severed several years later, although roles have been reversed: it is Dreymann now,

who, in a long tracking shot spies on the former Stasi officer. A concluding freeze frame

of on Capt. Wiesler's face as he accepts the indirect gift of his former victim makes the

audience realize that this is the first time Wiesler claims something for himself, not

anybody else.

Von Donnersmarck has gone to great lengths to capture the dreary atmosphere

of East Berlin in 1984 by working with a restricted colour palette that excluded any

redsor bright blues. There is dim, cold lighting in which blue and brown filters prevail,

which form a smooth visual transition to the clothing worn by most of the characters as

well as to the drab utilitarian flat to which Wiesler returns at the end of each day.

Wiesler’s isolation is brilliantly set off against the warm colours abounding in Dreyman’s

flat. This pattern is only disrupted by flashes of Christa’s white bathrobe, which serves as

a visual exclamation mark, as well as by the white telephone, which is openly suggestive

of the white telephone genre of cinema.

The film excels in showing various methods of terror and intimidation used by

the Stasi, such as coercing Dreymann’s girlfriend into having reluctant sex with Minister

Hempf, and ultimately turning in her lover due to her drug addiction.

Wiesler has certainly to be perceived as a round character, progressing neatly

from being henchman of a repressive state to one of its most set opponents. He also

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The Lives of Others

appears to be the least conflicted of the three main characters whereasthe other two

major characters, the writer and his partner, remain rather flat in their portrayal and

have to deal with ongoing inner conflicts.

The audience witnesses Christa-Maria Sieland's increasing desperation as she

withdraws into her addiction in order to be able to bear the Minister’s sexual

perversions and later on, to denounce her lover for the sake of her art. Knowing that any

failure at collaboration will inevitable end her career Christa-Maria takes full

responsibility for her action and by committing suicide is thus redeemed.

Georg Dreyman, the poster boy among GDR writers, is initially content to create

works of art within the limited cultural frame imposed by the government , but is

eventually forced to face the other side of the coin after his closest friend has committed

suicide and his partner has denounced him.

The film has to be read as an avowal of humanity to which each of us has to

subscribe to, even at the most difficult of times, as it provides the aesthetic space in

which values such as friendship, loyalty and self-expression can be articulated.

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The Lives of Others

Bibliography

Cox, Damien and Michael P. Levine: Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies , John Wiley & Sons, 2011

Dueck, Cheryl: The Humanization of the Stasi in "Das Leben der Anderen",IN: German Studies Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Oct., 2008), pp. 599-609

Fisher, Jamie and Brad Prager: The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television), Wayne St University Press , 2010

Lindenberger, Thomas: Stasiploitation: Why Not? The Scriptwriter's Historical Creativity in "The Lives of Others", IN: German Studies Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Oct., 2008), pp. 557-566

Matthew H. Bernstein: The Lives of Others: Matthew H. Bernstein on an Emotive Surveillance Thriller Set inCommunist East Germany, IN: Film Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Fall 2007), pp. 30-36

Schmidt , Gary: Between Authors and Agents: Gender and Affirmative Culture in Das Leben der Anderen, IN: The German Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Spring 2009), pp. 231-249

Stein , Mary Beth: Stasi with a Human Face? Ambiguity in "Das Leben der Anderen", IN: German Studies Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Oct., 2008), pp. 567-579

Brockmann, Stephen: A Critical History of German Film (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture), Camden House Inc., 2010

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