Topic: The Box Office
It’s an extremely difficult thing for any native-born American to think himself into the dark heart of tyranny. Unlike Europe, unlike Asia, unlike Africa, this country has never experienced the political, intellectual and moral cancer that goes by the name of totalitarianism. Thus in America, books like Nineteen Eighty-four or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tend to be greeted with complacent incomprehension. The paranoia of the police state, the terrors of the Ministry of Love, the cruelties of the Gulag, do not live in us.
All the more reason, then, to make sure that you see this movie:
Das Leben der Anderen (2006; German, English subtitles). Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
The place is East Berlin; the year, appropriately, is 1984. At the instigation of a senior government official, the secret police—the Stasi in the parlance of the German Democratic Republic—place a famous playwright under surveillance. Officially he is suspected of harboring unorthodox political opinions. In actuality, the corrupt official covets the playwright’s girlfriend, a celebrated actress, and seeks to eliminate the competition. An officer of the secret police is given the task of bugging the writer’s apartment. Such is the scenario that sets this marvelous film in motion.
The Lives of Others, to give it its English title, is both a taut political thriller and a moving testament to the nobility of the human spirit. In the person of the Stasi officer, portrayed with measured intensity by the late Ulrich Mühe, the moral degeneracy of totalitarianism, the mutilation it is capable of inflicting on the human personality, is made plain. For Captain Wiesler is not an evil man; he is true believer in socialism and a dedicated servant of the state. Little by little, we suppose, he has over the years negotiated with his conscience: “Sometimes, Herr Hauptmann, it is necessary to do evil that good may come, no?” But now, finally and inarguably, his socialist faith has stranded him at the dark end of a moral blind alley. “Remember the oath we took?” he asks his superior after it has been made clear that the object of Operation Lazlo is to further the sexual ambitions of a brutish and corrupt apparatchik. But there’s no choice—or, rather, Captain Wiesler made his choice long ago. As ordered, he wires the playwright’s apartment and commences the surveillance.
I shall not spoil anyone’s enjoyment by discussing the film’s plot at length. But I will say that the great jest of The Lives of Others is the manner in which the very apparatus of totalitarianism—the Stasi’s sophisticated technology of bugging and eavesdropping—ends by subverting the very system that spawned it. For as he sits alone in the attic of the writer’s apartment building, headphones clamped to his ears, listening in on the lives of others, the secret policeman with the stony soul experiences a spiritual rebirth.
The film’s cast is uniformly excellent, particularly Martina Gedeck as Christa-Maria Sieland, the brilliant but blemished actress, and Thomas Thieme as the corrupt government minister. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (who also wrote the screenplay) directs with a sure hand. After five minutes, you’ll cease to be bothered by the German dialog with English subtitles. The Lives of Others is that good.
In its depiction of life in a totalitarian state, The Lives of Others is quietly frightening. In its portrayal of a lost soul redeemed , it is profoundly moving. The late William F. Buckley, Jr., called the best movie he’s ever seen. Who am I to disagree? And why haven’t you seen Das Leben der Anderen?
