Already an Oscar Winner, Das Leben der Anderen is, somewhat sickeningly, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first project as joint writer and director. I say that this is sickening as The Lives of Others is not only beautifully directed it is also an intelligent and complex piece of cinema that avoids easy moralistic narratives in favour of a more subtle look at communist East Germany.
The film begins with lieutenant-colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur, alternately radiating bonhomie and ruthlessness) takes his less politically skilled but more talented junior secret police officer captain Wiesler (A superbly understated Ulrich Muhe) to the theatre to watch a play by East Germany’s last loyal writer who is also read in the west. However, despite being a loyal and non-subversive East German, Dreyman (a competent but rather bland Sebastian Koch) is designated for surveillance by former Stasi officer turned minister Hempf (a wonderfully earthy Thomas Thieme) simply because the minister fancies the playwright's girlfriend (a pulchritudinous Martina Gedeck). As Wiesler begins to watch the couple he becomes a party to their problems (such as the girlfriend having an affair with Hempf in the hope of protecting her boyfriend) and soon starts to sympathise with them and admire their infinitely more glamourous and exciting lifestyle. When a black-listed director friend of Dreyman commits suicide, this pushes Dreyman over the edge first into thinking about dissent and then into actual dissent when Captain Wiesler decides to turn a blind eye to what he thinks is an act of subversion but is actually only a dry run. Buoyed up by the perception that the Stasi are incompetent, Dreyman writes an article about the East German suicide rate and publishes it in the West prompting the Stasi to pick up Dreyman’s girlfriend and forcing Wiesler to play a dangerous game as he attempts to both protect the couple and himself from his own lapses in patriotic duty.
From reading this synopsis, it would be easy to think that The Lives of Others is simply a story of one member of the Stasi seeing the error of his ways and trying, in a Schindler’s List fashion, to save a couple that he has come to be fond of. There is an element of this in the film, but, the really interesting things that the film has to say do not fall into such a predictably banal narrative.
The first idea that the film explores is the arbitrary nature of state oppression. This is evident from the very beginning of the film as Hempf designates Dreyman for surveillance for reasons completely unrelated to whether or not the writer is actually a subversive. It is also evident from the process of surveillance itself and the way in which it is the process of state oppression that pushes Dreyman into subversion. Indeed, Dreyman is a loyal East German until his friend, a black-listed theatre director, decides to kill himself rather than face not being able to create. Here we see the process of repressing a dissident prompting others to question their loyalty to the state. When Dreyman decides to test the waters thanks to a dry run, Wiesler misunderstands and ignores Dreyman’s plotting leading to the writer’s dry run going through without a hitch. This proves to Dreyman that the Stasi are incompetent boobs and that it is probably safe to try and publish an article in the West. Dreyman the subversive is therefore an entity created by the state apparatus that seeks to weed out and destroy subversives. The reason for this is that, despite having a good idea of what constitutes subversion and an elaborate collection of techniques for dealing with subversives, the East German secret police is ultimately run by humans who interpret rules differently and have different agendas within the stasi itself. Indeed, Grubitz is clearly not a patch on the officer Wiesler is and yet, because he is able to schmooze politicians and steal the right ideas, he is promoted ahead of his friend. So responsibility in the Stasi has little to do with whether or not you can actually do the job.
As a result of the arbitrary nature of state oppression in the film, its tension does not derive, as is traditional in espionage thrillers (such as The China House or Firefox or any of the John Le Carre adaptations), from the question of whether or not the dissident can outwit the forces of state oppression, but whether the different factions within the Stasi can a) actually stumble across something incriminating and b) whether they can stay out of each other’s way long enough to do their job properly and catch the dissident.
This is the true horror of state censorship. The Stasi are not terrifying because they can and will efficiently find dissidents and dispose of them, rather they are terrifying because they are human and fallible and their system of enforcement is so arbitrary that their wrath is just as likely to fall on someone innocent as it is to completely avoid someone guilty. This is a characteristic key to many abusive relationships; a relationship of systematic abuse would not be endured by anyone sane, but a relationship where abuse alternates with affection and proper behaviour instantly becomes a lot easier to justify to yourself. Von Donnersmarck perfectly captures this characteristic of East German political life when a young Stasi officer is overheard telling political jokes at lunch by a superior. The superior begins by demanding the officer’s name and position but then bursts out laughing and tells a few jokes himself. We assume all is well but then, at the end of the film, we see the young officer in a dead-end job steaming open letters. The horror and the comedy... you never know which one you will get and it is that which is completely terrifying.
The second interesting aspect of the film is probably its most obvious component; the relationship between captain Wiesler and the couple in the apartment. What is interesting about this relationship is that while it could so easily have been a clicheed account of how an icy fascist’s heart was melted by good people, Wiesler’s character arc is in fact far more subtle and has far more to do with the movement from a socialist system to a capitalist one. Wiesler’s life is simple and beautifully encapsulated by one scene in his apartment. Perfectly kitted out in 80’s communist chic, Wiesler’s apartment is immaculately clean, perfectly tidy and looks as though it is completely devoid of human inhabitants. Wiesler’s emotional life is limited to a brief sex session with a corpulent prostitute who does not even bother to get undressed and who is completely unwilling to engage in conversation as she has another job immediately after her appointment with Wiesler. This dull and colourless life contrasts markedly with that of Dreyman who lives in an old-fashioned and slightly ramshackle apartment overflowing with books and invariably full of sex, arguments, passion, politics and conversation.
Wiesler becomes protective of the couple not because he agrees with their dissent, but because of their superior lifestyle. In a socialist system, without the capitalist pressures to improve oneself by earning more in order to consume more, people are spurred on by values such as duty, patriotism, public service and professionalism. Largely alien to the inhabitants of a capitalist nation, these are the values that motivate Wiesler and yet his life is empty. So he begins to aspire.
Whereas Orwell symbolised state oppression in the figure of Big Brother and the slogan “Big Brother is Watching You”, von Donnersmarck’s agents of state oppression are watching you in much the same way as they might watch the TV show Big Brother. Like the millions who flock to Channel 4 every summer to watch the skinny people get drunk, row and have sex, Wiesler finds himself sucked into the lives of the people he watches day in, day out. Like the people who buy trashy magazines and newspapers in order to find out “Chantelle’s REAL story”, Wiesler aspires to live Dreyman’s life.
This is confirmed in two separate scenes. Firstly, when Wiesler encounters Dreyman’s girlfriend and attempts to give her some advice, he speaks not as an individual but as “one of your audience”. To him, the woman is not real and does not exist on the same social level as him so for him to try and talk to her as one individual to another would be absurd... he shows deference because he is but one of her audience. The other scene that confirms Wiesler’s status as an aspirant is the film’s emotive ending in which Wiesler discovers a book about the entire affair by Dreyman devoted to him with thanks. “It’s for me”, the post-Berlin Wall postman says completely stunned that Dreyman would choose to even acknowledge him despite Wiesler throwing away his career in order to protect the couple.
Unlike the Ostalgia of Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin, von Donnersmarck strikes a far more enigmatic pose regarding the East German experience. Steering clear of the fashionable harking back for the simpler days of communism and the simplistic assertion that life in East Germany was an unmitigated hell, The Lives of Others comments intelligently on the ultimately flawed nature of an oppressive state and points out how powerful aspiration can be as a political and social force. A superb film that is completely deserving of its Best Foreign Language Oscar.
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