The Lives of Others (Germany 2006) Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down under the weight of accumulated frustrations and neighbourly envy, the secret police of the German Democratic Republic, known as the Stassi, had three hundred thousand informants and spies amongst its ranks.
Their goal, as the opening caption of this remarkable film tells us, was to “know everything”.
The ‘Lives of others’ tells the story of an informant, Wiesler, and his crisis of conscience as he listens into the life of writer, Georg Greyman. Superiors tell the informant to track and monitor the everyday activities of the author-ostensibly to jail him for subversion, but in truth so the minister for culture can get to Greyman’s attractive girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland. The informant proceeds to wire tap the author’s house and so we start down a tense alleyway of phantom cat and mouse.
The informant, a strict and loyal servant of his country, finds little on the pair in the way of wrongdoing. Indeed, Wiesler gradually finds himself disgusted by his superiors and their motives, and his loyalty soon switches. The results are tragic, yet worldly-making the film all the more poignant. There is no irrelevant drama here.
This is top class European cinema. What we see is what the people of East Germany dealt with everyday-so we can imagine that the events were half-expected. The narrative and the realistic performances of the actors create the tension. A fact compounded by an emotive but unemotional ending.
