Under the Stasi: Von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others

David Begelman

            Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in Soviet Russia and glasnost, a Stalinist wind continued to chill Eastern Europe. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen in German) tells one story of how it brutalized East German citizens. The young and gifted Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (he was 33 in 2007) wrote and directed the film, a work stunning in virtually every aspect of its production. Deservedly, it won an Oscar for the best foreign language film of 2006, yet the director found it difficult to find distributors in Germany, possibly because it delved into a not so ancient past they felt audiences would prefer not to dwell on, or about which a sense of national shame prevailed.

            Before 1989, the entire population of East Germany was under surveillance by a secret police network, the Stasi. The agency’s professed goal was “To know everything,” and it boasted some 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers under what was euphemistically called the GDR, or the German Democratic Republic. While The Lives of Others is a fictional account, von Donnersmarck assures us it mirrors faithfully the actual flavor of the era. He has remarked, “The film is not a true story, but nonetheless a truthful one.”

Some of the film’s stellar cast, recruited from the best acting talent in Europe, were themselves past victims of the regime, including Ulrich Mühe, who plays Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi functionary specializing in electronic surveillance, and the central figure of the film. Mühe’s performance is a triumph of steely containment of inner emotion. His own wife and daughter reported to the Stasi on suspicious signs of deviationism in the actor’s theater group, a theme repeated in the film. Informers in unexpected places was not a rarity in the GDR. After the collapse of the regime in 1989, it was discovered that the vice-chancellor at Humboldt University and as respected a churchman as Hans Joachim Rotch, Director of the Thomas Church choir in Leipzig, were also career informers.

The film is a multi-layered work with variations on themes that resonate throughout its length. Wiesler conducts electronic surveillance over a playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), suspected of treasonous activity; yet Wiesler himself is under the scrutiny of the cynical and self-serving Colonel Grubitz (played breezily and with a scary panache by Ulrich Tuker). The colonel in turn seeks to placate a highly placed cultural minister who monitors him, Bruno Kempf (played to cynical perfection by Thomas Thieme, and reminiscent of Rolf Hoppe’s magnificent performance as the Reich minister in István Szabó’s Mephisto), who wishes to dispose of Dreyman in order to have sexual access to the playwright’s live-in girlfriend, Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck, the national film treasure of Germany in a riveting portrayal). Christa-Marie is an actress who, despite her talent, doubts her own abilities, and is addicted to medication she takes on the sly.

Everyone seems to be monitoring everyone else in the taut social system all the film’s characters inhabit. Even Wiesler, in attempting to set up surveillance in an attic space above the playwright’s apartment, is observed by a neighbor, Mrs. Meineke, who is informed that her child will lose a spot at the university should she blow Wiesler’s cover to anyone. Von Donnesmarck indicates that much of the electronic equipment in Wiesler’s arsenal is actual recording technology used by the Stasi in the past. 

The Lives of Others, like its predecessor, Mephisto, is also a study of the relationship of art to politics, although the former, unlike the latter film, commemorates the redemptive aspect of art. Dreyman plays the piano, and even his eavesdropper is taken with the music, as were the Nazis in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. During the film, a character quotes a remark Vladimir Lenin is alleged to have made to Maxim Gorky: that listening to Beethoven’s 1804 Appassionata would have prevented him from completing his Communist revolution, causing him to go sentimental and caring when the business at hand was bashing in heads. Works of Bertolt Brecht, including passages of his poetry, are also thematic. This literary giant, a formidable anti-Nazi artistic voice, was also an ambivalent Communist when it came to the GDR.

Dreyman’s piano composition “The Sonata of the Good Man” becomes the title of a novel he authors after the Stasi is disbanded, with a dedication to “HGW XX/7, in gratitude.” The code name is that of none other than Gerd Wiesler, the operative Dreyman learns has rescued him from certain imprisonment by confiscating a typewriter from the playwright’s apartment as Grubitz and his Stasi team were about to seize it in a second raid on his premises. This after Dreyman’s girlfriend Christa-Marie had under pressure already divulged its location, thus betraying him.

The machine that disappears from underneath a floorboard in Dreyman’s apartment is the smoking gun of the playwright’s treason in the eyes of Grubitz and his gang. It could be identified as the one used to convey information to enemies in the West German press, especially Der Spiegel, about the high suicide rate in the GDR. One such suicide, prompted by blacklisting, was that of Dreyman’s colleague, Albert Jerska—also a writer.

Art is dangerous to the powers that be, and lest we imagine the lesson only applies to Communist tyrannies, we should remind ourselves of the possible political subtext for drastically reduced financial support for the arts in our own country, a campaign of erosion micromanaged in the recent past by certain influential congressmen. Another story, to be sure, albeit with an eerily similar resonance.

America, thanks to our tradition of a free press (not to mention investigative journalism ready for bear at the slightest hint of political hanky-panky), has corrupt officials either heading for the hills on indecent exposure or else attempting to drown the citizenry in sound bites in order to hide the forest for the trees. In Germany, however, efforts at owning up to a dark history have taken a more strident turn called Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or bashing the past. In this regard, all Stasi secret files have been made available to the public. This was the resource Georg Dreyman turned to in order to discover that it was Gerd Wiesler who saved him. Wiesler’s seeming transformation is the remarkable character change the film is mostly all about. It is sparked by his growing awareness of gruesome realities, among them the knowledge that his superiors act out of less than noble or patriotic motives.

Was Wielser’s turnabout a repudiation of the GDR and socialism, or only a moral effort to set things right after learning about the true motives of Colonel Grubitz and Bruno Kempf? It is difficult to say. Because he has not produced the “results” demanded of him—the treasonable acts of Georg Dreyman—by those two superiors, he is demoted to steaming open envelopes in a crowded office of other low-level functionaries. After the demise of the Stasi, he is observed by Georg Dreyman pounding the pavement as a postal delivery employee. Not a bad metaphor in a Germany in which freedom after a time breathed again, even in as unremarkable a way as uninterrupted mail.