Getting to Know You

The American abolitionist Wendell Philips, once said "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance." I doubt he would have appreciated how much vigilance (of a state-sponsored type) would go into maintaining tyranny as well.

"The Lives of Others" (2006, director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck) is a movie about a group of men, the "sword and shield" of their Party, who spy on anybody they suspect of anti-Party motives. Or, for that matter, anybody the party hacks at the top of the food chain want them to spy on. It is a German film that won the best foreign film Oscar over the strong competition of the fantasy-drama, "Pan's Labyrinth". Having not seen the former film, I was surprised that any film this year could have received the award over that masterwork.

But "The Lives of Others" is a masterpiece in itself, a sharp slice of life, art, and politics set in the thankfully former "German Democratic Republic" AKA East Germany. If you thought these people were jerks when it came to voting absurdly high marks for their own in international skating competitions or at the Winter Olympics, well, big brother or sister, you don't know the half.

Did I mention "Big Brother"? There are elements in the movie of George Orwell's masterpiece, "1984" (the same year most of this film's action is set in). But that novel was a work of imagination, albeit with a strong grounding in the rough "education" Mr. Orwell got from dealing with Stalinist goons as an anarchist soldier and journalist in the Spanish Civil War.

It took a lot less pure imagination to come up with this story: East Germany did exist and 100,000 people made up the internal wing of their secret police, the Stasi. Another 200,000 were "volunteers", many simply poor souls coerced into working to rat out family members, friends or co-workers out of a personal and very real fear of losing their loved ones or themselves being tortured, jailed, or some inhumane combination of all that the imaginations of cruel men could conceive.

The film features excellent performances by Ulrich Muhe as Stasi Capt. Wiesler, a man who is told by his superiors to dig up something incriminating about successful playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). This has less to do with matters of state--Dreyman is not a threat to anybody--and more to do with matters of lust.

One of the Party Bosses is jealous of Dreyman because his girlfriend, the actress Christa (Martina Gedeck), is a beautiful woman and he wants to destroy Dreyman to have her to himself. Christa is a fine actress, but she is no saint and certainly not a dissident. She wants to survive and have a career, and the compromises she is willing to make to do both and save herself fuel much of the drama.

Meanwhile, the more Wiesler intrudes on the private life of the playwright, the more an inner and repressed sensitivity to "the lives of others" comes out in him. By listening to Dreyman play a requiem for a dead friend on the piano and from stealing a book of poetry from his quarry's apartment, Wiesler starts to have second thoughts about the life he has chosen and the people he works for.

The film reminds me of a great film Francis Ford Coppola made between his first two Godfather epics. That was The Conversation with Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert who is drawn into the lives of two lovers who are in apparent danger from an older and powerful man. But "The Lives of Others" stands on its own and is worth seeing for its entertainment value as a political thriller and also as a reminder to be vigilant of a state, any state, that employs spies who can look over someone's shoulder without asking too many people about doing it.