Lives of Others

I would like to introduce readers to last year’s Oscar winner for best foreign film – “The lives of others”. Set in communist East Germany in the 1980s, the tale of the film works on two levels: a. Familiarizing the viewer with the conditions and compunctions of the people of those times without making excuses for or vilifying them; and b. Providing an emphatic, though oblique, illustration of the Miltonian catchphrase –“They also serve who only stand and wait”. Keep this in mind as you watch the movie – the last scene, especially, brings this out so well that, as cinematic setpieces go, I can’t think of a better way life, reality and irony could be depicted.

The film begins with what seems like a humdrum setting – a noted playwright,Georg Dreyman, in East Germany is making waves not only for his excellent plays but also for his more and more anti-establishment stance. Though, so far, he has never been proven to have anti- government tendencies, he comes under suspicion – especially after a close friend of his flees(maybe ‘defects’ is the right word) to the West. The playwright is also wedded to a beautiful actress who is in the sights of a top Govt. official. The dreaded German secret police, the Stasi, decide to put him under continuous surveillance to gain evidence enough to trap him. In order to find evidence to prove his anti-Govt instincts and to get the playwright out of the way, the surveillance is assigned to the command of the movie’s hero, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler – a rising star in the Stasi known for his ruthless interrogation and surveillance skills and total dedication to the cause [The first scene forms a descriptive intro to both the ruthlessness and effectiveness of his methods].

The 24/7 surveillance soon begins as the playwright’s home is comprehensively bugged and all conversations are monitored for even a hint of suspicious activity. The Stasi set up a monitoring station in a derelict flat directly above the suspect’s apartment where they base the listening team. [A curious point to note here is how, even though they seem to have the most sophisticated listening devices, to us now, their word processing – in this case, a typewriter – seems so archaic. One wonders how people ever managed without a decent spreadsheet or Word processor :D ]. As the hero listens in on the daily lives of the playwright,Georg Dreyman, and his girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, and is privy to their tensions and fear of speaking out, at least speaking out too loud, he slowly begins to identify with them and side with them against the ‘system’. Forced intimacy does aid identity formation, more often than not.

When he finds that Sieland is being blackmailed into having sex with the Govt. official on the pretext that refusal would mean the playwright’s death, Wiesler is moved to help the playwright, if at all possible, especially as he hates the govt official in question. He begins to selectively edit the conversations he overhears from Dreyman’s flat – including lovemaking and pillow talk, the borderline anti-establishment stance of one of Dreyman’s friends and Dreyamn’s increasing suspicion that Christa-Maria’s heightened remoteness means she is seeing someone else. Even though he is under increasing hostile pressure from his superiors to find incriminating evidence, he persists in his path.

Christa-Maria, meanwhile, also lets slip a crucial bit of information - about the hiding place of the typewriter used by Dreyman to write his inflammatory articles and plays. This is vital for the Stasi to match the typewrite and the printouts and prove Dreyman's guilt. The Stasi raid Dreyman's flat for the typewriter but Wiesler squirrels it away before anything can be done. Dreyman, though, realises that Sieland betrayed him and the look he gives her then is haunting. Sieland finally cracks under the strain of hiding her betrayal and being used as a whore by the minister and, when confronted about her whereabouts by Dreyman, rushes out of the flat to her death in front of a passing car. This breaks Dreyman’s spirit and while he had been making serious plans to flee to the West, he just subsides into a non-threatening life. The Stasi, deciding that the surveillance is no longer warranted and having incurred the minister’s wrath for failing him, end the case and come down hard on Wiesler, demoting him to a lowly post in the postal department.

The next scene is set several years later - after the fall of the Berlin wall, to be precise. On a casual repair job in his house, Dreyman, who had long suspected it but never found any evidence, finds one of the wires from his house leading upstairs. Following the wire, he finds the abandoned surveillance mission’s headquarters with old spoilt reels of tape and evidence that he had been under Stasi surveillance. Since Germany is now reunified and the Stasi no longer exists, he approaches a Government ministry to find out who had put him under surveillance and why. He finds the doctored records of the surveillance and realizes(dare I say, at the risk of taking myself too seriously, ‘with a pang’?) how much they’ve been altered to look harmless. It is only then that even the viewer realizes the lengths that Wiesler went to in order to protect him. He finds out Wiesler’s name and eventually locates him working as a postman in unified Berlin.

What happens after that, though nearly the last scene of the movie is, in my opinion, the crux of the entire movie’s message. ***Minor Spoiler***Dreyman writes a book about Christa-Maria and how she inspired him in the Communist days and dedicates the book to HGW, the initials of the man he found had protected him so much – as the man without whom the book would never have been written. He uses Wiesler’s call sign in the Stasi so there can be no doubt, at least to Wiesler, who’s being referred to. The final scene cuts to Wiesler buying Dreyman’s book after getting off work and finding the dedication "To HGW".

When Georg finds out that he was in fact under surveillance for all that time, even while writing his article, but discovers that the man monitoring him protected and helped him, his expression of realization is wonderful. Then when he goes to see Wiesler and stares at him, this man who he never met yet owed so much to, is another amazing scene. And in the last and final scene - Wiesler opening Georg's book and seeing the dedication, then walking to the check and saying "No, it's for me" was absolutely beautiful.

As Milton so rightly observed, “They also serve who only stand and wait”. A brilliant movie that I would most certainly recommend as a must-watch: not only for aficionados of good cinema but also for history buffs and those curious about the human condition and the vicissitudes and capriciousness of human nature.

Rating: ****1/2

Writer and Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck