The theme here is surveillance, and just to make sure we tune in to the magnitude of the problem, we are told that in the East Berlin of 1984, State Security had 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers. Or informants, whichever you prefer. (Similarly, since the Romanian secret police files were opened, it appears that one out of every three Romanians actively spied on behalf of the government.) It kind of makes you wonder, why are so many citizens willing to snitch on their fellow slaves of the State? The answers are here, as we see several excellently effective ways of making people do terrible things to their neighbors, friends, and families.
So there are these two State Security colleagues. Wiesler teaches at the Stasi academy, and we get a taste of what he’s about when he shows his class an educational film about the effects of sleep deprivation on a detainee. One student says it’s inhuman, and Wiesler puts an x by his name on the class seating chart.
Among other charming customs, Wiesler demonstrates the trick chair, with a place to put a piece of cloth to collect an odor sample for the dogs – which he says is done at every interrogation.
What else are these aspiring Stasi agents taught? For one thing, if a suspect is so bold as to suggest that they’re arresting the wrong person, that alone is reason enough for an arrest. Because, you see, the secret police don’t make mistakes. By the same kind of reasoning, a totally innocent person, as now in the US, can be arrested for resisting arrest. If you have the nerve to assert that you’re the wrong person, that alone is proof of guilt.
According to Stasi wisdom, a calm and quiet suspect equals a guilty suspect. Supposedly, an innocent person will get increasingly angry about being accused of something. Yeah, as if any prisoner is given the benefit of the doubt, or a second chance. In these people’s hands, feeling anger, let alone acting out, is all the excuse they need to reduce you to a bloody pulp – physically, mentally, or both.
Wiesler’s old classmate, and what passes for a friend in this kind of a society, is Grubitz, who is in charge of rooting out subversive artists. The German Democratic Republic only has one non-subversive writer who is read in the West – which in itself, you’d think, would tell them something. This paragon of politically correct thinking is the playwright, Georg Dreyman
We get to see part of a socialist play, what passes for culture in a country where the government runs the arts. Wiesler and Grubitz are in the audience. Grubitz chats with a party official who lets it be known that the playwright needs to be brought down. He doesn’t say why, just then, but it soon becomes apparent that he wants Dreyman’s woman, the leading lady. So they get to work. Dreyman’s apartment is thoroughly bugged, and Wiesler is put in charge of the surveillance. He sets up a listening post in the building’s attic.
The little details are great. When Dreyman tries to talk to the party boss about unblacklisting another writer, the apparatchik shows his contempt by revoltingly, insolently chewing his food in the playwright’s fact. Later, when Dreyman has a party at his apartment, this blacklisted writer, Jerska, sits alone and tells supporters not to associate with him, lest they be tainted. As if they weren’t anyway. Not long afterward, Jerska hangs himself, which is one of the factors that motivate Dreyman to quit being a party-approved writer and start fighting back.
The actress Christa-Maria wants Dreyman to wear a tie for his party – always a bad sign in a girlfriend. And she secretly takes pills. It’s a silent vice, so the eavesdropping Wiesler doesn’t pick up on it.
Grubitz and Wiesler are in this together, as both their careers depend on nailing Dreyman for something, to get him out of the way and leave Christa-Maria in the party bigwig’s hands. Wiesler makes sure the playwright sees her getting out of the bigwig’s car, and overhears the arrangement of another meeting. After being mauled by the party boss, Christa-Maria takes a long shower, and more pills, to cope with the degradation, and doesn’t tell Dreyman what’s going on.
Wiesler has an encounter with a visiting call girl and mentally compares this transaction to the love between Christa-Maria and Dreyman. Searching Dreyman’s apartment, he steals the Brecht book and reads about love. I don’t quite understand this part, because the movie seems to imply that Brecht was a forbidden author, but apparently he went over okay in East Germany during Communist rule. After Jerska’s suicide, Dreyman plays the piano and the eavesdropping Wiesler is absorbed in the music. Dreyman says,
“You know what Lenin said about Beethoven’s Appassionata. ‘If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.’”
So, what with one thing and another, Wiesler starts to have a change of heart. I swear I also thought of a screenplay based on this concept – but as usual, didn’t get around to it until too late. We see an indication of Wiesler’s transformation when he backs off from making a little boy betray his father. Another one of the rules the Stasi live by is that people don’t change. But Wiesler knows that he’s changing, and that brings into doubt a lot of other military/government maxims.
Dreyman tells Christa-Maria he knows about the party boss, and about her drug habit, and asks her not to keep the date with the party boss. But she goes out anyway. Meanwhile, Wiesler, off duty, gets mechanically, methodically drunk. Christa-Maria comes into bar, and he tries in roundabout way to tell her not to go with the bigwig. She goes home to Dreyman.
Dreyman decides to publish an anti-socialist statement in the West, about all the suicides in this workers’ paradise, and how the government doesn’t even count them any more because the totals would be very incriminating. Dreyman and his friends meet out in the open air and devise a test to determine whether Dreyman’s apartment bugged. But Wiesler, who is growing a conscience, does not report the subversive talk, and this turns out to be the great irony of the situation, because now Dreyman and his friends confidently proceed, in the belief that they’re not being overheard.
Grubitz explains how there are five different kinds of artist, and Dreyman is type 4 – the “hysterical anthropocentrist”. Never put them on trial, because they thrive on it. The better way, and one that involves no actual cruelty, is to put them in solitary with an indefinite sentence. Don’t give them anything to write about, or any other kind of contact. But not giving them anything to write about is moot anyway, because after about ten months of this kind of processing, you can let them out, and most of them never again write or paint or “whatever artists do,” as Grubitz puts it.
The party boss tells Grubitz where Christa gets her pills, and that she should never be seen on the German stage again. When they bring her in, right away she capitulates and offers to do something for State Security. But Grubitz says it’s too late for that. She offers him sex, but that’s no good either. All he wants is to know about the article in Spiegel – which one of her artist friends wrote it?
Grubitz’s task force searches Dreyman’s apartment brutally, ripping things apart. We get a look at the official hypocrisy policy, when the Stasi guy says that of course Dreyman can file for restitution if any damage was done to his belongings, and Dreyman assures him that no damage was done. Wiesler is shocked by the way Grubitz is going after the playwright and tries to protect him. Then, giving Wiesler one last chance, his superior makes him interrogate Christa-Maria. He urges her to save herself and not engage in “senseless heroics.” She rats and tells where the documents and typewriter are. So she believes she will be allowed to continue her career. Which is unlikely, because the party boss has already sworn that she’ll never be employed in the theater again. But she doesn’t know that she betrayed her boyfriend for nothing. The apartment is searched again, but – where the typewriter is supposed to be hidden, all they find is an empty hole. Still, Dreyman knows it was Christa-Maria who betrayed him.
She goes out and runs in front of a truck. Wiesler gets to her first, and tells her he moved the typewriter. Then she dies in Dreyman’s arms.
Grubitz tells Wiesler his career is over, and he is assigned to the lowest rung of Stasi duties, spending four years steaming envelopes open so the “security” goons can read their contents. The Berlin Wall comes down. In two more years, Dreyman finds out that he had been under surveillance after all. At the research center he examines his own files and that the Stasi agent assigned to eavesdrop on him had been covering for him. He figures out it must have been the agent, not Christa-Maria, who moved the typewriter and saved him from arrest, years before. He looks up information on the agent formerly assigned to him and checks out Wiesler from a distance. Nice twist – now he’s spying on the guy who used to surveil him, only for a different purpose. Two more years go by, and a Dreyman’s novel is published, “Sonata for a Good Man,” and it’s dedicated to Wiesler, not by name but by his Stasi agent number, as it appeared in the files. Wiesler sees the book cover in a store window and goes in to check it out. He sees that the book is dedicated to him, and finds some measure of vindication.
“Sonata for a Good Man” was also the title of the music score Jerska gave Dreyman before he committed suicide. It seems that one of the things we are meant to take away from this film is the importance of mutual support under an oppressive government. It’s all-important that the good people stick up for each other, and acknowledge each other for being good-hearted. Too many reformist movements are just a mass of infighting and holier-than-thou posturing and all that noise. It’s no wonder a Big Brother government can so easily rule, when the people are all busy quibbling with each other over details.
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) 2007
written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
Tags: betrayal, government, secret police, security, Stasi, surveillance
