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March 2, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > 2007’s Best Foreign Film earns its Oscar trophy

2007’s Best Foreign Film earns its Oscar trophy

By Anne Kemper | For the Thresher

The work of director and screenwriter Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Dobermann), The Lives of Others provides a powerful glimpse into East Berlin life during the last few years of socialist rule. The film is at different times painful, poignant, enraging and humorous. Simultaneously a political thriller, spy flick and psychological drama, The Lives of Others tests the limits of human goodness as it deftly immerses the audience in the too-recent realities of socialist Germany.

The film follows two men living opposing roles within East Berlin society. Gerd Wiesler, played brilliantly by Ulrich Muehe (Das Spinnennetz), is a captain of the Stasi, the East German secret police entrusted with the task of maintaining the government’s control through surveillance and interrogation of the population. Georg Dreyman (Amen’s Sebastian Koch) is a successful playwright and one of very few artists who has thus far managed to remain tolerated by the government and still respected by peers.

Although Lives spends much of its time observing Dreyman, Wiesler is the true central character. A model officer, Wiesler is stone-faced and unforgiving in his work. The director initially portrays him as a relentless and single-minded interrogator, adept at reading his subjects and squeezing out confessions.

At Minister Bruno Hempf’s (The Downfall’s Thomas Thieme) suggestion, the Stasi decide to monitor Dreyman and the job falls to Wiesler. With disconcerting ease, Wiesler bugs every corner of Dreyman’s apartment and sets up camp in the attic above it, recording and interpreting the most miniscule details of the lives of Dreyman and his companion, the actress Christa-Maria (The Good Shepherd’s Martina Gedeck).

But through Muehe’s subtle acting, Wiesler betrays hints of a more complex personality as he returns home to his own empty apartment each night. As he eats a bland dinner or has bland sex with a prostitute, Wiesler reveals a longing for human intimacy and yet also affirms his commitment to the ideals of socialism. While other members of the Stasi and the socialist party use their power to gain privileges, Wiesler rejects this hypocrisy and elects to live no better than the average people he monitors. “Socialism has to start somewhere,” he tells his boss and former classmate as he sits down in the student section of a cafeteria.

Striving to find fault in the object of his attention, Wiesler is quickly drawn into Dreyman’s world. It is hard to tell whether Wiesler’s initial harshness is the result of his commitment to the government’s goals or of a bitter envy for Dreyman and his happy life with Christa-Maria. And Dreyman proves to be more loyal to the socialist party than Wiesler once suspected, so Wiesler seeks Hempf’s true motives for ordering the surveillance. As Wiesler begins to empathize with his object of study, and as Dreyman watches the government destroy the careers and lives of friends and fellow writers and artists, disillusionment and uncertainty grow in both of them.

The motif of the good man runs throughout the film, as both Dreyman and Wiesler struggle internally to do the right thing. Von Donnersmarck plays cleverly with the strict dichotomy of good and bad established in the beginning of the film, highlighting the complexity of the consequences of each of the characters’ decisions. While Wiesler detests Hempf’s misuse of power, standing against it would make him equivalent to an enemy of the government. But taking down Dreyman might bring him a huge promotion, although the moral weight of the act would never fully be eased. Dreyman faces parallel choices. Although he may feel it is the artist’s role to bring attention to wrongdoing, denouncing the government’s actions would almost surely result in his arrest, while remaining silent is the only sure way to keep his career.

Does the good man do good for himself or good for his country? Is serving one’s country the same as serving one’s government? What does it mean to be patriotic? These are questions faced by every character in The Lives of Others, questions that affect the audience long after the film has ended. As distant as socialist East Germany may now seem, The Lives of Others is more than relevant to our times. As it reminds us of what it means to be good, it also reminds us of what a good movie really is.

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