The Lives of Others: [Das Leben der Anderen] 9781839025334, 9781839025303

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For my students

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Acknowledgments My thanks go to the Leverhulme Trust and my colleagues at the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London for giving me the time to write this book. While working on it, I benefited greatly from the generous mentorship of Mererid Puw Davies. I enjoyed the skilful editorship of Rebecca Barden at Bloomsbury, and the expert work of Sophie Contento in preparing the manuscript. The three anonymous reviewers contributed invaluable pointers as well as warm encouragement. For her brilliant research assistance, I thank Laura Lux. And for their support, Jenny Chamarette, Geraldine Horan, Kristin Veel and the whole Uncertain Archives research collective, Gözde Naiboglu, Lucy Bollington, Debbie Martin, Dagmar Paulus and Katherine Robinson. Thank you to Joey Whitfield for reading the manuscript at an early stage. Andrew Webber was my PhD supervisor when I began lecturing on this film in 2010 and I am grateful for his influence, which has shaped my writing in this book and elsewhere. For their presence and love, I thank Ellen Pilsworth, Hester Swift, Fiona Wright, Anna Bull, Catherine Ring, Adam Jacobs Dean, Philippe Marie, Cilla Wright, Rachel, Jess and Rosa Talmage, Ali and Charly Milton-Doyle, Pippa Sterk, Z Freeman, Simon Harrison, Philip Engleheart, Fran Elliot, Shauna Laurel Jones, Victoria Camblin, Ina Linge, Stefanie Orphal and Jens Elze, my family, and Em Cooper.

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Introduction We are living in a time of mass surveillance, when big data companies and governments around the world are mining, storing and trading information taken from the everyday life of individuals. Against this contemporary backdrop of data-mining and -monetisation, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s feature film The Lives of Others (2006) remains one of the most significant films in any genre about surveillance. It is also one of the most internationally successful German films of all time. And rightly so: this award-winning drama is compelling for its portrayal of the East German secret police, the Staatssicherheit or Stasi, as an inhuman institution in which, against the odds, human transformation becomes possible. In the film, a committed spy turns away from the depressing conformism represented by the Stasi and towards ethical individuality, as he tries to save the playwright and actress on whom he is spying. This fictional conversion of a Stasi spy through the lives of the people he spies on has inspired viewers and garnered praise among many critics. The politics that surrounded its plot, which is set in a socialist regime portrayed in the film as entirely ‘bad’, are also remarkable. The spy’s journey, from Stasi agent to self-governing individual, runs parallel to the historical shift that took place at the end of the Cold War, the moment American writer and political theorist Francis Fukuyama called the ‘end of history’ when capitalism seemed to have succeeded definitively as the only viable world order.1 The way the film tracks that world-changing political shift, away from the collective dreams of socialism and towards the fantasies of the private individual, is what makes The Lives of Others at once an appealing and problematic classic. Von Donnersmarck’s film has outstanding aesthetic qualities. He chose to depict the Stasi in the form of a heritage melodrama, set

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in a milieu of spies and artists in 1980s East Berlin. The thoroughly researched and handsomely constructed setting makes for exciting viewing, and the plot, structured around the narrative conventions of classic film melodrama, proved popular among its large audiences. The film boasts a stellar cast and uses impressive techniques of cinematography, mise en scène and editing inspired by earlier German film traditions and Hollywood. It is also outstanding for the record-breaking number of awards it won upon its release, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007. Making the best case of all for its classic status, The Lives of Others has had an extremely wide appeal across traditional political boundaries. It proved popular both to liberal audiences and critics, who enjoyed its depiction of the arts as improving subjectivity and society, and to conservative critics and fans, for whom the film provided definitive and visually beautiful proof of ‘the iniquity of communism’.2 The Lives of Others was released seventeen years after German unification, when the memory of the Cold War could still spark heated debates and deepen political divides. For the four decades from 1949 to 1989, East Germany formed a separate country, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), ruled by the single-party dictatorship of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party; SED). The party was kept in power with the help of the Stasi, which spied on so-called enemies both within and outside the GDR. The months following the fall of the Berlin Wall were dominated by revelations about this secret police force. The Stasi’s offices were stormed and occupied by protestors, who seized evidence of an unprecedented surveillance regime. At its peak in 1989, the Stasi employed 91,000 full-time officers, in a country of just 16.4 million people.3 But the most shocking revelation concerned the recruitment of East German civilians into a network of unofficial informants (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, or IMs), who were set to work spying on neighbours, family members and colleagues. An estimated total of two million people collaborated with the Stasi between 1950

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and 1989, and in 1989 alone there were around 189,000 IMs, or one in eighty-nine East German citizens spying unofficially.4 The power exerted by the Stasi, with its ranks of full-time and unofficial spies, has made it a captivating subject for cinema and other screen formats. German cinemas in the 1990s showed many films depicting the Stasi, including Alexander Zahn’s satirical The Truth About the Stasi (1992), which was released the year the Stasi files were opened for scrutiny and featured music by Rammstein. Zahn’s film was followed by the serious dramas Goodbye to Agnes (1994) by Michael Gwisdek and Forgiveness (1994) by Andreas Höntsch, and later came Sebastian Peterson’s satire based on a novel and screenplay by Thomas Brussig, Heroes Like Us (1999). The more successful cinema depictions of East Germany reached audiences abroad, in the form of comedy Sonnenallee (1999) by Leander Haußmann, set in 1970s East Berlin and also based on a novel by Brussig, and Wolfgang Becker’s celebrated tragicomedy, Good Bye, Lenin! (2003).5 Both comedies offered engaging narratives looking back on the GDR and its popular culture from the vantage point of a decade of unification. However, neither of their plots featured central Stasi storylines, leaving a gap that remained unfilled until The Lives of Others came out in 2006. Another successful drama featuring the Stasi was Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012). Released five years after The Lives of Others, Barbara is a rare heritage film: it employs the subtle and pared-back aesthetics common to Berlin School film-making, of which Petzold is the best-known director,6 to depict a doctor exercising subtle resistance against the East German regime, including Stasi surveillance. The Stasi continues to represent an important plotline in films set in the former East: for instance, Andreas Dresen’s 2018 drama Gundermann, about East German singer Gerhard Gundermann, who was recruited as a Stasi IM. Beyond the cinema, German television productions depicting the Stasi included The Scorpion’s Sting (Stephan Wagner, 2004), The News (Matti Geschonneck, 2005), I Didn’t Want to Kill (Dagmar Hirtz, 2006)

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and I Am the Other Woman (Margarethe von Trotta, 2006). More recently, there has been the ongoing international TV success of Deutschland 83 (2015–20), in which the Stasi sends an undercover agent to spy in the West. However, none of these productions has enjoyed anything like the international renown of The Lives of Others. Von Donnersmarck’s film was so successful because it inspired viewers at the same time as raising questions about the kinds of action and agency that were possible under the Stasi and the broader SED regime. The turning point in its plot is the transformation of Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) through his surveillance operation and discovery of poetry and music. Wiesler undergoes a redemption in the film, as he moves from conformity to utter disillusionment with state socialism, finding he can grasp a new sense of agency in the process. Agency is important to the film’s narrative in several senses. Wiesler is a paid-up Stasi agent. He then becomes a double agent, working against the Stasi while appearing to be operating for them. There is a third way in which he becomes an agent, too. Once he is no longer bound by loyalty to the Stasi, Wiesler can come to his own decisions based on an individual sense of right and wrong. Through his transformation, Wiesler attains a kind of free personhood that was explored by German philosophy of the Enlightenment period. In the eighteenth century, writers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich Schiller extolled the power of art to contribute to a liberation of human sensibilities from oppression by church and state, and so help society progress towards universal values of freedom, justice and individual personhood. However, von Donnersmarck’s film leaves questions open regarding Wiesler’s change from loyal Stasi captain to sovereign Enlightenment subject. Viewers are left wondering what the fate of the former spy will be in unified Germany, as well as pondering how his story fits with the film’s allusions to radical post-Enlightenment theorist and Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht.

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Wiesler’s redeemed character contrasts with that of the tragic heroine, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Sieland fails to fully live out her individuality and, instead, becomes an unofficial Stasi collaborator before meeting a tragic end, suffering the fate of many of melodrama’s heroines. And yet Sieland’s death does not eliminate ambivalence from the film’s ending. Further traces of ambivalence persist in its closing sequences, set in unified Germany. This new setting does not look as free and satisfying as the East German characters may have hoped when the Berlin Wall fell, although it seems to promise some rewards for the improbably successful writer and the film’s other lead male character, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). With its melodramatic characterisation and historical setting, and its intertextual references to Enlightenment and postEnlightenment philosophy, this is a film capable of exciting its audiences at the same time as raising fundamental questions, which I explore in the following pages. These are questions about how film can function as a source for understanding the past, about the politics of heritage film, the place of ambivalence in melodrama, and the way post-Cold War culture can commemorate the so-called ‘end of history’, when the Berlin Wall fell and a new era of unconflicted individuality supposedly began.

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1 A Contemporary Classic – and a Conservative One? The Lives of Others is set in the Orwellian year 1984. Five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stasi is maintaining high levels of surveillance over the East German population. The film follows initially loyal Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler, who carries out a spying operation against successful playwright Georg Dreyman and star actress Christa-Maria Sieland. This operation changes Wiesler’s mind and leads him to subvert the Stasi regime. We see Wiesler’s transformation as he watches the artists’ lives and develops a love of the art forms they unknowingly introduce him to, including the poetry of Brecht and contemporary classical music. Observing the lives of these ‘others’ – the playwright and the star, with their love, literature and free thought – Wiesler finds himself also becoming ‘other’. Finally, Wiesler grasps the agency to act independently of the Stasi’s inhuman hierarchy. So changed is he that he decides to conceal Dreyman’s authorship of a clandestine report for West German news magazine Der Spiegel on the GDR’s scandalously high suicide rate. Sieland, meanwhile, suffers sexual abuse by a government minister. This and her addiction to prescription drugs, which she obtains illegally, provide the conditions for her to be coerced into informing on her partner to the Stasi. Sieland reveals the whereabouts of the typewriter whose unique signature will identify Dreyman as the author of the critical publication. But Wiesler’s vantage point as spy enables him to hide Dreyman’s typewriter before his Stasi colleagues can retrieve it; he saves Dreyman from discovery and Sieland dies in a tragic road accident. At the end of the film, Dreyman learns the truth and writes a novel dedicated to his unknown protector. The Lives of Others was von Donnersmarck’s debut feature film and he financed it on a shoestring budget. His impressive script

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nonetheless secured a cast of some of Germany’s most celebrated actors. Sebastian Koch had an impressive TV and film career behind him when he was cast as Dreyman. In the same year as The Lives of Others, he also starred in Paul Verhoeven’s war thriller Black Book (2006), and he has since had roles in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015) and the Showtime series Homeland (Season 5, 2015). When she came on board, Martina Gedeck had starred in Mostly Martha (Sandra Nettelbeck, 2001), for which she was nominated for Best Actress at the European Film Awards. Like Koch, Gedeck starred in another film in the same year as The Lives of Others, Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006). In 2009, she again had a title role in a German Oscar contender, starring as Ulrike Meinhof in The Baader Meinhof Complex (Uli Edel, 2008), which was also nominated for a Golden Globe. The biggest star in The Lives of Others, however, was Ulrich Mühe as Wiesler. By 2006, Mühe was already a household name thanks to his illustrious career in theatre, film, radio and television. Mühe’s prior roles included Georg in Michael Haneke’s original German-language thriller Funny Games (1997) and he played Dr Robert Kolmaar in the popular television series The Last Witness from 1998 to 2007 (written by Gregor Edelmann). Not only was Mühe famous for his acting, but allegations had been circulating in 2001 suggesting his former partner, actress Jenny Gröllmann, had informed on him to the Stasi. These allegations were never proven or otherwise because both parties died before the dispute was resolved, and no handwritten reports by Gröllmann were found in the Stasi archive.7 Von Donnersmarck’s film went from being a small-budget production to making $77.3 million at the global box office in 2007. It also won numerous awards, including a record-breaking number of nominations at the German Film Prize 2006, which led to multiple Gold Awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for Mühe, and Best Supporting Actor for Ulrich Tukur, who plays Wiesler’s commanding

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officer, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz. In 2007, the film then won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and it was nominated for the same prize at the Golden Globes of the same year. It won the 2006 European Film Prize, as well as Best Actor for Mühe and Best Screenwriter at the European Film Awards, among many other accolades. It went on to gain a huge amount of recognition in Anglophone film criticism, too, so much so that two influential volumes came out, containing chapter after chapter of criticism on this one film.8 Much of the film’s appeal came from its aesthetic inheritances from classic Hollywood cinema. Daniela Berghahn has argued that the film’s ‘redemption plot’, in which the hero is able to recover his humanity from political compromise and moral ruin, is commonly seen in Hollywood dramas, and explains some of its success.9 Meanwhile, in an interview in 2010, von Donnersmarck named UK-born Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock as a ‘master’, whose classic Hollywood techniques he aspired to emulate in making The Lives of Others.10 Certainly, the influence of Hitchcock’s film-making on von Donnersmarck is evident when comparing The Lives of Others with Hitchcock’s lesser-known Cold War film Torn Curtain (1966). This political thriller is set largely in the GDR and shows American nuclear physicist and double agent Professor Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his assistant and fiancée Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) on the run from the Stasi. Hitchcock’s film shares with The Lives of Others a leading couple under threat from the GDR authorities, the setting of an East Germany permeated by suspicion and surveillance, and even the striking parallel of a scene set in an East Berlin theatre, where Armstrong and Sherman are only just saved from apprehension by the Stasi. However, there are certain key differences between the two directors in the way they represent the Stasi. In Torn Curtain, Stasi captain Heinrich Gerhard (played by Hansjörg Felmy) offers Armstrong, at that point an honoured guest of the East German state, a cigar. He also quips with him that Sherman has arrived as

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Differing depictions of the Stasi in Torn Curtain (1966) and The Lives of Others

unexpected ‘excess baggage’. The light tone of the meeting with Hitchcock’s Stasi captain is unlike any scene in The Lives of Others. Moreover, the clean brick walls and healthy houseplant in the Stasi office in Torn Curtain are a far cry from the yellow-lit twenty-fourhour interrogation chamber Wiesler operates in. The Stasi appears more threatening in Torn Curtain’s most famous scene, when Armstrong’s Stasi chaperone Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling) discovers Armstrong is a double agent, leading to a famously difficult struggle in which Armstrong finally kills the spy. Gromek is a more volatile presence than Gerhard and the deadly fight is hair-raising. However, while Stasi officers constitute a formidable enemy in Hitchcock’s film,

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Hitchcock’s Stasi spy Gromek (left, in Torn Curtain), is more glamorous than the authentically-dressed Wiesler

they are given more human warmth and more opulent costumes than Wiesler, who stays apart from his victims and wears synthetic fabrics that are entirely unglamorous, albeit more historically accurate. Still, von Donnersmarck was clearly influenced by Hitchcock’s iconic cinematography. Like Hitchcock in many of his films, von Donnersmarck takes time building up the depiction of his central couple in tense domestic moments on which the action then pivots. In both directors’ works, domestic sequences create tableaux in which little dialogue is needed to convey the threat its characters are under from external forces. Some of Hitchcock’s most famous and most troubling scenes take place in domestic settings, of course,

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Domestic tensions in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Torn Curtain

such as the home invasion by killer Thorwald in surveillance thriller Rear Window (1954), and the murder of Marion in the shower in horror classic Psycho (1960). In other films, couple tableaux work in subtler ways to convey threat and tension: for instance, the scenes in Scottie’s apartment with Madeleine (or ‘Madeleine’) in surreal memory-noir Vertigo (1958), and the tense reunion of Newman’s and Andrews’ characters in an East Berlin hotel suite in Torn Curtain. While the central and frontal placement of Sieland in von Donnersmarck’s tableaux varies from Hitchcock’s male-focused compositions, the apartment sequences in The Lives of Others nevertheless echo the domestic tensions in Hitchcock’s films.

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Domestic scenes in The Lives of Others recall Hitchcock’s tense and richly-furnished couple tableaux

Viewers become detectives as they take in detailed props, vexed glances and unmet gazes between couples in states of confusion and danger. Hitchcock’s signature close-up high-angle shots, which invoke a hovering, proximate surveillance, are also echoed in The Lives of Others. High-tension high angles appear in many of Hitchcock’s films: for instance, in his international thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much (the 1956 version), where the angle emphasises the unbreakable complicity between James Stewart as Dr Ben McKenna and Doris Day as Jo Conway McKenna. In The Lives of Others, a lengthy high-angle shot shows the couple from ceiling height while Sieland hangs Dreyman’s fortieth birthday decorations. Here, however, rather than the complicity conveyed in the Hitchcock frame,

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Close-up and highangle surveillance shots in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others

the couple is shown in a growing state of discord as they disagree over whether Dreyman should invite theatre director Albert Jerska, who has fallen foul of the Cultural Ministry and been blacklisted, to his party. As well as referring to the surveillance operation Wiesler

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has recently launched in the attic above them, the angle accentuates the couple’s growing division in the edgy atmosphere of 1980s East Berlin. There are important influences on the film from classic Hollywood cinema beyond Hitchcock, too. The code name assigned to Dreyman in his Stasi file is Lazlo, a misspelling on the Stasi’s part that still invokes Michael Curtiz’s 1942 romantic melodrama Casablanca. Curtiz’s Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is a Czech Resistance leader who has escaped a Nazi concentration camp, and becomes love rival to the hero, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Casablanca’s plot, set amid Europe’s difficult history, and its interlinking of subterfuge and romantic drama, are also shared with The Lives of Others. However, the principal Hollywood influence on The Lives of Others is Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 thriller The Conversation. Gene Hackman plays private investigator and surveillance operative Harry Caul, whose character changes as he listens in on a conversation between a couple in a public square. Initially only interested in his work as a form of technical expertise, Caul finally sets out to save the couple, who he comes to believe are in mortal danger. Set in 1970s San Francisco, Coppola’s film is far removed from the Surveillance technology forms a medium for transformation in The Conversation (1974) and The Lives of Others

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dark years of the late GDR. Still, The Conversation was released in a time of surveillance revelations in the US. After whistle-blowers broke into the FBI’s offices, they leaked files exposing its COINTELPRO programme, in which agents had sought to break up political campaign groups since the 1950s. The Conversation came out in the wake of that leak and the Watergate investigations, which revealed President Nixon’s secret tapes. Thus, both The Lives of Others and The Conversation came out in the aftermath following the exposure of shocking surveillance regimes. While the regimes in the US and East Germany had different goals, the revelations were equally appalling to the people whose lives had been shaped by their covert surveillance. As well as their contexts, the central plot point in both films is comparable. Like Wiesler, Coppola’s operative Caul undergoes a

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crisis of conscience and becomes attuned to the human risks behind his surveillance operation. Greg Wise has analysed the influence of Coppola’s aesthetic style on von Donnersmarck, writing: ‘Visually The Lives of Others echoes The Conversation in its use of static cameras in Wiesler and Harry’s bare apartments, that is, the camera tends to be stationary and to lag behind the action.’11 Moreover, both films are united by the dual importance of surveillance technology, as at once a prop and a plot catalyst. Audio surveillance devices operate in both films as the means through which the spies are transformed. These prostheses for the mind of the spy connect them to the lives of their surveillance subjects and effect a change of mind based on the information they hear. The aesthetic and thematic references to classic film in The Lives of Others militate for its status as a contemporary classic. So too does its tendency to appeal to viewers across a very broad political spectrum, including a reception that has at times cast it as a conservative film. As well as the many prizes it won in Hollywood and across Europe, the film was very warmly received by conservative critics. For instance, in 2009 it was named one of the best conservative movies of the previous twenty-five years, as listed in the National Review.12 It appeared among a list of films perceived to promote conservative values, alongside ‘pro-life’ critics’ choice Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) and the animated superhero film The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004), which was read as delivering an aspirational pro-marriage message. The narrative of The Lives of Others exerted a powerful pull in this context as an anti-Communist fairy tale, prompting conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr to want to ‘rush out into the street and drag passersby [sic] in to watch the story unfold’,13 in the hope of persuading them of the ‘evils’ of state socialism. The film was also celebrated by academic critics of the former GDR, Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV, who espouse the extremely controversial view that the GDR was a totalitarian state.14 These authors give a favourable review of Wiesler’s conversion,

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viewing it as a total condemnation of the GDR: ‘the film brings to the fore the iniquity of communism, it also succeeds as a drama of the human soul’.15 They celebrate the film’s depiction of state socialism in religious language (‘iniquity’), so that in their reading, the purification of the soul of the spy becomes an emotive celebration of sacred, capitalist freedoms. These positive conservative responses to the film back up Nick Hodgin’s claim that its release fed ‘a yearning for a time when the ideological lines were clearer and the West’s triumph over Communism was a battle waiting to be won’.16 Indeed, the depiction of the Stasi in this emotionally charged film did risk producing a black-and-white version of a very complex political history. The central plot event in the film – the transformation of the Stasi spy – formed the focus of its positive reception among conservative critics. Wiesler’s conversion represented, from their perspective, the liberation of his ‘human soul’ from Communism.17 But his story is more complicated than a simple shift from ‘evil’ socialist to ‘good’ capitalist subject. Wiesler begins the film willing to prop up the East German regime, and we have to assume he is doing so out of real ethical and political commitment. No evidence is provided in the film that he has ulterior motives for upholding the Stasi regime, unlike his ambitious boss Grubitz, who preens over a new academic appointment, and the sexually abusive former Stasi officer and now cultural minister Hempf. By contrast, the consistency of Wiesler’s actions both in and outside his work for the Stasi proves he initially believes in the regime with real conviction. Once viewers are persuaded of Wiesler’s genuine loyalty to the Stasi, we then watch as the operation transforms him into a true individual, working against the oppressive regime. This transformation is courageous, since the stakes of striving to assert individual agency against the Stasi were high. Moreover, Wiesler’s transformation allows von Donnersmarck’s film to set in striking contrast the Stasi’s inhuman system of knowledge gathered through surveillance with the empathic, particular knowledge Wiesler deals in, as he dares to protect the individual lives of his surveillance

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subjects. Thus, the self-defined decisions he makes are depicted as more ethical than the conformist behaviour associated with the East German regime. It can be inspiring to dream of the subject freeing himself from the Stasi’s hierarchy and enjoying a more sovereign individuality. In that vision, communal politics and society, and the reduction of the subject to a mere function, drained of human specificity, are replaced by a sensitive humanity and an ability to make ethical decisions freed from the pressures of a group. Wiesler’s shift thus takes him from socialist conformity to sovereign individuality, a liberal, humanist ideal of behaviour that is also the mainstay of Western capitalist styles of governmentality and subjectivity. Viewed in this sense, it is obvious why the spy’s transformation has appealed to conservative reviewers. However, some of the conservative accolades the film received make less sense. For instance, one conservative National Review critic wrote hopefully that this was ‘a film that will be remembered longer than East Germany itself’,18 an idea that has worrying implications for collective memory from any political viewpoint. While true that the film does not depict the end of East Germany with any ambivalence or grief, it is also alarming to think that regimes such as the SED and Stasi could simply be forgotten. From an aesthetic point of view, Marco Abel argues that the film stays true to conventional narrative forms, perpetuating an unmistakably conservative ‘politics of the image’.19 Making the case for its conservative aesthetic, the film depicts an almost entirely ‘evil’ GDR, shown in grim, dark colours and devoid of any sense of joy, so that it can be read as reflecting well on the Western system as superior and more aesthetically pleasing even. Abel also groups The Lives of Others among other heritage films that use dramatic genres and authentic settings to emphasise Germany’s difficult twentieth century in a manner reflecting ‘the increasing tendency for Germans to view themselves as a nation and a people whose suffering during the Second World War has been unduly ignored’.20 The trend in the 1990s and 2000s for Germans to assert the right to see themselves as

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victims of the events of the 1930s and 1940s was certainly associated with German conservatism.21 However, a narrative about Germans as victims is not the film’s primary interest. For many viewers, it depicted a merciful end to the Cold War-era division in Germany and in the world more broadly. It also brought the darkest aspects of Stasi surveillance into view for the first time among a broad, international audience, and with admirable attention to detail, both in its formal elements and its plot.

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2 The Authenticity of a Very Hollywood German Melodrama In Germany, ways of reading the film mapped onto existing, often conflicting ways of remembering East Germany in relation to longer twentieth-century political history. Hence, in the years after its release, a debate emerged among German publics, critics and historians concerning the historical authenticity with which the film portrayed the Stasi in its chosen form of a heritage drama. The category of ‘heritage drama’ implies that the film deploys costumes and settings dating from or invoking the historical era in which it is set. Successful heritage films of the time were set in the Nazi dictatorship: for instance, Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999), Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004) and The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2007). The style of The Lives of Others inevitably linked it to these dramas, risking an erasure of important political and historical differences between East Germany and the Nazi regime. Timothy Garton Ash has written of ‘Germany’s festering half-rhyme’,22 Nazi–Stasi, resulting from the kind of contraction common in vernacular German that aims to reduce the long titles of officialdom to more manageable sounds. Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) received the shorthand term ‘Nazi’, and the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security) became known as the Stasi. The similar sounds have indeed produced a psychological echo between the two very different regimes that reigned in Germany’s difficult twentieth century. To elide these regimes risks more than a linguistic reduction because it erases the political differences and the lived experiences of the two dictatorships.

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Michael Minden writes that there were considerable differences between the ‘death-obsessed Third Reich’ and the GDR’s admittedly oppressive regime that nonetheless showed ‘a theoretical concern for the welfare of the whole human race’.23 Mary Fulbrook also rejects the trend of historical elision, arguing that comparing the two regimes and labelling both ‘totalitarian’ ‘served the Cold War purpose of conflating dictatorships of the Right and the Left under a common global label: the Soviet Union under Stalin and Germany under Hitler could be equated and castigated with scholarly impunity’.24 Given the differences between the Nazi and SED dictatorships, authenticity was understandably the most significant category through which the film was received and critiqued in Germany. This reflected a need for representations of the past that do justice to victims as well as making beautiful cinema. Accordingly, the praise the film received on its release in Germany focused chiefly on its apparently authentic portrayal of life in the GDR. It is true that in making the film, von Donnersmarck mobilised a number of techniques to create a strong effect of authenticity: for instance, using contemporaneous music by East German musicians including Kurt Demmler. We also see authentic East German cars (including the iconic Trabant) and uniforms, and it was filmed at certain original sites. The interrogation that opens the film was shot in the Stasi’s former headquarters at Normannenstrasse, now the Stasi Museum. The use of authentic GDR artefacts and original sites lends the film an almost documentary quality. Joachim Gauck, the former Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files, praised the film in an article in Stern (a left-liberal, weekly current affairs magazine) titled ‘Ja, so war es!’ (‘Yes, that’s how it was!’),25 and his successor, Marianne Birthler, granted von Donnersmarck permission to film in the archives. Critics went on to view the film positively, praising it for depicting the ‘Stasi without Spreewald gherkins’,26 a reference that positions The Lives of Others as a corrective to the sentimental Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) which Good Bye, Lenin! was seen

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to display.27 In that film, the jar of gherkins central to the tragicomic plot gave regional viewers a visual and olfactory reminder of the lost days of the GDR. It is not that The Lives of Others foregoes vintage objects. Rather, the authentic artefacts used in von Donnersmarck’s film accompany a weightier, more serious plot. Newspapers, cars and uniforms from the GDR are not employed in The Lives of Others to convey a complicated sense of loss for the former East, a loss which is certainly still felt among viewers who lived in the GDR and was captured with more nuance in the complex and highly acclaimed Good Bye, Lenin! Rather, these archival objects lend an apparently unarguable authority to the film’s depiction of the East as an extremely oppressive setting. Political figures and educators took up the cue, given by the markers of authenticity that appear in the film, to assess it in terms of historical accuracy. Approving words came from the former vicechancellor of Germany, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who said, ‘This film is coming at precisely the right time, giving voice to the victims.’28 Conservative politician Friedbert Pflüger stressed the pedagogical significance of von Donnersmarck’s film and called for it to be used in classrooms.29 Indeed, it has been utilised in German schools to teach a generation who never experienced Germany’s division about conditions in the former East. The pedagogical uses of the film stressed its realistic depiction of East Germany. For instance, Berit Eichler’s workbook for school and university teachers praised the way in which the characters’ consciences and actions conflict with one another ‘in a painfully realistic manner’.30 However, not all viewers were convinced by the authenticity of the film’s portrayal of the Stasi or life in the GDR. Notably, its opening prison scenes were not shot in the former interrogation prison, Hohenschönhausen, as listed in the intertitles, due to a dispute over authenticity. Hubertus Knabe, historian and the director of the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, refused von Donnersmarck’s request to shoot there. Knabe wrote that the events portrayed in the film were historically impossible, and more, that they were insulting

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to survivors of the regime. He justified these views by stating that such a transformation as Wiesler undergoes, from a spy to an ally, never happened, and indeed would not have been possible in the GDR. He reminds viewers of the film to think about ‘the real victims, who were tormented by a dictatorship’, when we are admiring its unbelievable hero.31 On a technical level, it is true that Wiesler’s spying operation proceeds in an entirely inauthentic manner. A Stasi spy would never have been stationed in the attics above East German celebrities’ apartments. The Stasi did not need to set up such high-tech operations in people’s homes because their network of informants provided ample verbal and written reports on victims. Furthermore, no officer would have had the power to work alone and obfuscate the Stasi’s mission so individually as Wiesler does in the film. There is a level of inauthenticity, too, in the centrality of a woman informant to the plot, in the shape of Sieland. Only 15 per cent of unofficial Stasi informants were women,32 and apart from the allegations about Gröllmann spying on Mühe, there are no recorded cases in which women were accused of having spied on their partners. Several men were proven to have done so, however. Sieland’s IM status in the film is thus not historically representative. The making of the film by a West German-Austrian director, who was born into an aristocratic family and benefited from a privileged international education, including study at the University of Oxford, further undermined the film’s authenticity. Von Donnersmarck’s parents came from Eastern Pomerania (now part of Poland) and left for the West before the GDR was founded. Although, following the film’s release, he hinted to the press that his family had extensive experience of Stasi surveillance, including strip searches, he clarified in a lecture in 2008 that ‘we were pretty much just driving through’.33 The film’s success thus continued the trend identified by Christoph Dieckmann, in which Germany’s socialist past was narrated by West Germans and not by those with any meaningful experience of spending time in the GDR.34

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The authenticity debate looked rather different from abroad, and film scholars have convincingly argued that the film does not need to be historically accurate to achieve its powerful effects. Owen Evans discusses its ‘authenticity of affect’, an emotional resonance which is persuasive to the viewer ‘[i]rrespective of the film’s historical accuracy’.35 Explaining his idea of affective authenticity, Evans argues that viewers experience the GDR as a felt reality rather than seeking documentary truth in the film. Taking another angle, Hodgin convincingly argues that more important than historical authenticity is the film’s manner of mirroring ideological divides that have continued after unification. He provocatively suggests that its depiction of the East German past is less pertinent than reading it in terms of ‘the present’s relationship to that past’,36 a valid assessment given the politics of the film’s reception. Moreover, that past is presented through the techniques of classic film melodrama. This is a very Hollywood film mode in which historical accuracy comes second to provoking affective responses. The mode of melodrama can include drama, romance and thriller, all genres in which plot and characterisation are devised to appeal strongly to the audience’s emotions.37 So too are melodrama’s soundtracks: the term ‘melo-drama’ derives from the Greek melos (music) and drama (action), an etymology telling for the way these films’ soundtracks both reflect and induce emotions relating to events in the plot. Melodrama’s narratives play out in domestic, albeit not apolitical, settings and they often include a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, a battle which, as Langford notes, is ‘usually waged over the symbolic terrain of an innocent woman or child’.38 The conflict concludes with the sacrifice of one such ‘innocent’ character, a death whose tragedy is assuaged by some degree of conflict resolution, permitting a final restoration of order. In The Lives of Others, a domestic setting provides the backdrop to a highly political drama. Tensions arising from the drama are resolved, but not without tragedy, as the heroine dies, providing a very bitter closure indeed both for her lover and for

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the spy who has been watching over them. Also true to the melodramatic mode, the action is accompanied by an emotionally rousing musical score composed by Gabriel Yared and Stéphane Moucha. The score plays an important diegetic role, moreover, as listening to music is one of the artistic encounters that effects Wiesler’s transformation. Melodrama’s plots are often triangular, involving a hero such as Dreyman, a villain (in this case the Stasi provides several, with Wiesler as the central villain who is redeemed) and a tragic heroine. Von Donnersmarck’s film does not deviate from melodrama’s classic character typology, with triangulations emerging between Wiesler and the artist couple, as well as between the couple and Minister Hempf, who is abusing Sieland. Its characterisation remains bounded by these classic categories, as a result simplifying the film’s representation of how East Germans experienced the Stasi’s surveillance. All these features make the film easily consumable, and Jaimey Fisher argues that its use of the conventions of Hollywood melodrama leads it in places to ‘foreclose[s] potentially political moments’.39 However, melodrama also has a long history outside Hollywood, into which more progressive politics are encoded. Beyond Hollywood melodrama, the film also draws on the rich history of the mode in German film. The first German melodramas, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), offered escapism from the pressures of modernity, as well as the opportunity to feel that order was being restored after World War I, in which the individual could belong to a broader community.40 Early melodrama was not interrupted by modernist aesthetic features that would remind viewers of the technological atrocities of the war. And yet these were not apolitical films. Rather, the political pressures they depicted were disguised as personal ones. Given this history, a style of melodrama developed – for instance, in La Habañera (1937) by Detlev Sierck (who later worked in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk) – that disguised political topics in personal storylines and settings. This historical double agency of

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melodrama, as a disguised political mode, also holds true for von Donnersmarck’s film, in which the characters must find ways of being personally happy, even as they struggle to exist amid the intense surveillance and widespread suspicion of the late GDR years.

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3 Depicting the Stasi’s Surveillance Regime Von Donnersmarck’s film depicts the milieu of Stasi surveillance in the 1980s, the spy organisation’s historical high point. The East German regime exhibited a degree of liberalism in the 1970s, but the 1980s were a much more repressive era. To reflect the lived experience of this historical period, the film uses cinematography, mise en scène and editing to portray scenarios of pressure and fear for both Stasi spies and their surveillance subjects. It also highlights the subtler aspects of the GDR’s surveillance regime, which included pressures to perform and to self-police as ‘good’ citizens. These behaviours were crucial in a state where citizens’ actions were vulnerable to constant and hidden scrutiny. The depiction of the Stasi is one of the film’s most persuasive elements and it makes clear how the secret police’s codes of behaviour, for spies and victims alike, were reproduced and perfected. To explore this extraordinary surveillance regime, the film follows Stasi captain Wiesler in his work. When the film begins, Wiesler is stuck in the unhappy status of a middle-ranking Stasi officer. Accordingly, the episodes in which he appears insist on drab colours, achieved through cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski’s sombre colour palette that dwells persistently in browns, greys, and desaturated yellows and greens. Wiesler’s character is also accompanied on screen by an array of now outdated technological devices, put there to remind viewers of the GDR’s status as a dehumanising surveillance regime. As a result of these aesthetic choices, critics have read Wiesler himself as a technological device. Rather than a man, for Eva Horn he is a ‘mere listening device’,41 while for John Hamilton, he is ‘yet another instrument of technology, as if the human form were but a prosthetic extension of the system … an inhuman utensil’.42 These analyses rightly observe how inhumanity and lack of individuality are encoded into Wiesler’s characterisation.

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In the opening scene, we meet Wiesler in a dual role as spy and teacher, training recruits at the Stasi’s officer training college, the Juristische Hochschule (Academy of Law; JHS) in Potsdam. The scene consists of a tightly cut montage, alternating between a sequence of Wiesler interrogating a prisoner, and one of him replaying the interrogation on a reel-to-reel recorder as material for his lecture on interrogation techniques. This opening montage introduces the viewer to the Stasi’s operations. Through them, the GDR is shown as an undemocratic regime, which locks away and interrogates its own citizens as enemies of socialism. And this exercise of power is carried out, we learn, through the subjection of individuals to dehumanising power. In the first spoken line of the script, attention is drawn to the control of the prisoner’s body. He is instructed: ‘Stand still. Eyes to the floor.’ During the interrogation, he must sit with his hands under his thighs. This is so that his sweat can be absorbed into a piece of fabric covering the chair, which will be kept for the Stasi’s sniffer dogs. Emphasising the inhumanity with which the regime treated its subjects, Wiesler refers to the prisoner throughout the dual scene by his number, 227, not by his name. In this opening scene, a considered use of lighting further underscores the subjection of the prisoner. In a manner true to the techniques employed by the historical Stasi, the lighting in the interrogation room is designed to assert the power of the institution over the individual. Wiesler is backlit and so obscured in partial darkness, while the prisoner is visible in the full glare of the window’s light. As darkness sets in, the prisoner is then lit by a harsh yellow lamp. The lighting changes rapidly throughout the scene, and this accelerated realism conveys how long the interrogation lasts without the prisoner ever being permitted to sleep. The opening scene shows the Stasi setting up conditions in which power is performed by one subject and wielded over another. This is achieved, in part, through the positioning of bodies in relation to light and in postures of authority or subordination. The exercise of power also demands that the prisoner perform his trustworthiness,

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Interrogation as theatre in the film’s accelerated realism

thus creating the effect of the interrogation prison as theatre. The prisoner is being questioned about an illegal plan to escape from the GDR. Wiesler presses him to keep repeating his account of events. Foreshadowing the central theme of theatre and performance in the remainder of the film, the prisoner has to produce a believable, authentic performance in order to be set free. If a correct performance is key to the prisoner’s fate, it is one in which the randomness of individuality is subsumed into the Stasi’s rigorously codified ideas about behaviour. Wiesler explains, in the simultaneous scene taking place in the lecture theatre, that the man’s guilt will be assessed according to the tone in which he delivers each answer. If he gets more irate, he is innocent and angry at the injustice of his detainment. But if he becomes calmer, he is guilty. Then, if the

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same prisoner repeats the same story using the exact same words, he will be judged to have learnt them as a performance. As Wiesler points out to his students, the prisoner in question does not say das Gleiche (‘the same thing’) but rather dasselbe (‘the very same thing, in the same words’). Therefore, his answers are viewed as a preprepared performance, and he is judged to be lying. Too faithful a repetition undermines the prisoner’s credibility, both in the eyes of the Stasi and for viewers of the film, who notice during the scene that the prisoner’s wording does indeed remain the same. By the Stasi’s horrifying logic, which the film unwittingly seems to reproduce here, it is not an individual act that will save the prisoner, but rather an adherence to a code of rules according to which the Stasi believed all subjects would speak and behave – and even worse, a code of which the prisoner is not aware. As for the class of Stasi officers, they too must perform to a strict code of conduct, and they are being trained consciously in that code as they listen to the recording and the lecture. Their education at the JHS teaches them to style themselves as future Stasi agents and they will need to behave according to the rules if they want to remain on the right side of the interrogation table. Rebellious recruits risk a mark against their name, as we see when Benedikt Lehmann, a student who makes the mistake of questioning the inhumanity of the interrogation technique, has a blue cross marked on the register that maps the designated seats of each trainee in the lecture theatre. Wiesler is shown wielding power here over Lehmann’s future, making a note of his problematically individual way of thinking that risks influencing the recruits around him. Wiesler himself is subject to the Stasi’s strict rules of behaviour, too, albeit a different performance code compared to those demanded of the prisoner and of trainee officers. Still, he is tasked with teaching centralised Stasi guidelines, and his own performance is subject to surveillance. The latter becomes clear when his commanding officer Grubitz appears in a corner of the lecture hall, claps demonstratively and praises the lecture, before inviting Wiesler to the theatre, where

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Stasi codes of conduct are learnt in a carefully-mapped lecture theatre

there is more spying – and more performing – to be done. The end of the opening sequence raises the question: who are the real perpetrators if Wiesler is also a victim of surveillance? In this sense, the scene recalls philosopher Michel Foucault’s writing on the Panopticon, the 1785 prison design by British social reformer Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon was Bentham’s blueprint for an inspection house in which inmates in a circular architecture of cells could be seen at any time by a guard in a central watchtower. The possibility of constant vision ensured ‘good’ behaviour. More than a prison design, the Panopticon was adaptable for the architecture of asylums, workhouses, factories and schools: all environments where self-policing was meant to improve the behaviour of their occupants. Bentham died frustrated at the failure

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Panopticon: Or the Inspection-House. Architectural drawing by Willey Reveley (1760–99)

of his project, through which he had hoped to contribute more humane alternatives to punishing prisoners by execution. However, Foucault’s writing in the mid-twentieth century has ensured the design lives on, in theories of surveillance, until the present day. Foucault’s account of the Panopticon underscores how the prisoner kept in its radial cell design would self-police because they could not know when they were being observed. The fact that there could be an audience meant the prisoner must continually demonstrate that their conduct was improving. The theatrical connotations of the prisoner having an audience, in the form of the guard, are significant. Foucault saw the Panopticon’s solitary confinement cells as constituting ‘so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible’.43 He also emphasised a complicating aspect of performance in the new humanist prison design. Not only the prisoner but also the guard had to perform to constant surveillance, so that panopticism is ‘a machine

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in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised’.44 The effect, in Foucault’s view, is not the formation of an ideal humanitarian society, free from crime and the need for excessive punishment, such as Bentham envisaged. Instead, it creates a community fraught with suspicion, in which both individual freedom and the security of the group can only be very limited. This is precisely the high-performance surveillance society von Donnersmarck’s film depicts. The pressure on the characters in the film’s opening scene, to perform to strict codes of conduct, is exemplified by a central prop, in the form of the reel-to-reel recorder. The interrogation is not just happening between two individuals: it is recorded so it can be projected into the lecture theatre. The reel will also be stored

Reproducing control through technology: the reel-to-reel as overdetermined symbol

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in the Stasi’s archive. The reel-to-reel machine is a technology of authentication, archiving the interview’s content, at the same time as providing material with which to train the next generation of interrogators. The recorder thus symbolises multiple levels of surveillance, and this overdetermination is accentuated by the repetition of images of the recorder at a distance and in close-up, conveying the importance of this technology of control. The Stasi’s treatment of all its agents and prisoners is shown from the beginning of the film operating on the basis of categories and codes, rather than individuality. Even though Wiesler’s prisoner is expected to give an individualised account of events, there is still a code of permissible behaviour he needs to conform to, whether he knows it or not. As we have seen, if he delivers his account too repetitively, he must be a liar because it is assumed all liars are reproducing a script. In this way, the scene recalls the horrifying determinism of Kafka’s modernist fictions: for instance, in The Trial (1925), any behaviour on the part of protagonist Josef K. can be incriminating and will be construed – indeed already has been construed – as proving his guilt. Meanwhile, if the trainee asks challenging questions about the inhumanity of the interrogation technique, then he must be an unsuitable future Stasi officer. The opening scene thus shows the Stasi analysing everybody who comes into its midst, breaking down human complexity into simplified categories. These details in the film reflect the historical reality, in which the Stasi categorised individuals as types in order to surveil them more systematically. This is borne out in the historical archive of Stasi files, which contains not only individual spy files but also theoretical handbooks and documents revealing the ministry’s belief that human behaviour could be codified and controlled according to Pavlovian behavioural models.45 The records show the Stasi carrying out behavioural analyses of its detainees, feeding into its belief that human subjects would function according to a set of machine-like patterns, rather than acting in random, distinct ways. Officers of the

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historical Stasi were required to produce an arrest document that delivered ‘the complete image of the personality of the accused’,46 an image gained through interrogation and the extrapolation of behavioural patterns from ‘documents about the behaviour of the accused in other areas of life’.47 Information about a person’s religious beliefs, family dynamics and behaviour in school could apparently provide insight into their likely guilt or loyalty and future conduct. Similar techniques were applied, too, in the recruitment and ongoing observation of IMs;48 indeed, becoming an IM was a possible pathway for detainees hoping to improve their situation. When his film was released, von Donnersmarck emphasised the extensive research he had conducted into the Stasi, its internal workings and surveillance operations in wider East German society. There is indeed evidence of this research in a short but crucial scene two-thirds of the way through the film, when Wiesler visits Grubitz’s office. Wiesler is there to request that his night-shift colleague be removed, so he can have sole control over the Lazlo operation. But first Grubitz stops Wiesler to confide in him about a PhD project he has recently supervised in his new role as professor at the JHS. Grubitz is keen to talk about his student’s work, which sorts some of the Stasi’s core subjects of surveillance – authors, intellectuals and artists – into five ‘character profiles’ to predict which modes of policing and punishment will most effectively keep them in line. The dissertation’s argument is that there are distinct psychological categories of artistic temperament, all of which can be catalogued and treated with surveillance methods tailored to each type. Grubitz’s student has found that Dreyman, for example, is a ‘Type 4: hysterical anthropocentric’, who thrives on having an audience. He should therefore be kept in isolation and under no circumstances brought to a trial, in which his performance-prone character would thrive. Grubitz laughs with satisfaction at what he calls the ‘scientificsounding’ thesis. He is happy, too, that the research proves how the technique of isolating artists in Stasi prisons has been effective in stopping them painting or writing entirely after their release.

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Wiesler learns more about the Stasi’s system of types

The scene illustrates, with archival detail, how accurately von Donnersmarck portrays the Stasi’s project of control through categorisation. The topic of this fictional PhD thesis is true to the kind of material covered in the dissertations submitted at the historical JHS. The documented practices of the Stasi are also echoed in the film script’s tendency to mark, very clearly, hierarchical practices of naming. Wiesler’s first name ‘Gerd’ is never used by any character in the film. However, viewers are persistently reminded of his code name, HGW XX/7, which is seen repeatedly printed on Stasi documents, as well as in Dreyman’s novel and in the subtitles written for the film’s international audience. In the script, moreover, all the male Stasi officers and the artists, even side characters who just speak once, are given ranks as well as their names. Even junior

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Stasi officer Axel Stigler, who makes the mistake of telling a joke in the staff canteen at the expense of the leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, is named along with his rank in the printed film script. By accompanying each man’s name with a rank or position, the script reflects the tendency of the historical Stasi to subsume individual identity into bureaucratically defined roles. By contrast to the men in the film, with the exception of ChristaMaria Sieland, women characters are deprived of full names and only described with reference to their appearance and relationship to men. A neighbour is merely Frau (Mrs) Meinecke, and a sex worker who visits Wiesler is not named at all, referenced in the script only as ‘prostitute’. Dreyman’s new partner at the end of the film has a first name, Tamara, which is only printed in the script, along with directions describing her age (mid-thirties) and appearance, including her sequinned dress, haircut ‘à l’égyptienne’ and admiring gaze, which she directs at Dreyman as his play is premiered in the Federal Republic. Although frustrating for the feminist viewer of the film, this technique is nevertheless effective in reflecting the masculinist bias of the historical Stasi, which was an outlier to the otherwise relatively progressive gender politics of the GDR. The result of this naming practice employed for male characters, all of whom receive a rank of some kind, and the simultaneous reduction of women characters to basic categories is that viewers encounter its cast of characters as types, not individuals. Lieutenant Grubitz embodies the Stasi’s bureaucratic cynicism and the preening ambition of its commanding officers. SED Minister Hempf symbolises the country’s descent into personally motivated sleaze. An additional effect of the typological characterisation in the film is that Wiesler is shown embedded within a hierarchy of men who work and take meals together but otherwise live without personal meaning, never finding a space for being, away from the system of watchers and watched. Wiesler, however, does seek a space outside that surveillance system, and he shows a capacity for movement that is suggested

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by his own name, which translates as ‘weasel-er’. The weasel is a creature that moves up, down and around a given space and can get into and out of tight corners. Given the severity and rigidity of the surveillance system Wiesler eventually subverts, his weaselly name is not pejorative. Rather, the qualities of the weasel are valorised in his characterisation, with his namesake suggesting a mobile individuality. As weasel, Wiesler has the potential to wriggle out of the GDR’s system of categorised types and highly surveilled conformity and find a better way of being.

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4 The ‘Good’ Spy of East Berlin: Captain Gerd Wiesler Wiesler’s transformation provides the turning point in the film’s plot. In part, it is the surveillance operation itself that leads Wiesler to become a double agent and grasp his own, independent agency to protect the artists over whom he is keeping an increasingly benevolent watch. Before this, Wiesler embodies the Stasi’s tendency to reduce individuals to types, and we learn that there are few pleasures in his life. Mostly, the film depicts him at work in his uniform, and there are only two very brief scenes capturing Wiesler’s private life. The first shows that he lives in a forbiddingly high tower block, where he is seen eating an unappetising dish of pasta with tomato puree while watching state television. In a second scene, Wiesler receives a visit from a sex worker, who cannot stay as long as he would like. Here, the camera remains fixed within Wiesler’s unappealingly yellow living space, not leaving with the woman, whose work involves her visiting Stasi clients in multiple apartments within the same tower block. Wiesler’s characterisation is effectively conveyed by cinematography. In the two short scenes in his apartment, the camera’s stasis creates an effect that Wise persuasively analyses as being ‘more like a surveillance camera than the smooth movements we associate with modern filmmaking’.49 The lack of camera movement suggests Wiesler is stuck, even in his own private space. It also indicates his initial inability to be anything other than entrenched in the categories defining the Stasi’s culture. Through the remarkable stillness of the camera in the pre-transformation scenes, Wiesler is represented as living a half-life, only coming into movement when he is watching the lives of his surveillance subjects. More movement comes into Wiesler’s life when he begins to spy on the artist couple. In the film’s second scene, set in the

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A professional and yet increasingly spellbound gaze

theatre, Wiesler sees Dreyman and Sieland for the first time. He sits transfixed, his gaze conveying a mixture of professional and increasingly spellbound spectatorship, as he gets a first glimpse of these creative figures both on stage and in the wings. Wiesler watches as the playwright and the actress kiss off stage, and, as his gaze moves around the theatre, his way of looking shifts from that of the professional spy to rapt, tearful onlooker. Along with Wiesler’s gaze, the camera becomes more mobile in the theatre scene, too. Seeing the artists prompts Wiesler to propose to Grubitz that he should lead a surveillance operation against Dreyman. The optics of motion, which speed up when Wiesler encounters Dreyman and Sieland, suggest he is not simply proposing the operation out of concern for the conformity of the arts in the GDR. Rather, confronted with these characters, his attitude visibly begins to change, as he becomes drawn to a new way of being that has more life and movement in it. As the surveillance operation progresses, more movement becomes possible, and not just for Wiesler’s gaze. Up in the attic, he draws a precise plan of Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment on the floor in chalk. While listening to their conversations, Wiesler then walks as if from room to room; this vicarious mobility permits him to imitate the inhabitants of the apartment below with his whole body.Wiesler’s mobility continues to increase throughout the operation, and at

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Vicarious mobility

one key moment, he leaves the apartment and walks to a bar on the corner nearby. Sieland enters the bar, too, serendipitously allowing Wiesler to speak to her. The final moments in the film see him moving around in unified Berlin, no longer stuck in his fixed place in the Stasi’s hierarchy, and free now to do whatever he wants. Wiesler’s life is changed when he encounters the lives of people who are so other to him. Their example persuades him that there is a better way to live than in the stifling Stasi bureaucracy. The notion of ‘others’ in the title is instructive in this regard. The ‘others’ are first and foremost the artists who are so different to Wiesler, and who inspire his transformation during the surveillance operation. In a broader context, the ‘other’ of continental philosophy has evoked an ethical encounter, or a meeting of differing subjectivities, as in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and more recently, Judith Butler.50 Encountering the ‘other’ can lead to recognition of a subjectivity that is different, allowing the self to be imprinted by that recognition, and admitting to the vulnerability and shared humanity that come with it. We certainly see such a positive ‘othering’ happening, as Wiesler encounters people who are radically different to him. He finds, despite or even because of this difference, that he wants to be more like them, with all their vulnerability and complexity, and he finally decides to protect them. A third meaning of ‘other’ in the film can be located

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in the Stasi’s psychological power as a big ‘Other’. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the big Other represents the realm of the ‘symbolic’: embodying law, patriarchy and other unbeatable forces that define the self.51 In the film, the Stasi organisation is a big Other, wielding its overwhelming power that Wiesler finally decides to subvert. The most central philosophical background to Wiesler’s rejection of the Stasi’s regime, however, is the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. Wiesler comes to embody values dating from the influential intellectual and philosophical movement of mideighteenth-century Europe, and his journey reflects Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy of the individual, who liberates himself (this philosophy indeed referred to a male, European subjectivity) from oppression to express his own true and singular personality.52 He also begins to experience a more private, individual life, separate from the role of the spy who only functions in the interest of the state as collective. In his influential essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Immanuel Kant emphasised a distinction between public and private spheres.53 In the private sphere, the individual is not subjected to the will of princes, governments or gods. Instead, the Enlightenment subject is one who defines their own life and develops a sense of agency separate from intrusion by state or society. Moreover, the German Enlightenment espoused the notion of a division between Macht and Geist (‘power’ and ‘spirit’), a necessary gap between government, and art and philosophy, so that the latter spheres could criticise bodies of power and thus shape a more moral order. Enlightenment values have persisted into contemporary assumptions about individuality and about capitalism as fostering a liberal, democratic social order. As an effect, these values are likely to be so familiar to viewers of the film in global North contexts that they will be unconsciously taken as universal and so appear inarguable. Art was key to the German Enlightenment tradition, which saw literature and other arts as having morally improving effects. In Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767), he wrote that the arts should entertain and educate in equal measure. Lessing quotes Horace, who

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defined the aims of poetry as being ‘to instruct and to delight’.54 Schiller built upon Lessing’s thinking, arguing that the emotions are crucial to such an aesthetic education, and he saw theatre as a ‘moral institution’, permitting a Bildung or education of the individual watching a play, not only through its aesthetic and moral qualities, but also the feelings it invokes.55 It is fitting, therefore, that it is in the theatre that Wiesler first sees the people whose example changes his life. Like the Enlightenment subject of the eighteenth century, Wiesler’s liberation is associated with art forms that give rise to his moral and emotional education. Wiesler’s encounter with art is depicted as central to his transformation into a self-defining individual with his own ethical sensibilities. In the scene immediately after the sex worker’s visit,

The temptation of literature … and of writing

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he enters the artists’ apartment and the change in him begins. As his aesthetic and moral awareness are shown to develop, further cinematographic decisions and a deft use of editing emphasise the subtlety of the role art plays in Wiesler’s conversion. The main point of this scene is to show Wiesler stealing a volume of Brecht’s poetry from Dreyman’s desk. But a shot/reverse shot sees Wiesler zone in on the desk and the camera’s gaze, representing his point of view, is caught by the appealing form of Dreyman’s pen. The pen rests at an angle as if waiting to be picked up and to carry on writing in the hand of a new owner. The next scene shows Wiesler at home, where he reads the opening stanza of Brecht’s famous lyric poem of 1920, ‘Remembering Marie A.’: It was a day in that blue month September Silent beneath the plum trees’ slender shade I held her there My love, so pale and silent As if she were a dream that must not fade Above us in the shining summer heaven There was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon It was quite white and very high above us Then I looked up And found that it had gone.56

The poem invokes the loss of love when the memory of it fades; in its final stanza, the lyric voice remembers a kiss, but cannot recall the former lover’s face. Overlaid with a moving musical score, the poem sequence suggests Wiesler is about to recover some long-lost memory of love and, by extension, that his full sense of humanity will now return. The camera takes up a fully vertical perspective, evocative of gods or angels, then zooms in on Wiesler’s face. The angle and zoom increase the intensity of the scene as he reads Brecht’s poem, lending

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A poetic transformation

his act of reading the qualities of a religious conversion. One side of Wiesler’s face is illuminated as if reading the poetry has given him access to a new Enlightened perspective. Hamilton notes that it is Dreyman’s voice we then hear in voiceover reading the text aloud.57 These camera and lighting decisions, along with the Dreyman voiceover, produce a sense of Wiesler coming closer to Dreyman’s sensibilities. Dreyman seems to be reminding the spy that love is possible, that by loving him or loving Dreyman and Sieland as a couple, Wiesler can come to a better way of being. Soon after the Brecht-reading sequence, Wiesler’s aesthetic education is completed when he hears Dreyman playing the piano downstairs. The sequence comprises another tight montage, which cuts between just two shots. The first is of Dreyman performing the ‘Sonata for a Good Man’, original music written for the film by Yared and Moucha. In the diegesis, the sonata was a birthday gift from blacklisted director Jerska to Dreyman. Wiesler has just heard Dreyman take a phone call and discover that Jerska has committed suicide. Dreyman goes to the piano and plays the sonata, with Sieland standing behind him and Wiesler listening upstairs. In the footage of Wiesler, we see him transfixed by the musical performance. Cinematography is as important as ever here, and the camera makes a circular movement in both shots so that it

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Empathy in what looks like a single shot

effectively draws two semicircles, bringing the artists and Wiesler into a single space, that of the musical performance. The effect is one of seamlessness, and the acting direction here calls for static poses, so that viewers see Dreyman playing the piano, with Sieland’s hand in a stereotypically feminine, supportive position on his shoulder. The circle is completed by the image of Wiesler, who sits still as his face moves from neutral attention to tearful absorption. Mühe’s impressive acting conveys a deep sense of wonder, while the music is transmitted over the technological medium of the wiretaps into his recording equipment upstairs. Not a distantiating equipment, the mediating machinery brings the spy closer to the people below. In fact, there is no sense of irony in the sequence. Instead, after he has finished playing, Dreyman asks Sieland: ‘Can anyone who has

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heard this music – I mean truly heard it – really be a bad person?’ Dreyman is citing a famous anecdote, which states that Lenin could not bear to listen to Beethoven’s Sonata No. 23, the Appassionata, for fear that it would weaken his resolve for the revolution ahead. Von Donnersmarck has spoken in an interview about hearing the anecdote, and recalled: I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening in to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him.58

Undergoing a change such as Lenin foresaw, Wiesler is visibly transformed by listening to the music and begins from this point on to resist the regime. For Lenin, listening to the music would make him ‘bad’, in the sense that it would weaken his resolve for the revolution to come. But for Wiesler, it makes him ‘good’, turning him against the East German regime in its late, distinctly un-revolutionary years and towards individual attachments against which Lenin wished to defend his mind. Soon after this decisive scene, Dreyman begins his work on the report on GDR suicides, planning to smuggle it into the West for publication. Wiesler, in turn, falsifies his reports on Dreyman, protecting him from state interference by claiming he is simply working on a new play. In line with Enlightenment thinking about the improving function of the arts, Wiesler becomes freer and more human, able to judge for himself how problematic the regime is, and to imagine a better world through the lens of the lives and art he encounters. Furthermore, in an apotheosis of the Enlightenment values that accord such high status to art, Wiesler’s transformation is complete when he becomes an artist in his own right. In order to cover up Dreyman’s critical writing project, Wiesler composes a summary of the play he claims Dreyman is writing to celebrate the GDR’s fortieth anniversary, repeating the lie Dreyman

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has told Sieland to prevent her knowing about the incriminating Spiegel report. The two characters are thus connected from that moment by an ethical bond, transcending Dreyman’s relationship with Sieland. As in the scene where Dreyman plays the piano sonata, camerawork and editing portray the two male characters coming closer together. The camera is again set into a circular motion, and it glides around the characters in their two spaces. At this point, they even switch roles: Dreyman works on a factual report now while Wiesler writes fiction for the Stasi files. The writing sequence is accompanied by brisk and uplifting music. Meanwhile, the edit does all it can to hide the cut between the two shots, and then intersperses them with a third sequence of Dreyman sitting at the same desk and in the same lighting, reading

The writing montage shows the two characters exchanging roles

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the finished report aloud to his trusted friends. This third sequence in the montage removes any ambivalence that might attach to the act of creation. The two writers seem to experience no blocks, false starts or failures; instead, the writing process appears linear and as leading triumphantly to a finished product. The depiction of Wiesler’s transformation is effective on many levels. For a start, it is convincing that anybody would want to get away from the dehumanising regime of Stasi surveillance. Equally convincing is the compassion he develops, which feels intuitive given the danger Dreyman and Sieland are in. The recognition Wiesler gains at the end of the film, in the form of the dedication in Dreyman’s book, seems a just reward, too, since he has learnt over the course of his transformation to recognise the value of art. However, several contradictions in the film render his process of becoming-individual problematic. As explored in Chapter 2, the historical authenticity of the transformation is doubtful. It also brings with it an ethical problem, in that the transformation requires surveillance itself to take on a positive function in the plot. It is surveillance that enables Wiesler to make the connection with others that initiates his conversion. The connection takes place via wiretapping and involves him listening in on the lovers’ conversations and even sexual relationship. When he breaks into their flat, before stealing the Brecht poems, he spends a moment caressing their bedsheets. This gesture indicates how surveillance has become personal for Wiesler in a way that is ethically questionable, no matter how transformative his personalised mission becomes. The transformative function of surveillance in the plot means the film risks endorsing it as a catalyst for ethical change. Surveillance is thus construed here as tolerable if it operates on a private level to produce individual decisions that resist a corrupt regime. More problematic still, the role played by surveillance in his transformation also makes it questionable how truly independent the agency Wiesler gains is. Is he becoming more individual, or is he merely switching from conformity with the Stasi to imitating the

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behaviours espoused by the subjects of his surveillance? If the latter, we need to ask whether it is really individuality that Wiesler gains through observation, or whether he is carrying out a kind of mimicry. If he can only free himself through the surveillance of others, and if he is overpowered by his feelings for them, his sense of agency must remain dependent on whichever influence is most powerful at a given time. A further, philosophical problem arises as the film unfolds to show Wiesler failing to enjoy the greater self-expression of the individual he appears to become. Despite the brief experience of artistic expression, when he writes the summary of the decoy play, Wiesler becomes confined to a secret double life, and he lacks any further outlet for expression. Contrary to the lives of Dreyman and Sieland, lived in complexity and fullness, and shared with others, he must act out a secret duality: Stasi officer on the outside and developing individual on the inside. His only reward for rebellion is to be relegated to a lowlier role in the Stasi organisation. Though he cannot prove it, after the search of the artists’ apartment, Grubitz knows Wiesler has been tricking his superiors. He therefore has him demoted and sent to work in a letter-sorting station, opening post for higher-ranked colleagues to read. Wiesler’s relegation to a role that contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes as that of ‘a modest postman’ takes him far from heroic individuality.59 Instead, the letter-sorting office to which Wiesler is posted evokes the deprivation of individuality and also the endless bureaucratic files that appear in Kafka’s fiction. Wiesler’s demotion also recalls a detail of Herman Melville’s short story of 1853, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall-Street. Bartleby, a clerk, baffles his employer by refusing to carry out his work and gives no more justification than that he prefers not to. At the end of Melville’s text, the employer seems to find a clue to the meaning of Bartleby’s otherwise inexplicable rebellion in the job he previously carried out, sorting ‘dead letters’, or post that had remained undelivered for long periods of time.60 Yet in the literary fiction of Melville and Kafka,

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The spy demoted; in the letter-sorting office

letters and legal files do not really deliver a revelation of meaning. Rather, they represent the fundamental humiliation of human life when subjected to bureaucratic modernity. In this sense, the literary echoes in Wiesler’s demotion to letter-sorter reflect how the creative life he has come to long for is not at all what he attains. He is demoted to meaningless work. Meanwhile, the compassionate love he has developed for Dreyman and Sieland remains unrequited. Sieland is dead and Dreyman becomes aware of Wiesler’s existence only after unification, as a codename in the Stasi files, and the two men never meet. Despite Wiesler’s demotion to this humiliated and cut-off state, there is an unlikely lack of ambivalence in the depiction of his transformation. In the film, we see Wiesler switch from being

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a spy, seeking at first to monitor and incriminate Dreyman, to a secret protector. There is little evidence of him wavering and he soon dedicates himself to a mission of protection. Such an unambivalent change is unlikely: the evidence early in the film of Wiesler’s ardent work, as a Stasi interrogator and trainer of future spies, belies the possibility of such a total turnaround. Then, to turn away from the Stasi’s operations does not bring Wiesler any closer to the artists, and lying both separates him from his colleagues and removes any sense of dignity he had in his work. Is it possible that this transformation is purely positive for Wiesler, and that he never equivocates over it?

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5 Brecht and the Politics of an Aesthetic Education Wiesler’s transformation carries with it worrying repercussions, leaving him isolated, unfulfilled, and at the same time apparently unambivalent about a decision that has drastically negative consequences for his life. How are we to understand the problematic enlightenment of this Stasi spy? It takes place in large part through encountering art, and as such is in line with German Enlightenment ideas about the capacity of art to improve sensibilities in service of individuality and a more ethical society. However, looking more closely at the artistic performances and texts which change Wiesler’s mind complicates his conversion as an entirely positive turn towards Enlightenment values. Like the Enlightenment philosophers, Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) firmly believed in the power of art to change subjectivity and society. Yet the politics Brecht espoused in his work in the early twentieth century meant the aesthetic and social transformations he had in mind were radically different to those envisaged by Enlightenment philosophers. Brecht’s postEnlightenment ideas also differ fundamentally from the aesthetic education portrayed in von Donnersmarck’s film. The love poem by Brecht that Wiesler reads before deciding to protect Dreyman is a nostalgic text, rare in Brecht’s oeuvre for its lack of political commentary and of distantiating poetic techniques.61 After he has read the poem, Wiesler listens to Dreyman playing the piano. The pastiche classical sonata that influences Wiesler does not represent a progressive art form either: although the piece contains expressionistic dissonances, Dreyman’s delivery of it is legato and emotive. The sonata form dates to the Classical era (c. 1750–1825), the heyday of Mozart and Haydn, and the Romantic era (c. 1825– 1900), when Beethoven further codified the sonata into a fixed

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The improving powers of opera in Pretty Woman (1990)

structure, dividing it into three sections defined by set musical keys, tempos and repetitions. Given the apolitical, nostalgic and in the sonata’s case rigid forms of the artworks that transform him, Wiesler’s emotional education arguably takes place in an aesthetically conservative fashion. It also looks this way when viewed in light of Hollywood film. Is Wiesler’s response to the music not simply another version of the moment in Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 1990) when Edward (Richard Gere) takes Vivian (Julia Roberts) to hear Verdi’s opera La Traviata (1853) and she cries, leading Edward to conclude that the ex-sex worker has real and valid emotions? Anna Bull argues that this kind of response to classical music, while supposedly spontaneous and natural, is in fact mediated by elitist norms around quality and about the subjectivity that is meant to respond to it.62 Wiesler’s epiphany certainly seems to bring him closer to the world of elitist art forms, as well as to liberal democratic values that Marxists like Brecht viewed as having an extremely limited capacity to change the world. Wiesler’s transformation, made by encountering these art forms, has inspired critics by showing, in Wise’s words, how the ‘human spirit … will triumph over technology, bureaucracy, and oppression’.63 And yet Hamilton rightly points out how, in this transformation plot, ‘humanization is consistently linked to a

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liberal view that poses as an apolitical position’.64 Wiesler becomes disillusioned with the socialist state. Of course, it is laudable that he is then ‘summoned … to save the life of another’,65 in the form of Dreyman. However, Wiesler’s final achievement of decisive individuality, independent of the GDR state, is beset with political contradictions. As part of his transformation, Wiesler moves away from a collective social form, the very destructive surveillance society of the late GDR years, and towards a liberal individuality more in tune with capitalist cultures on the other side of the Berlin Wall. A simple reading of Brecht seems to support the idea that the inspiring story of the spy’s becoming-individual is universal and unproblematic. It would be a misreading, however, to assume that Brecht merely believed art could make for better moral sensibilities and lead to an improved liberal society through the improvement of the individual, in continuation of Enlightenment views. Such a misconstruction of Brecht is very common, and through the depiction of Wiesler’s immersion in the arts, The Lives of Others risks carrying over that highly simplified version of Brecht’s ideas. By quoting only Brecht’s apolitical love poem, the film permits his philosophy of the arts to be misread as continuing a liberal Enlightenment tradition. There is little in the film of the historical-materialist views that underpinned Brecht’s political writing and theatre-making. This is important, because the Enlightened agent Wiesler becomes is quite different to the complex and often split subjectivity Brecht explored both in his theatrical works and theoretical writing about the role of art in bringing about change. Whereas Enlightenment philosophers hoped art would help shape a free, whole, sovereign subject, not subjected to the power of God, state or church, Brecht’s theory of transformation through art envisioned a less sovereign, much more discontinuous selfhood. In Brecht, being an entirely ‘good’ person is unattainable because it is impossible to live without ambivalence and devoid of vulnerability to external conditions, such as how ‘good’ or otherwise the society around one is.

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Brecht’s thinking about aesthetic practice went against the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, as exemplified by the Verdi opera that makes Julia Roberts’ character cry in Pretty Woman. The Gesamtkunstwerk was an emotionally consuming, smoothly constructed production, such as Wagner introduced to the international stage in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it was supported by a massive apparatus of illusion that permitted the spectator to become utterly absorbed in it. Brecht wrote of the Gesamtkunstwerk that ‘[its] process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot, too, and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art’.66 For Brecht, total artworks in this style serve to prop up ideological fantasy and cover over important political conflicts. They also subjugate, rather than free, the spectator whose subjectivity becomes consumed by them. Wiesler’s absorbed interest in the Brecht poem, followed by his total immersion in Dreyman’s piano playing, are depicted as central to his conversion and his determination to behave ethically. However, the positive depiction of his aesthetic education-as-immersion sits in tension with Brecht’s theory, which looked sceptically at the transformative power of immersive and subjugating aesthetic forms. In their place, Brecht developed the now famous Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt or alienation-effect), a way of subjecting performance to defamiliarisation that recovered the agency of both performer and spectator in service of a more radically changed society. Brecht’s V-Effekt would be produced, he wrote, by techniques aimed at deconstructing the artwork in order to illuminate the spectator’s own place in systems of oppression. He described the effect as ‘alienating’ spectators from their conditions, or rendering these conditions unfamiliar so that they can be critiqued. In the process, the effect also contributed to ‘alienating’ the idea of a sovereign subjectivity itself. The practices Brecht used to generate the V-Effekt broke down the aesthetic experience, and, at the same time, were addressed to an audience in the early twentieth century that was itself fragmented by political contradictions and materially unliveable

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Wiesler immersed in a total work of art

experiences of war, poverty and the inequalities brought about by capitalism. Shaped by Marxist philosophies and the early twentiethcentury context in which his ideas developed, Brecht held the view that subjectivity is fundamentally formed by material, economic conditions. These conditions could be illuminated and changed, he believed, through progressive aesthetic practice, not least in the powerful setting of the theatre. This kind of illumination could produce change, but it would only do so by both fragmenting the familiar work of art and revealing the fragmented nature of the lives of those watching it. In place of the subjugating effects of the total work of art, Brecht advocated for the ‘radical separation of all the elements’ of the theatrical production,67 so that it no longer held its audiences in enthralled states but woke them up to the political contradictions

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shaping their lives. Separating the elements of a production involved introducing critical breaks between, for instance, body movement, lighting, set design, voice, text and music. Brecht intended his audiences to develop a critical awareness of these elements of the apparatus of performance because he felt that dramatic performances, like identities, tend to settle into conventional forms – to remain familiar, unbroken and comforting. For Brecht, such unfragmented conventionality breeds dangerous compliance in performer and audience alike. Radically separating the elements of dramatic productions also implied using a non-naturalistic acting style and defying expectations of performance quality: for instance, by showing rehearsals as a finished piece and by introducing an excessive, destabilising repetition of words and events. The foundational text for understanding this core aspect of Brecht’s thought is ‘The Street Scene’ (1950),68 written in the year after he moved to the GDR and set up the Berliner Ensemble theatre company. Subtitled ‘A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre’, the essay summarises the acting theories surrounding Epic Theatre, a form that radical practitioners such as Erwin Piscator, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Brecht had begun experimenting with during the years following World War I. Epic Theatre incorporated social commentary, and Brecht’s interest in it stemmed from its potential to produce critical spectatorship and ultimately more agency in its audiences. In ‘The Street Scene’, a person who witnesses a traffic accident re-enacts the event, but not faultlessly. Instead, they deliberately repeat certain moments, breaking off their commentary to give explanations, insert obvious inaccuracies and directly address the audience. These techniques index the fact that the performance is always already a re-enactment so that the actor detaches from the character portrayed and the spectator is forced to look at the play from a conscious, critical perspective. As a result, spectators develop critical points of view on the everyday performances of the society around them.

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Brecht developed further ideas for how to achieve the effects of Epic Theatre through mechanical means in his essay about the V-Effekt published a year after ‘The Street Scene’.69 Here, he argued for techniques such as the bright illumination of the auditorium so that spectators are drawn to perceive one another and the light sources as much as the play itself. He also wrote that an actor should address social groups within the audience separately, creating friends and enemies among them, drawing attention to conflicts in the action on stage and beyond it while fostering political insights and co-operation between actors and audience. The point of these techniques was to highlight how political realities separated people from one another and even fragmented the experience of individual subjectivity based on the separations of class, place in the workforce and vulnerability to violence, for instance in the form of war. Brecht made the case for the technical fragmentation of the work of theatre to generate political understanding rather than passive consumption of performance. By presenting his audiences with productions that broke down into their component parts, Brecht encouraged spectators to come to a more critical consciousness and grapple with the conditions of production of the artwork. This functioned in turn as a rehearsal for analysing social conditions and performances outside the theatre. In the process, Brecht’s theories also questioned the possibility of an unproblematic experience of subjectivity that rises above its material conditions to attain sovereign and invulnerable self-definition. Viewed in this sense, and despite its use of Brecht’s poetry, The Lives of Others diverges from Brecht’s views both of aesthetics and of subjectivity. On a surface level, Brecht’s theories and practices are evoked in The Lives of Others. Apart from the transformation of Wiesler through encountering art, including Brecht’s poem, there are the two renditions of Dreyman’s play that bookend the film, which refer superficially to Brecht’s legacy. The first production of the play is set in a factory, recalling the interest in the conditions of the working classes among GDR playwrights including Brecht.70

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Contrasting productions: in a factory setting and a post-dramatic staging

Then, the modernism of the production of the same play at the close of the film recalls the challenging aesthetics of more recent postdramatic theatre by playwrights such as Elfriede Jelinek, whose works show the ongoing influence of Brecht’s ideas.71 And yet, despite the factory setting of the first production and the post-dramatic style of the second, the extract of Dreyman’s script which is performed in both productions is not dedicated to social commentary. Sieland’s character in the play is a factory worker and visionary, and she says she has seen a vision (and it is an accurate one) of a worker being crushed under the factory’s large, inhuman wheel. The scene is concerned above all with other-worldly forms of knowledge, followed by a dramatic expression of grief. The grief shown in the second production is understated, but otherwise no

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theatrical devices are used that would challenge Dreyman’s audiences to analyse the relationship of the artwork they are watching to contemporary ideologies or industrial practices, or indeed to question the seeming apolitical universality of their own experiences of love and grief. The two scenes from Dreyman’s play embedded within the film therefore diverge in form and meaning from the performances Brecht himself sought to produce. There is more resonance with Brecht’s interests in the opening scenes of The Lives of Others. The elements of rehearsal, re-enactment and repetition explored in Brecht’s writings on theatre echo in the theatricality of the prisoner’s performance in that first scene, and the pressure on the Stasi officers to perform their own parts in the lecture theatre. The repetitions, both in the prisoner’s words and the replaying

Performances of power and technologies of repetition

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of the interrogation on the reel-to-reel recorder, have a flavour of the consciously ridiculous repetitions recommended in ‘The Street Scene’. These performances and technologies of repetition are important to how von Donnersmarck introduces the Stasi’s regime. They also demonstrate the director’s interest in ideas about subjectivity in relation to power and its technologies, which interested Brecht, too. And yet the fragmentation of performance that was so important to Brecht contrasts drastically with the presentation of Wiesler’s transformation, as well as with the kind of subject he becomes following his aesthetic education. Brecht’s ‘The Songs’, a short poem on the theme of theatre written in 1939–40, foreshadows his GDR essays. In it, the lyric voice speaks to fundamental aesthetic processes of separation in aid of political change. They assert that the goal of a performance is always to ‘show / That the sister art is / Coming on stage’;72 here, the uneven enjambement of the poem’s lines itself performs the separation being advocated for. Most instructively for a reading of The Lives of Others, the first line of the poem consists of the exhortation: ‘Separate the songs from the rest!’73 This is the opposite of what happens in von Donnersmarck’s melodrama, in which music is fully integrated into the action and the key piece of diegetic music proves an unironic motivating factor in Wiesler’s conversion. Once transformed, Wiesler is not the fragmented subject who, as Brecht saw it, was both being reflected upon in his exciting, alienating productions and consuming them. Wiesler’s aesthetic education leads him to become a self-defining subject who acts alone and, after he has encountered the artworks that change him, remains unambivalent about his decision. In order to send its hero on such a journey towards sovereign subjectivity, the film has to give him an individual power he would never have had in the Stasi’s historical setup. Meanwhile, in his solitary and unwavering decisiveness, Wiesler also becomes a subject Brecht would not have considered realistic or desirable. The character of Christa-Maria Sieland, however, brings with her much more insightful and productive ambivalence.

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6 ‘Sister art is / Coming on stage’: Christa-Maria Sieland The film has a more politically outspoken intertext in the form of Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan (1943). However, while the phrase guter Mensch (‘good person’) recurs as a leitmotiv throughout the script, the intertext is never explored directly in the plot. In contrast to the love poem, this play is an example of Brecht’s politically engaged theatre, and its implicit presence as intertext contrasts with Wiesler’s character trajectory, at the same time as it provides a model for the more divided and uncertain experience of the film’s tragic heroine, Christa-Maria Sieland. As a Stasi informant, Sieland cuts a much more ambivalent figure than Wiesler and Dreyman. She is also granted little of the individualistic authenticity the men in the film enjoy: Dreyman is a playwright who sees his solo-authored works performed in Berlin’s prestigious theatres; Wiesler also strives to achieve individual agency against the confines of the Stasi organisation and, finally, manages to attain it. By contrast, Sieland fails to break free of the influence of others. Indeed, there is a chiasmic shape in the film’s structure, wherein Wiesler’s ethical status goes up as Sieland’s goes down, and she becomes more and more compromised. The very first images of Sieland show her on stage in the East German production of Dreyman’s play. The character she plays sees visions, and she falls to the ground, having seen the vision of a man being crushed by the huge factory wheel. She recovers and tells her factory comrade Elena that her lover has died. There is a double agency to Sieland’s role, both here in Dreyman’s play and in the logic of the film itself. In the play, she is embedded in a cast of other performers, playing out a role written for her by Dreyman. And yet, in the audience, all eyes are on her, including those of Wiesler. She is

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A falling heroine who is also in control

clearly the star, and as such, she cuts a sovereign figure, completely in control of her performance. However, up on the stage, she is falling. Her character is overcome by visions she wishes she could not see. Sieland is thus defined from the start by the vexed doublework of acting: being in control of her performance, while enacting a vulnerability that has to be recognisable to those watching her. In fact, vulnerability defines Sieland’s double role as a performer, as is further emphasised in the next scene. At the postshow party, she is shown dancing with Dreyman before a crowd of admiring onlookers. There is both strength and vulnerability in the way Sieland dances. She is absorbed in the dance and yet begins to appear troubled, eyeing her audience suspiciously. She is responding to the presence of Minister Hempf, who is looking on and enjoying

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Her troubled performance before threatening onlookers

being able to abuse his power. Empowered by his position among the GDR elite, Hempf forces, or has already forced, Sieland into a sexual relationship with him. Gedeck portrays Sieland as dancing with natural flair while remaining conscious of the threatening presence in her audience. This is the complex and intuitive performance of a character who has to cling to her place in the regime while being subjected to some of its worst abuses. Sieland’s position becomes increasingly difficult throughout the film, and always in relation to the men around her: the abusive minister, the artistic partner and the Stasi spy who keeps appearing in her life. She gives in to Hempf’s abuse, then vows to stop going to see him; soon after, she buckles under pressure from the Stasi and her addiction to become an informant. Under this pressure, and

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isolated, she can see no other course but to report on Dreyman and his co-conspirators, so when Dreyman begins to write his critical report for Der Spiegel, she warns him to keep any talk of it secret from her. As an IM, however, she later names Dreyman as author of the article and his friends as co-conspirators, and reveals the location of Dreyman’s typewriter. The film then sacrifices Sieland when she emerges from the shower to find Grubitz and his men searching the apartment, and walks out into the road in front of a van, dying soon afterwards. The ambiguous accident (is this another GDR suicide?) means Sieland does not survive into the new era of German unification portrayed at the end of the film. To a degree, the depiction of Sieland shows The Lives of Others adhering to the conventions of classic film. Her fate provides the ending required by the classic mode of melodrama, as the film sacrifices its complicated heroine in favour of providing closure. Her portrayal displays other kinds of conservatism, too, as there is a sense in which Sieland is blamed for not achieving individuality. In the logic of the film, to be ‘good’ means disentangling oneself from abuses of power and gaining ethical agency of one’s own. Sieland fails to become a sovereign individual, unlike Dreyman and Wiesler. Somebody completely in control of their own life and decisions would not, of course, betray the person they love, or submit to the power of the Stasi and the SED minister. Blame has been building up for Sieland throughout the film, and this blame is focused around an external demand for her character to be more coherent and less fragmented because her complexity makes her vulnerable. Both Dreyman and Wiesler encourage her to realise she does not need to sleep with Hempf, and that she just needs to be ‘herself’ in order to be a successful artist. Both urge her not to keep submitting to Hempf’s sexual abuse because she is a grosse Künstlerin, a great artist, one who is loved for her acting and her own personhood. This exhortation to be her true self is then the basis on which Sieland fails in the film’s narrative: she lacks confidence in herself as an individual artist and is unable to extricate

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herself from the clutches of the Stasi, that vast, individuality-crushing organisation. Sieland is thus framed as a failure, since she does not believe in her own agency as a great actress and instead is construed as ‘submitting’ to abuse. In this reading, the film can be criticised for punishing Sieland with a victim-blaming comeuppance for her failure to grasp her individuality: a failure that seems inevitable given the abuse and isolation she suffers. At the same time, the film contains an element of resistance to its own conservative victim-blaming. Her character trajectory also brings more dynamic qualities of ambivalence and fragmentation into the narrative. These stay in the viewer’s mind and undermine the brutal structures of both her role in the film’s skewed love triangle and her sacrifice in the traditional melodramatic ending. Crucially, Sieland’s trajectory reveals how difficult it is to embody the authentic selfhood which the men around her keep exhorting her to. After all, through her art as an actress, she knows the possibility of living out one true and sovereign self is illusory. The phrase guter Mensch occurs in the film as part of the title of the pastiche classical sonata that Dreyman plays, provoking Wiesler’s conversion, as well as in the title of the book he finally dedicates to Wiesler. Sieland herself uses the same phrase to describe Wiesler. The implication in this repeated phrase is that Wiesler develops his full potential, to be not just a Stasi official but also a ‘good’ person. The phrase also invokes Brecht’s play The Good Person of Szechwan, written in 1939–41. Yet the complexities of that play and of Brecht’s theatrical theories are almost lost in the logic of the film. Just as Sieland is sacrificed because she is too contradictory to enact sovereign selfhood, so too is Brecht’s play at risk of being written out of the film in all but name. However, through Sieland’s characterisation, some of the complexity of the intertext is permitted to remain. The title of The Good Person of Szechwan refers to its protagonist, the cross-dressing heroine, Shen Teh. Brecht’s play dramatises the predicaments of this sex worker turned business

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owner, who is rewarded for her hospitality to three visiting gods with the prize of 1,000 silver dollars. She uses the money to start a business, initially to support the poor people around her, who cannot afford rice to eat, trying to help them through charitable means. Shen Teh’s ‘goodness’ proves unsustainable, however, and she devises a male, capitalist alter ego in the form of a ‘cousin’, Shui Ta. She takes to dressing up as this figure, who is able to carry out the exploitative side of her role that the prevailing economic system demands. Shui Ta refuses to give food out for free and instead sets up a factory where the poor work for a subsistence wage. Shui Ta’s more mercenary approach ensures the survival of Shen Teh’s business, but at the cost of Shen Teh’s more charitable attributes. The character of Shen Teh struggles with fundamental questions of goodness amid a context of poverty and corruption. Written during the Nazi era, when Brecht himself was in exile, the play poses the question: what is ‘goodness’? Through the character of Shen Teh, Brecht asks who is capable of goodness in a harsh society and, in such circumstances, is it even helpful to try to be ‘good’? It is hard to see how Shen Teh can be ‘good’ in this context and not go under, taking with her the poor people she employs. Ultimately, it is not that this character needs to choose between being Shen Teh or Shui Ta. The real problem is that, ultimately, neither figure finally provides a fit model for treating others ethically without falling into economic ruin and dragging those others with her. There is no closure, and Shen Teh never settles on being one of her two utterly conflicting personas. In fact, it becomes clear there is no true and moral identity for her to embody. Brecht’s materialist and protodeconstructivist play instead suggests that individuals are entirely shaped by systems that prevent them from acting ethically without becoming tied up in moral knots. Sieland is a character, like Brecht’s Shen Teh, torn between multiple, impossible options for how to be. She achieves a degree of agency and self-expression through her acting, but we see her subjected to sexual abuse as well as the demand to become an

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informant. Thus, in contrast to the successfully resistant characters of Dreyman and Wiesler, she represents the limits to the fantasy of becoming an authentic individual capable of overriding the Stasi’s surveillance. She highlights the limits of that fantasy such that her apparent failure has a helpful, ethical function: Sieland’s fall reveals how complicated it is to succeed in being an authentic, sovereign self. The insightful function of her character is possible not least because Sieland is a performing artist whose performance conversely relies on her audience experiencing a feeling of authenticity. The debates about the historical authenticity of von Donnersmarck’s film, set out in Chapter 2, showed how authenticity always relies on performances of truth and reality: the use of props, music and archival footage functions as ‘proof’ of the film’s truthfulness. Within the film’s diegesis, too, authenticity requires successful performances to be perceived as such. As an interrogator, Wiesler must have the stamina to maintain his authority for hours; and later, as the spy who falsifies reports, he needs to author them in a way that will make them believable to his Stasi bosses when he decides to rebel. There is also Dreyman, the playwright who must perform his authentic loyalty to the GDR state if he is to ensure that his fictions continue to be performed on its stages. The etymological root of ‘authenticity’ lies in the Greek, authentikos, meaning ‘first’ or ‘genuine’; the term ‘author’ is directly related to it, with both coming via the Latin augere, ‘to originate’. And yet German cultural theorist Helmut Lethen notes how the idea of authenticity has been defined in continental philosophy by ideas of repetition, citation, construction and fictionality as the central practices that are held to fashion individuals and the social world around them.74 Authenticity has to be stable and secure, but it must also be able to repeat itself, be performed correctly each time. But perhaps not too correctly: remember that Wiesler’s prisoner, who tells his story too often, too well and word for word, will be seen as performing too perfectly, and therefore inauthentically.

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Authenticity is therefore dependent on performances of originality and reliability. How can one act authentically if authenticity always requires an act? Through Sieland’s struggles, the film invokes an important problem to do with performing an authentic self as a route to ‘goodness’. When she is unsure how to proceed regarding Hempf’s abuse, Sieland is preoccupied with the question: who is she after all, the actress or the part that she plays? As she struggles to decide what to do, Sieland is approached by Wiesler in the bar. Wiesler poses as a fan who really believes in the person Sieland is. He claims that she is always authentic, and even more so when she is acting. Wiesler tries to encourage Sieland to believe in her own talents and refuse the forced ‘relationship’ with Hempf: she does not need it, he says, to continue working. This is questionable, as viewers

Performance … and the exhortation to authenticity

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know from an earlier scene when Wiesler himself threatens Dreyman and Sieland’s neighbour Frau Meinecke. Again reflecting the film’s historical accuracy, he makes it clear he has the power to withdraw her daughter’s university place if she reveals his covert surveillance. It is certainly within Hempf’s power to end Sieland’s career. Wiesler presses Sieland to believe she can succeed without giving in to Hempf’s abuses, but she rightly fears the consequences. Moreover, during the conversation, Sieland insightfully describes how she is always behaving in some inauthentic fashion: ‘an actor is never how he [sic] really is’. Still, Wiesler manages to persuade her that she does not need to ‘sell herself for art’ because she is already a great artist. As their conversation in the bar continues, Sieland removes her sunglasses, letting down her guard and permitting herself to be seen as she really is. It is at this point that she declares Wiesler ein guter Mensch, before going home to Dreyman and ending the coercive relationship with Hempf. This discussion between the two characters is echoed when Wiesler and Sieland meet again, as Sieland is brought in for questioning about the Spiegel article. In the scene, Wiesler persuades Sieland to reveal the location of Dreyman’s typewriter. He plans to hide it before Dreyman can be caught, and tries to convey this to Sieland wordlessly. The play of gazes between them is a performance with two functions: first, it conceals from Grubitz that they have met before, and second, it allows Wiesler to tacitly communicate that he intends to protect Dreyman. Wiesler looks as reassuringly as he can at Sieland, and he employs the phrase ‘think of your audience!’ during the questioning. On a narrative level, this is to remind Sieland of their previous encounter in the bar. On a thematic level, meanwhile, the phrase signals to viewers how the interrogation is itself a kind of theatre, akin to the interrogation shown in the film’s opening scene. Sieland then does as Wiesler asks and reveals where the typewriter is. Her gaze is resigned, and she hesitates as she gives herself over to trust in this unknown fan.

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‘Think of your audience!’

Sieland’s doubts about Wiesler’s trustworthiness are understandable. She has already experienced abuse, and she knows what it means to be vulnerable. Indeed, she had earlier told Dreyman how her first encounter with the abuse of power in the GDR was as a teenager, when she was pushed off her bike by a fellow member of her military-scouting Pioneer group. The older Pioneer had fallen in love with her and, finding his love was unrequited, pushed Sieland to the ground, leaving her with a permanent scar. Dreyman particularly loves this scar. For Sieland, it has negative memories attached, as she recalls that the teacher forced her to say it had been an accident, to protect the older student whose party loyalty gave him privileges. The anecdote is telling: a sentimental Dreyman looks at Sieland’s vulnerability aesthetically. However, Sieland experiences it quite

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differently, aware that she has fallen and will continue to fall, and that the protective power of the state will not be there to catch her. This knowledge is as ingrained in Sieland’s being as the scar is etched into her face. In the end, Sieland’s situation is complicated beyond the possibility of simply deciding to stop being vulnerable and free herself from the Stasi’s power. In this sense, she is the true carrier of the Good Person intertext, which shows it is impossible to overcome the difficulties of an immoral system by acting consistently and with moral certainty. Instead, the impossibility of becoming a singular, uncomplicated and ‘good’ subject is exactly what tears Sieland apart, just as it tore apart Brecht’s protagonist Shen Teh/Shui Ta. It is not possible for either figure to embody a wholly ‘good’ identity, no matter how hard they try. In the Brecht play, there is no neat resolution in which Shen Teh is exonerated or discovers a way to be an ethical subject capable of improving the system around her. The gods, who have been looking on with increasing moral perplexity, abandon Shen Teh. In the final scene, they leave, having failed to produce a judgement on what she should or should not do, and uttering the alarming words: ‘Time that we too started flying / Homeward to our nothingness.’75 In The Lives of Others, it is Sieland herself who leaves the scene. Believing she has condemned her lover to discovery and imprisonment, she runs outside, straight into the path of the passing van. As she makes her final fall, Sieland remains tragically unredeemed. She has been unable to free herself and outwit the regime. Although she has acted with as much authenticity and integrity as she could muster, she betrays her lover and dies. In her last moments, she may or may not hear Wiesler’s comforting words as he tells her there is nothing to set right. She may or may not grant Dreyman the forgiveness he begs for. The closure of melodrama is not entirely provided, then, by the death of the film’s complicated heroine. Sieland’s role in Dreyman’s play within the film is also helpful for untangling the complexity and insightfulness of her

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Sieland’s final fall represents a sacrifice without closure

characterisation. When her character in the play, Maria, sees a vision of her comrade’s lover under a factory wheel, the incident recalls East German writer Christa Wolf’s early novel Divided Heaven (1963), whose protagonist Rita is injured in an industrial accident. The accident symbolises how Rita is torn apart, as she has to decide between joining her partner Manfred in the West and staying in the East; she chooses the latter because it is the place where she has something to offer the society around her. Sieland also has this complexity in common with Wolf’s later protagonist in The Quest for Christa T. (1968), with whom Sieland partly shares her name. In this later novel, more controversial with the GDR authorities than Divided Heaven, Wolf’s readers learn about the tragic character Christa T. through her bereaved friend’s narration. Unlike Rita, Christa T. dies,

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finding there is no place for her sensitive, complex selfhood in either the GDR or the capitalist West. Sieland shares her ambivalence with these characters in Wolf’s writing (Wolf was herself a Stasi IM for a short time). Sieland is both a great artist and an IM, and in failing to live out one coherent identity, she is the most realistic of the film’s characters. And yet the film sacrifices her: like a Christian martyr, Christa-Maria is crushed under the wheels of the rather pathetically small East German van, leaving sad memories behind her. Critic Thomas Lindenberger has commented on the Christian connotations of Sieland’s first name and the similar sound of her last name to Heiland (saviour), bemoaning understandably that ‘she is marked as the bearer of sins, and so must be sacrificed’.76 ‘Sieland’ or ‘she-land’ has other resonances, however. Perhaps Sieland’s character belongs to another time and place: a land of women, as in Wolf’s Kassandra (1983), a text named after the daughter of the King of Troy, who is also assailed by visions. Kassandra’s gift of prophecy is useless because she is fated never to be believed, and Wolf imagines in this text a separate space for a community of women who, like the Cassandra of Greek legend, hold an alternative viewpoint to men. In Sieland’s she-land,77 more ambivalence may be permitted, as opposed to the ideals of successful individualism embodied by the male characters. By killing Sieland, the film sends her into the utopia of no-place and, on the surface, stays within a realist imaginary. The only alternative place viewers travel to at the end of the film is Berlin after unification. Here, it seems, the two surviving male leads can get on with their lives, no longer disturbed by the limits and ambiguities of life in the GDR. The very last scenes suggest, however, that life in unified Germany is not quite as undisturbed as it seems.

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7 Success? Georg Dreyman and German Unification The film’s closing scenes continue the latent critique, which is present in Sieland’s ambivalent characterisation, and through which the film itself problematises a surface reading of its transformation narrative. To a degree, it appears the film provides the closure that classic melodrama typically leans towards, and that the unified Federal Republic is a preferable final setting for the surviving characters to reside in. Hamilton has pointed out how the ‘goodness’ Wiesler comes to embody can only flourish ‘in the post-Wende [unification] sphere of capitalist liberalism’.78 These final scenes are set amid German unification, with Dreyman figuring as the central character. Wiesler’s protection meant that Dreyman avoided capture by the Stasi, and he has gone on to live in freedom and see his work performed in theatres in the first years after unification. A closer reading of the last scenes calls into question how ideal this new context is, however, and it problematises the sense of closure felt by viewers. Throughout the film, Dreyman has enjoyed an almost unbelievable success. He is first introduced to viewers by way of Grubitz telling Wiesler about the playwright’s exceptional status as an author. At first sight, Wiesler writes off Dreyman as precisely the ‘arrogant type’ against which he usually warns his students, presumably advising them to observe such subjects very attentively and never to become arrogant individuals themselves. However, Grubitz suggests Wiesler should adopt a more positive view of Dreyman and describes him as the only author who writes ‘nothing worthy of suspicion’ and yet is read in the West, too. East German writers did enjoy some success in West Germany, when they could smuggle their works illegally across the border, but these writers were more often critical of the GDR. There must really be something

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extraordinary about Dreyman’s work that means it is beloved in both East and West, since the West German literary market would certainly have looked for critical gestures in any texts by East German writers. Clearly, Dreyman has managed to craft a public persona that is not critical of the regime because otherwise he would be in Jerska’s situation: unable to work and, perhaps like Jerska, unable to carry on at all. In his reading of the film, Žižek notes that Dreyman is something of an anachronism, in that he is working after the historical forced exiling of critical poet and musician Wolf Biermann in the autumn of 1976.79 It is likely that if Dreyman, like other artists, had protested Biermann’s expulsion from the GDR, he would not be able to work with such ease in East Germany. Biermann’s forced exile appears to be referenced very implicitly in the party scene when Dreyman mentions a letter, signed by Jerska, which led to his blacklisting. It is clear that Dreyman has secured his ongoing success in the GDR by not signing it. He evades capture for his celebrated Spiegel article, too, and in the last scenes of the film, his success continues. When he encounters Hempf after unification, the ex-minister goads him about a brief hiatus, in which he has been unable to write in the first year or so after the Wall fell. A bestselling novel soon follows, though, and it seems Dreyman does return to the flow of writing and fame that comes easily to him, despite the death of Sieland and the upheaval of regime change. It is unlikely that an East German writer of such renown would go on to receive the kind of acclaim Dreyman enjoys after unification. The 1990s were a time when many East German writers, including Christa Wolf, were vilified for collaboration with the Stasi, and interest in their writing beyond texts about Stasi collaboration faded as the former regime became a more distant memory. With Wiesler’s protection, Dreyman has managed the feat of succeeding in the East without becoming a Stasi informant, and his career continues in the first years of unification without any disgrace or loss of public interest. In the scenes set in the early 1990s, we even see Dreyman’s play being performed to a packed audience.

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Dreyman’s success

The only empty seat visible is the one through which the camera captures Dreyman, and he is part of a glamorous new couple. Sitting surrounded by his audience, Dreyman is also comforted by the hand of his new companion on his arm. Dreyman’s success is admittedly tinged with bitterness. At this post-unification premiere, he leaves the auditorium in a hurry and has a bitter exchange with Hempf, who has been in the audience. Hempf hints that the Stasi had more information on Dreyman’s life than he had realised, and later Dreyman is shown ripping out the wiretaps from the walls of the apartment and then visiting the Stasi archive, where he reads the enormous pile of files Wiesler had kept on him. This archival visit prompts Dreyman to write the novel dedicated to Wiesler. His autobiographical novel is then shown, after

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Uncovering secrets in the Stasi archive

a productively brief time-lapse of two years, taking pride of place in the windows of East Berlin’s famous Karl Marx bookshop. After the deaths of Jerska and Sieland, the past clearly still causes Dreyman pain. However, the film’s ending offers him the cathartic effects of both closure and agency, not least through the art he is still able to produce. In contrast to Dreyman’s ongoing success, the closing scenes complicate the hopes its other male lead may have had when the Berlin Wall fell. In unified Germany, Dreyman and Wiesler do not meet, and neither of them seems happy with the individual experience of being a ‘good person’ who has survived the GDR years more or less intact. We can assume that Wiesler’s hopes were raised by the ending of the regime, presumably mirroring the hopes that many

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people to the east of the Iron Curtain had in 1989. And yet the film’s final images suggest these hopes are not about to be fulfilled. The last scene set in the GDR is of Wiesler in the letter-sorting office, where his colleague Stigler, who told the joke in the Stasi canteen, hears on the radio via earphones that the Berlin Wall has fallen. Wiesler wordlessly stands and leaves his desk, leading Stigler and their fellow letter-sorters out of the room. These lettermen abandon their posts and step out into the new era of freedom. Wiesler’s fate after unification also includes a new job, again involving the delivery of post, so continuing the Kafkaesque and Bartleby-like connotations of his demotion in the GDR. In postunification Berlin, Dreyman tracks down Wiesler and finds him walking along a street distributing flyers, which bring the capitalist

A postman, before and after the Berlin Wall falls

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medium of advertising to the letterboxes of Berlin’s apartment buildings. Admittedly, the wide-angle shot through which Dreyman sees Wiesler from the car suggests the potentials and promises the new society offers former GDR citizens. The distance afforded by the camera permits viewers to watch Wiesler as he walks along a wide pavement, in an image much less enclosed than his surveillance attic or the cramped dead-letter sorting office. Behind him are graffitied walls, which offer a visually striking contrast to the bare East Berlin buildings of the pre-unification era that form much of the film’s exterior backdrops. This wide and more varied streetscape shows in effective visual shorthand that Wiesler now enjoys some more freedom than in the GDR. However, a sense of melancholy imbues the scene as the street shot tips into a canted angle and Dreyman remains static in his car, not getting out to greet the man who protected him. Wiesler’s new job is no great improvement on his former demotion. For one thing, it will not offer him the security that his last posting, humiliating as it was, would have given him in the GDR’s generous employment and pensions system. He is presumably not even earning minimum wage, a basic standard of income Federal Germany did not introduce until 2015. Following unification, we cannot assume Wiesler finally gains an entirely rewarding experience of agency. Overall, his decision to act more ethically brings meaning to his life and allows him to do good. Yet that decision also leaves him alone, as far as we know, and in an economically precarious position. His situation contrasts with the position of ex-minister Hempf, whose smart clothing and attendance at the theatre in the final encounter with Dreyman portray him as continuing a life of leisure and satisfaction. In these ways, the film communicates a lack of closure and leaves viewers wondering how fulfilling Wiesler’s total turn from the Stasi’s surveillance regime to individual agency can be, if society still rewards such corrupt figures as Hempf. The backdrop to the film’s closing scenes also endows the ending with complexity and a sense that an ethical order has not been

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restored, despite the melodramatic closure the surface redemption story offers. The graffitied walls in West Berlin are relatively neutral markers of the end of Germany’s division. More loaded with ambivalence is the inclusion in the scene of extras, who play a small group of homeless people, leaning against the external wall of the theatre as Dreyman is leaving. Being poverty-stricken or homeless in Berlin was something of a trope in German film around unification and functioned as a synecdoche for the challenges of life in capitalist West Germany. In Wim Wenders’ 1987 film, Wings of Desire, the poet Homer wanders adrift in the non-space of divided Potsdamer Platz, and he sits wrapped up against the cold in an abandoned chair as if homeless in the unmown grass while Berlin and the world change around him. The representation of the complexities of divided Germany and its capitalist future through images of poverty is so much of a trope that it is even quoted ironically in Good Bye, Lenin! Becker’s protagonist Alex (Daniel Brühl) picks through the bins outside his apartment block in search of consumer products which he needs as props, as he pretends to his ill mother, who had been loyal to the GDR, that the Wall has not fallen. He later does the same when he realises his mother’s savings have been disposed of, money that is worthless anyway in 1990 when West German marks are flowing but life is suddenly unaffordable for East Germans. Both times this act of rummaging through bins prompts the exclamation from neighbour Mr Ganske, ‘look what we are reduced to’, and an admission that he is unemployed and struggling himself to afford life in the new era. Is it possible that the homeless people portrayed late in The Lives of Others are scene-setting, background objects that show we are now in the West, where not everybody can afford the basics of life? Or, worse, are these images of homeless people being used as neutralising lip service, passing comment on the problems that accompanied German unification without handling them seriously or even with the dark comedy Becker’s film does so well? Alternatively, we can read the image of homelessness in the film’s ending as

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Homelessness and poverty as tropes of West German capitalism: The Lives of Others, Wings of Desire (1987) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)

playing a meaningful role, in that it highlights the economic reality accompanying the dream of freedom into which Wiesler, his lettersorting colleagues and all the other surviving characters step out. The image may prompt observant viewers to consider how East Germans, no longer being crushed by the wheel of socialism, may nevertheless

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struggle to live out their newfound freedom without anxiety. The image of the homeless people certainly prompts viewers to think beyond the binary of ‘good’ West versus ‘bad’ East, a division that conservative readings of the film were too quick to take as given. These last images from The Lives of Others encapsulate why the film has attained the status of a contemporary classic, precisely because of its inherent complexity. There is a rich ambivalence in the film’s formal qualities, which link it to Hollywood classics as well as earlier traditions of film-making in Germany, including Weimar cinema and the East German DEFA film studios. In her writing on the film’s post-DEFA realism, Berghahn argues that it succeeds in ‘evoking the emotional and bodily experience of people with firsthand experiences of life in the GDR’, rather than depicting the totalitarian state conservative reviewers were determined to see in it.80 Ultimately, the film does not belong solely to a Hollywood or East German tradition of film-making, nor can it be read as favouring one historical regime – state socialism or capitalism – over the other. In several places, von Donnersmarck’s script touches on the disappointment many people felt at the failure of socialism in the former East. Both Dreyman and Jerska, critics of the SED’s cruel excesses in their different ways, are also faithful believers in the good socialism can do, which is why they are determined to stay and work within the GDR rather than leave. In the end, Jerska sees little choice but to commit suicide rather than attempt escape to the West, where Dreyman is sure Jerska would be able to work again. True, Jerska would have been rewarded with opportunities and acclaim as a talented dissident taking refuge in West Germany. And yet that sympathetic character has no desire to do so: he wants socialism to work. Though Jerska’s suicide is depicted in the film and in Dreyman’s critical report as a tragic consequence of the GDR’s failures, his death also represents the difficulty of locating a desirable alternative to the socialist system which was tried, without success, in the former East.

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It would be possible to argue from one perspective that The Lives of Others struggles to give important nuance to the past and to its characters’ compelling trajectories. There is the use of art in the film as an experience of total immersion, which transports its audiences but does not necessarily alert either the characters or the film’s viewers to their, or our, political realities, as a radical thinker like Brecht would have hoped. Nevertheless, the film has its own outstanding aesthetic qualities, including its sophisticated cinematography, mise en scène and editing, and its use of authentic historical settings and GDR material culture. Von Donnersmarck’s chosen mode of melodrama is enriched, moreover, by the elements of ambivalence and even resistance contained within its plot, implicit intertexts and closing scenes. These features add a necessary and, in the end, historically-accurate complexity to the film, which ensures it continues to fascinate its viewers, from school pupils to political historians.

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Notes 1 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 2012). 2 Carl Eric Scott and F. Flagg Taylor IV (eds), Totalitarianism on Screen: The Art and Politics of The Lives of Others (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), p. 2. 3 Mike Dennis, ‘The East German Ministry of State Security and East German Society During the Honecker Era’, in Paul Cooke and Andrew Plowman (eds), German Writers and the Politics of Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 3. 4 Helmut Müller-Enbergs, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit: Die inoffiziellen Mitarbeiter, vol. IV, no. 2 (Berlin: BStU, 2008), p. 3. 5 Good Bye, Lenin! was the first German film to win the European Film Award, won Best European Film at the French and Spanish Film Awards and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes. 6 See Marco Abel, ‘The Berlin School’, in Tim Bergfelder et al. (eds), The German Cinema Book, vol. 2 (London: BFI, 2020). 7 See Christian Schertz and Thomas Schuler (eds), Rufmord und Medienopfer: Die Verletzung der persönlichen Ehre (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2012). 8 Paul Cooke (ed.), ‘The Lives of Others’ and Contemporary German Film (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); and Scott and Flagg Taylor IV (eds), Totalitarianism on Screen. 9 Daniela Berghahn, ‘DEFA’s Afterimages: Looking Back at the East from the West in Das Leben der Anderen and Barbara’, in Seán Allan

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and Sebastian Heiduschke (eds), Re-imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Context (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), p. 320. 10 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Diane Carson, ‘Learning from History in The Lives of Others: An Interview with Writer/Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’, Journal for Film and Video vol. 62, nos. 1–2 (2010), p. 19. 11 J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 37. 12 John J. Miller, ‘The Best Conservative Movies’, National Review Online, 23 February 2009. Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 13 Ibid. 14 On the controversial topic of viewing the Nazi and Stasi regimes as both having been ‘totalitarian’, see Annie Ring, After the Stasi: Collaboration and the Struggle for Sovereign Subjectivity in the Writing of German Unification (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 23–4. 15 Scott and Flagg Taylor IV (eds), Totalitarianism on Screen, p. 2. 16 Nick Hodgin, ‘Screening the Stasi: The Politics of Representation in Postunification Film’, in Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce (eds), The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State Since 1989 (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), p. 86. 17 Scott and Flagg Taylor IV (eds), Totalitarianism on Screen, p. 2.

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18 Louis Wittig, ‘Back in the Old GDR’, National Review Online, 9 February 2007. Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 19 Marco Abel, ‘Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the “Berlin School”’, Cineaste vol. 33, no. 4 (2008). Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 20 Abel, ‘The Berlin School’, p. 255. 21 See, for example, Bill Niven, Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 22 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Stasi on Our Minds’, New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007. Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 23 Michael Minden, Modern German Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), p. 160. 24 Mary Fulbrook, ‘The Limits of Totalitarianism: God, State and Society in the GDR’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society vol. 6, no. 7 (1997), p. 26. 25 Joachim Gauck, ‘Ja, so war es!’, Stern, 25 March 2006. Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 26 Reinhard Mohr, ‘Stasi ohne Spreewaldgurken’, Der Spiegel, 15 March 2006. Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 27 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Dreams of Others’, In These Times, 8 May 2007.

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Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 28 Hodgin, ‘Screening the Stasi’, p. 70. 29 Ibid. 30 Berit Eichler, Unterrichtseinheit zum Film Das Leben Der Anderen (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2008), p. 1. 31 Hubertus Knabe (ed.), Gefangen in Hohenschönhausen: Stasi-Häftlinge berichten (Berlin: Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag, 2007), p. 19. 32 Annette Maennel, Auf sie war Verlass: Frauen und Stasi (Berlin: Elefanten, 1995), p. 121; and Alison Lewis, ‘En-gendering Remembrance: Gender, Memory and Stasi Informers’, New German Critique vol. 86 (2002), p. 113. 33 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, ‘Seeing a Film Before You Make It’, in Cooke (ed.), ‘The Lives of Others’, p. 23. 34 Christoph Dieckmann, Das wahre Leben im Falschen: Geschichten von ostdeutscher Identität (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2000), p. 15. 35 Owen Evans, ‘Redeeming the Demon? The Legacy of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen’, Memory Studies vol. 3, no. 2 (2010), p. 173. 36 Hodgin, ‘Screening the Stasi’, p. 79. 37 See Michael Stewart, Film Melodrama: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 38 Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 41. 39 Jaimey Fisher, ‘German Historical Film as Production Trend: European Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others’, in Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager (eds), The Collapse of the

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Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010), p. 194. 40 See Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 190. 41 Eva Horn, ‘Media of Conspiracy: Love and Surveillance in Fritz Lang and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’, New German Critique vol. 35, no. 1 (2008), p. 138. 42 John Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 43 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 200. 44 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 156. 45 See Ring, After the Stasi, pp. 135–48. 46 BStU, MfS, HA IX, Nr. 4740, p. 106. 47 Ibid. 48 See Ring, After the Stasi, pp. 100–3. 49 Wise, Surveillance and Film, p. 37. 50 See Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). 51 See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans.

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Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 52 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and On the Discourse of Inequality (New York: Pocket Books, 1967). 53 See Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (1784)’, in James Schmidt (ed.), What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 58–64. 54 Horace, in H. Rushton Fairclough (ed.), Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 478. 55 See Friedrich Schiller, ‘The Stage as a Moral Institution’, 26 October 2006. Available at: (accessed 7 April 2022). 56 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Remembering Marie A.’, in John Willett and Ralph Manheim (eds), Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913–1956 (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 35–6. 57 Hamilton, Security, p. 288. 58 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, in Alan Riding, ‘Behind the Berlin Wall, Listening to Life’, New York Times, 7 January 2007. Available at:

(accessed 7 April 2022). 59 Žižek, ‘The Dreams of Others’. 60 Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Bartleby and Other Stories (London: Penguin Classics, 2016), p. 54. 61 Also on the film’s use of Brecht, see Marc Silberman, ‘The Lives of Others: Screenplay as Literature and the

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Literary Film’, in Cooke (ed.), ‘The Lives of Others’, pp. 139–57. 62 Anna Bull, Class, Control and Classical Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 155–73. 63 Wise, Surveillance and Film, p. 38. 64 Hamilton, Security, p. 289. 65 Ibid., p. 298. 66 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre. Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964 [1930]), p. 38. 67 Ibid., pp. 136–47. 68 See Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Street Scene’, in Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre, pp. 121–9. 69 See Bertolt Brecht, ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting’, in Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre, pp. 33–42. 70 The status of Brecht as a political figure in the GDR was itself extremely complicated. At times, Brecht showed a regrettable amount of conformity in relation to the SED, most memorably when he failed to criticise the sending in of tanks to end the popular uprising in June 1953. However, at other times, Brecht’s work was too anti-authoritarian to be promoted unambivalently by the regime and he had problems publishing his text on photography, Kriegsfibel (War Primer, 1955), because its version of pacifism conflicted with the GDR’s own narrative about its relationship to its enemies.

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71 See Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 72 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Songs’, in Willett and Manheim (eds), Bertolt Brecht, p. 426. 73 Ibid. 74 Helmut Lethen, ‘Versionen des Authentischen: Sechs Gemeinplätze’, in Hartmut Böhme and Klaus R. Scherpe (eds), Literatur und Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996), p. 209. 75 Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Szechwan, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Bloomsbury, 1985), p. 108. 76 Thomas Lindenberger, ‘Dealing with the GDR Past in Today’s Germany: The Lives of Others’, German Studies Review vol. 31, no. 3 (2008), p. 562. 77 Jennifer Creech explores the idea that Sieland is, even more exploitatively, herself a kind of space in the film, used as a ‘(she-land) through which the hero must pass’. See Jennifer Creech, ‘A Few Good Men: Gender, Ideology, and Narrative Politics in The Lives of Others and Good Bye, Lenin!’, Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture vol. 25 (2009), p. 119. 78 Hamilton, Security, p. 289. 79 Žižek, ‘The Dreams of Others’. 80 Berghahn, ‘DEFA’s Afterimages’, p. 324.

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Credits Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others Germany 2006 Written and Directed by  Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Co-produced by Dirk Hamm Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Claudia Gladziejewski (BR) Hubert von Spreti (BR) Monika Lobkowicz (BR – Arte) Andreas Schreitmüller (Arte) Produced by Quirin Berg Max Wiedemann Production Company Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion A Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion in coproduction with Bayerischer Rundfunk, Arte, Creado Film Supported by Filmfernsehfonds Bayern, Filmförderungsanstalt FFA, Medienboard BerlinBrandenburg Released by Buena Vista International © 2006 Wiedemann & Berg Filmproduktion

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Casting Simone Bär Production Manager Tom Sternitzke Sound Mixer Arno Wilms Sound Designer/ Supervising Sound Editor Christoph von Schönburg Sound Mixer Hubertus Rath Sound Editor Babette Fürbringer Makeup Annett Schulze Sabine Schumann Costumes Gabriele Binder Production Design Silke Buhr Music Gabriel Yared Stéphane Moucha Cinematography Hagen Bogdanski Film Editing Patricia Rommel Production Administrator Wolfgang Rhaden Production Coordinator Christine Haupt Production Assistant Oliver Zeller Unit Production Manager Lisa Schmidt (as Lisa Kolodzik) Location Manager Peter Maasz

Unit Manager Andi Pilarczyk Assistant Set Managers Oliver Berger Annick Wiedenmann Set Runners Jan Bludau Holger Köhler-Kaess Kamil Friebel Martin Pust Paul Rohlfs Trainee Assistant Director Katrin Arendt Set Intern Luisa Lossau First Assistant Director Claudia Beewen Second Assistant Director Katharina Hofmann Continuity/Script Supervisor Matthias Junge Casting Assistant Kirstin Plotz Alexandra Montag Extras Casting Iris Müller Assistant Camera Nicolay Gutscher 2nd Assistant Camera Alexander Bscheidl Video Operator Theresa von Eltz Gaffer Michael ‘Rossi’ Röska Lighting Technicians Florian Wentzel Holger Löhner Jürgen Ruge

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Martin Sell Michael Koschorreck Ralph Leopold Richard Nitsche Stefan Eckert Key Grip Stephan Sommersberg Best Boy Grip Heiko Kohl Art Direction Christiane Rothe Assistant Production Designer Christian Sitta Set Designer Klaus Spielhagen Props Olaf Kronenthal Assistant Property Master (indoor) Sandra Zimmerle Prop Driver Axel Wiczorke Location Scouts Erika Falk Thomas Duchnicki Martin Zillger Ana-Mona MüllerSchwerin Set Construction Danny Stuchlik Frank Noack Det Auell Construction Blackbox Markus Schröder Gonda Hinrichs Domino Design Painters Felix Gallo Daniela von Waberer

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Extra Cars Dorothee Weingarten Design Michael Roggemann Osthafen Design Frank Brückner Spiegel Cover Design Titelredaktion der Spiegel Televisual Devices Dieter Klucke V&M Filmservice Uwe Helfrich Wiretapping Devices Dr Dutka Setis Cine Elektronik Costume Assistant Najad Kirchberger Wardrobe Susanne Paulus-Segerath Kerstina Schemmel Wardrobe Assistants Anne Dettmer Franziska Becher Additional Wardrobe Ulrike Plehn Lena Harlan Stefanie Schulze Assistant Makeup Artists (Extras) Adella Selzer Karla Meirer Cornelia Wenzel Christine Neubauer Tamar Aviv Researcher Nicole Wolfarth Special Effects Hans Seck Adrian Lorberth (as Adrian Lorbert) Stunts

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Alister Mazzotti Stills Photography Hagen Keller Making of Thorsten Schneider Catering Götterspeisen Assistant Editors/ Postproduction Maria Stiernmann Julie Bargeton Sylvain Coutandin Janina Herhoffer Olivia Retzer Music Consultant Jörg Stempel Orchestra The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor Adam Klemens Music Supervisor (Tadlow Music) James Fitzpatrick Music Recording/Mixing Engineer Jan Holzner Music Recordist (Preproduction) Philipp Fabian Kölmel (as Philipp F. Kölmel) Prints/Processing CinePostproduction Project Support Stefan Müller Gabriela Schultze Ute Lingner Angela Brunn Colour Timer Maik Strauch (as Mike Strauch)

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Negative Cutting Manuela Buhtz Opticals Johannes Mautner Frank Rohlfing Boom Operator Oliver Schnug Sound Editing CinePostproduction Sound Postproduction Manager Manni Gläser Dialogue Editors Eva Claudius Andrea Koschmieder Foley Artist Jörn Poetzl Foley Editor João Da Costa Pinto ADR Supervisor Tobias Kunze ADR Recordist Andreas Hinz ADR Assistant Mark Wegner Mixing Assistant Günther Schönbein Wolfi Müller Film Equipment Panther Rental Lenses Vantage Film Film Stock Kodak Vision PR Just Publicity Anke Zindler Set Press Via Berlin Petra Meyer Hilde Läufle

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Legal Advisors Nörr Stiefenhofer Lutz Dr Martin Diesbach Copyright Clearance Andreas Kirnberger Elfriede Happe Insurance Caninenberg & Schouten Klaus Eisenberger Bank DZ Bank München Andreas Brey Beate Lukas Historical Consultants Professor Dr Manfred Wilke, Jörg Drieselmann, MfS Oberstleutnant A.D., Wolfgang Schmidt, Bert Neumann, Dr Henning Rischer, Gisela Spiering, Gisela Pucher, Klaus Spielhagen, Brigitta Pistorius, ‘Colonel’ Mario Schulz, Dr Wolfgang Dutka, Dominique Insomnia, Christoph Hein Special Thanks to Peter Rommel, Jutta Frech, Bettina Reitz, Wolfgang Braun, Maike Haas, Jan Mojto, Dirk Schürfhoff, Professor Manfred Heid, Wolfgang Krusche, Bernd Hausler, Rainer Lehnardt, Jörg Stempe, Susanne Hildebrand, Sebastian Henckel-Donnersmarck, Marianne Birthler

Many Thanks to Behörde der Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der Ehemaligen DDR, Stasi Museum, Normannenstrasse, Astak E.V., Bürgerkomitee Leipzig E.V. für die Auflösung der Ehemaligen Staatssicherheit (MfS), Adlershof Requisitenund Kostümfundus, Akzo Nobel GmbH, Alexander Kollmorgen, Alfred Holighaus, Andreas Rothbauer, Anja Dörken, Anna-Maria Henckel von Donnersmarck, Anne Delventhal, Augustin and Amelie D’Aboville, Apothekenmuseum Cottbus, Berliner Ensemble, Frau Hübner, Barbara Brecht-Schall, Berliner Schultheiss Brauerei, Frau Rudloff, Birthe Klinge, Bernhard Hoestermann, Charité, Frau Bohrmann, Boris Bergmann, Christian and Monica Ledoux, Christian Boosz, Com. De.Köstum Fundus Berlin, Christoph Hochhäusler, DFFB, Claudia Löwe, Dr Klaus Schaefer, Dr Johannes Kreile, Dr Hans-Christian Loitsch

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and wife, Dr Mariele Büscher, Eichborn Verlag, Frau Jonas, ElektrikSun Berlin, Berg family, Wiedemann family, Felix and Valerie Dohna, Ferdinand Dohna, Franka Böttcher, Franziska Heller, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frau Börnk, Frau Börner, Frau Rüdiger, FTA Film- und Theaterausstattung, Gabriele Pfennigsdorf, Gina Bergmann, Hebbel Theater, Susanne Görries, Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, Martin Stier, HFF München, Ingo Politz, Johannes Schultz, Julius Reinfeldt, Jürgen Lemke, JVC Deutschland GmbH, Katrin Näher, Keimfarben, Kerstin Schmidtke, Kirsten Niehuus, Klaviere in Potsdam, Andreas Vollbrecht, Kostümund Requisitenfundus des Studio Babelsberg, Leo-Ferdinand Henckel von Donnersmarck, Mahée Thorak, Mateko, Maxim Gorki Theater, Frau Marquart and Frau Nola, Neelsmobil, Neues Deutschland, Dr Dietmar Bartsch, Uncle Ehrenfried Schütte, Peter Benz, Peter Dinges, Peter Sturm, Professor Dr

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Peter Raue, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Tanja Würfel, Sophie and Georg Zolchow, Spiegel Verlag, Suhrkamp Verlag, Thomas Zeipelt, Theaterkunst Berlin, Veuve Cliquot, Volksbühne Berlin, Volker Engelmann Thanks to Erna Baumbauer, ZBF Berlin, Hoestermann, Fitz & Skoglund Agents, Ute Nicolai, Sybille Flöter, Britta Imdahl, Girke Management, Agentur Scherf, Margarita Kling, Reed & Pauly, Daniela Stibitz Management, Vogel, Lars Meier Management, Karin Freitag, Gesichter, Drews, Werdenberg Management, Helga Retzlaff, Lindig, Ten 4 U, Conaect, Type Face, Inka Stelljes, KJ Entertainment, Karin Schieck, and the entire Buena Vista International Team Film clips ‘Ackerbau und Viehzucht in Thüringen’ with permission from Dra. RBB Media Programmvertrieb; ‘Erinnerung an die Marie A.’ by Bertolt Brecht from Bertolt Brechts

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Hauspostille, © Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 1927. Renewal Copyright 1968 by Helene Weigel-Brecht, Berlin, with permission from Suhrkamp Verlages, Frankfurt-am-Main; ‘Ich würde, wenn ich wüsste, dass ich könnte’, performed by 4 PS, lyrics by Kurt Demmler, composed by Franz Bartzsch, published by Edition Air Franz; ‘Gral’, performed by Manfred Ludwig Sextett featuring Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, composed by ErnstLudwig Petrowsky; ‘E.W. als Gruss’, performed by Manfred Ludwig Sextett featuring Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, composed by Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky; ‘Champus-Lied’, performed by Angelika Mann, composed by Franz Bartzsch, lyrics by Fred Gert, published by Edition Air Franz; ‘Wie ein Stern’, performed by Frank Schöbel, composed by Hans-Georg Schmiedecke, lyrics by Dieter Lietz, published by RobaMusikverlage; ‘Rock’n’Roll im Stadtpark’, performed by Pankow, composed by Jürgen Ehle, lyrics by Jürgen Ehle; ‘Stell dich mitten in den Regen’,

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performed by Bayon, composed by Christoph Theusner, lyrics by Wolfgang Borchert, with permission of Sony BMG Music Entertainment (Germany) GmbH; ‘Ut Jucundas’, composed by Gabriel Yared, published by YAD Music/1530 Music, with permission of Gabriel Yared CAST Martina Gedeck Christa-Maria Sieland Ulrich Mühe Captain Gerd Wiesler Sebastian Koch Georg Dreyman Ulrich Tukur Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz Thomas Thieme Minister Bruno Hempf Hans-Uwe Bauer Paul Hauser Volkmar Kleinert Albert Jerska Matthias Brenner Karl Wallner Charly Hübner Udo Herbert Knaup Gregor Hessenstein Bastian Trost prisoner 227 Marie Gruber Mrs Meineke Volker Michalowski (as Zack Volker

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Michalowski) typewriting expert Werner Daehn officer in uniform Martin Brambach Officer Meyer Hubertus Hartmann Egon Schwalber Thomas Arnold Nowack Hinnerk Schönemann Second Lieutenant Axel Stigler Paul Fassnacht Uncle Frank Hauser Ludwig Blochberger Benedikt Lehmann Paul Maximilian Schüller boy with ball Susanna Kraus Andrea Gabi Fleming prostitute ‘Ute’ Michael Gerber dentist Dr Czimmy Fabian von Klitzing news presenter Harald Polzin guard Sheri Hagen ‘Martha’ 1991 Gitta Schweighöfer ‘Anja’ 1984 Elja-Duša Kedveš ‘Anja’ 1991 Hildegard Schroedter ‘Elena’ 1984 Inga Birkenfeld ‘Elena’ 1991/BStU employee

Philipp Kewenig man arresting Christa Jens Wassermann ‘Rolf’ Andi WenzkeFalkenau Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky band leader Manfred Ludwig Sextett band Kai Ivo Baulitz bookseller uncredited Charlene Beck Cuban pupil Ralf Ehrlich colleague in Stasi canteen Anabelle D. Munro theatre actress Klaus Münster Erich Mielke (voice) Production Details Filmed between 28 October and 21 December 2004 in Berlin. 35mm 2.35:1 Colour Running time: 137 minutes Release Details German premiere on 15 March 2006 in Berlin; German theatrical release 23 March 2006 by Buena Vista International UK theatrical release 2006 by Lionsgate UK

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Bibliography Abel, Marco, ‘Intensifying Life: The Cinema of the “Berlin School”’, Cineaste vol. 33, no. 4 (2008). Available at: . Abel, Marco, ‘The Berlin School’, in Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, Denis Göktürk and Claudia Sandberg (eds), The German Cinema Book, vol. 2 (London: BFI, 2020), pp. 252–61. Berghahn, Daniela, ‘DEFA’s Afterimages: Looking Back at the East from the West in Das Leben der Anderen and Barbara’, in Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke (eds), Re-imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in Its National and Transnational Context (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016), pp. 312–34. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre. Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 33–42. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 33–42. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘The Street Scene’, in John Willett (ed.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), pp. 121–9. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘Remembering Marie A.’, in John Willet and Ralph Manheim (eds), Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913–1956 (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 35–6. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘The Songs’, in John Willett and Ralph Manheim (eds),

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