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An Oscar Winner Featuring a Great Performance

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, The Lives of Others (2006) is a suspenseful, psychologically intense drama. It is set in the Cold War era and centers around an operative for the Stasi, East Germany's repressive internal security police. The movie has much in common with a spy thriller, but it achieves substantial resonance by following a protagonist who works his way through a moral quandary.


The central character is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi captain assigned to conduct surveillance on a writer who possesses great personal charm. At first Wiesler believes he's investigating a probable enemy of the state, but he soon learns his assignment came about not so much from ideology as from lust: a disgusting government bigwig has developed a strong sexual attachment to the writer's girlfriend. As Wiesler's surveillance continues, he finds himself becoming increasingly sympathetic toward the writer, and he is faced with a series of decisions.

One of the major strengths of The Lives of Others is the compelling, nuanced performance by Ulrich Mühe. He portrays a character who does not talk about his feelings and maintains a tight control over external displays of emotion, yet Mühe manages to convince us that Wiesler undergoes change. In the audio commentary on the DVD, the film's director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, describes Mühe as the greatest stage actor in Eastern Germany.

Also, Mühe appeared in many television programs and movies. Unfortunately, however, he passed away in 2007.

A Vision of East German Life That Doesn't Punish the Audience

It would be easy to make a film about drab East Germany and the dreaded Stasi that is unrelentingly grim, but writer-director von Donnersmarck included a variety of elements in The Lives of Others that keep viewers from getting too depressed. For example, Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck, the actors who play the writer and his girlfriend, are easy on the eyes. Also, these two characters live together in a spacious, artistically furnished apartment where they sometimes make love.

In addition, music has an important role in the film. In one scene, the writer plays an elegant, evocative piano piece titled "Sonata for a Good Man," and this provides a musical motif that is heard elsewhere as well.

There's also a strain of dark humor in parts of the movie. The scene that best exemplifies this takes place in the Stasi commissary, where an employee whose job is to steam open sealed mail tells a funny joke about feared East German dictator Erich Honecker.

But von Donnersmarck's stroke of genius was to have the final 15 minutes of the movie take place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That permitted him to bring his story to an ending that is both satisfying and upbeat.

An Excellent Filmmaker's Commentary

On the DVD, writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck provides an outstanding audio commentary for The Lives of Others, which is his debut feature-length movie. Although the film is in German, von Donnersmarck delivers his commentary in fluent English, spoken with only a trace of an accent.

His remarks about Ulrich Mühe are fascinating. Von Donnersmarck says that the Stasi kept voluminous files on the actor, and four of his colleagues in his theater group informed on him. The filmmaker goes on to claim that when Mühe gained access to Stasi records, he discovered that his wife of six years was listed as an informer.

Von Donnersmarck discusses almost every aspect of production. To capture the feel of East Germany, he avoided reds and blues and stayed with a color scheme of grays, greens and beiges. He also talks about using real Stasi equipment, which he mostly obtained from a private collector. Where possible, he shot on location, including in the real Stasi archives, now made into a research center.

He gives details about the timeline in his movie, explaining that the first two hours are set in late 1984 and early 1985 to correspond to the period immediately before Gorbachev came to power and brought glasnost (openness) to the Communist world. Other key historical dates impacting the story include the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the opening of the Stasi files to the public in 1991.

Making-Of Documentary, Filmmaker Interview, Deleted Scenes

The DVD contains an above-average making-of documentary. It's in German and runs a little over 19 minutes. In it you hear from the producers and principal actors. Sebastian Koch says he practiced four hours a day for six weeks to be able to play "Sonata for a Good Man" on the piano. There's also a historical consultant, who states that the film "reveals the mechanisms of a dictatorship."

Another DVD extra is a 30-minute English-language interview with writer-director von Donnersmarck. This was conducted at the Toronto Film Festival, and the filmmaker basically gives a condensed version of the information in his audio commentary. But he does make the interesting remark that "in life, there is an axis with at one end principle and at the other end feeling. The truth lies in the boring middle."

Finally, the DVD contains seven deleted scenes with optional English-language commentary by von Donnersmarck. These have a total running time of about nine minutes, and all were cut to speed up pacing. An interesting thing arose in connection with the deleted scene where a character reads aloud a brief excerpt from Brecht's "Animal Poems." Von Donnersmarck says that Brecht's daughter wouldn't give them permission to use the excerpt.

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