The Lives of Others follows a playwright, Georg Dreyman, and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, as they struggle through life in the authoritarian state of 1984 East Berlin. The government maintains tight control of artistic activity, blacklisting or otherwise silencing artists who are critical of the political system.Dreyman’s plays are sympathetic to communism and he is generally liked or tolerated by those in power. When even he comes under full surveillance, however, he achieves in his life what the censors will not allow him to achieve on the stage; he touches the soul of an audience he doesn’t even know he has, and opens that soul to possibilities it had never before conceived.
Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler is the stazi (secrete police) official tasked with spying on Dreyman and Christa-Maria. As the movie unfolds, Wiesler’s naive idealism and belief in the communist project is challenged on the one hand witnessing the blatant corruption and hypocrisy of powerful party officials, and on other hand by a growing sympathy with the targets of his surveillance.
His sympathy for them develops and deepens over the course of the movie just as our own does. Indeed, as Wiesler listens to the lives of Dreyman and Sieland, the entire movie unfolds as a “play within a play,” allowing the film to explore the connections between art and life in a more explicit way than would otherwise be possible.
While the censors would never allow Dreyman to produce a play portraying the struggles of life under the GDR (the East German government), as Weisler spies on him and Sieland, their very lives become something of a play. Rather than an dramatic imitation of life staged in a theater, it is the drama of real life into whichWiesler finds himself drawn. Experiencing the drama of Dreyman and Sieland’s real lives brings Weisler to an understanding of the suffering which the government he works for has created for its citizens.
The transformative power of art emerges as a theme throughout the movie. In one amusing scene, Dreyman searches his entire apartment for his copy of a book of poetry. The scene then cuts to Wiesler in his own apartment reading the book of poems which he had “borrowed” from Dreyman. It is clear that he reads the poetry not as Western propaganda or through a political lens, as he may have read it before. Probably for the first time in his life, he reads poetry openly, as one who is searching for something.
Later, in what represents the definitive turning point in Wiesler’s loyalties, Dreyman plays “Sonata for a Good Man,” which Jaska had given him just prior to his suicide. As Dreyman plays a kind of private requiem for his friend, tears fall from Weisler’s eyes. Dreyman rhetorically asks Seiland, “Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean really heard it, truly be a bad person?” This is perhaps the closest the film comes to articulating its central theme. Weisler truly hears the music. It is after this that Weisler begins submitting false reports to his superiors in an attempt to protect Dreyman.
If drama is in some way an imitation of life, and if drama has the power to transform people’s lives and bring them to a deeper and richer understanding of themselves and the world, then this film is a compelling reminder that the reality which drama imitates has the same power. Indeed, whatever insight or truth a playwright tries to convey through drama must first be gleaned from real life. No matter how successfully and powerfully the dramatist – or any artist for that matter – is able to distill those insights for the audience, the source of those insights must ultimately be human experience.
Dreyman’s and Sieland’s lives provide for Wiesler that kind of raw material from which an artist might work. Wiesler is able to appreciate the insights which his surveillance of these lives has given him even without an artistic interpretation, and in so doing he displays that necessary quality of a true artist; to draw inspiration from life.
Wiesler’s actions in protecting Dreyman and trying to save Sieland demonstrate the authentic nature of this inspiration. Wiesler does these things with no thought of recognition, praise, or reward. Indeed, he has no reasonable hope that his career will ever advance out of the mail-room to which he is re-assigned. He does these things rather out of the necessity of his whole being. Having glimpsed these insights, he literally cannot do otherwise than act as he does. Such is the nature of truth when it is authentically grasped.
This becomes a model for life. By orienting his life in accordance with these deep insights into the value and dignity of people and acting consistently from them, Wiesler finds a fulfillment and satisfaction that is deeper than anything his political party can offer.
It is this same conviction and authenticity which first attracts Wiesler to Dreyman and Sieland. They act authentically as best they can in the context of the oppressive East German government. Much of the tension of the movie hinges on the state preventing artists from acting as they must to be authentic to themselves. This control literally destroys two artists,Jenska and Sieland , by stifling them or forcing them to actively betray the things for which they live. Indeed, the high suicide rate in East Germany as a result of the oppression is precisely whatDreyman addresses in his essay.
The denouement of the movie reinforces these themes. Just as Dreyman and Sieland touch Weisler’s soul without even knowing it, simply through trying to live an authentic life, so Weisler touches Dreyman. Years later, as Dreyman is able to examine the records the government kept on him, he is able to “watch” Weisler just as Weisler spied on him. Dreyman is no less affected by Weisler than Weisler was by him. Dreyman draws new inspiration from life (just as Weisler learned to do). Being an artist, however, Dreyman takes that inspiration and artistically presents it for the benefit of the rest of us.
Of course, we realize that all of these things are themselves artistic imitations of life. The characters of Dreyman, Sieland and Weisler are fictional and we are just watching a movie. It is a film, however, that encourages us and challenges us to take those themes of life, art and authentic living and apply them to our own lives.
