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. (more…)
