The Lives of Others

It is a tribute to the richness of the Lives of Others that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi—the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honor—or, in practical terms, the survival—of the state. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus said. The German Democratic Republic offered its own version: watch thy neighbor, then pick up thy phone.

The movie begins in 1984. The Stasi machine still fulfills its Orwellian function, training its sights on anyone who might be construed as seditious. All the more surprising, then, that Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) should have escaped censure. He is a playwright. He is handsome, affable, and draped in a corduroy suit that must have been made in the West; his live-in girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), is also his leading lady, and supporters of compulsory egalitarianism would consider her beauty an insult. Yet the fact remains that Dreyman is a pet talent of the state—“the only non-subversive writer we have,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), Wiesler’s cheery superior. As for Sieland, she is, in the words of a government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), “the loveliest pearl of the G.D.R.” He should know, the swine.

One evening, Wiesler attends the première of a Dreyman play. What is it that alerts him? The curtain call, brimming with a warmth that he, as a Stasi operative, will never feel? The kiss that Christa-Maria exchanges with Dreyman? Or,...