Even many of those Germans who aren't particularly culturally literate themselves like to refer to their country as "das Land der Dichter und Denker" (the country of poets and thinkers). Although, unfortunately, for much of the 20th century the description "Land der Richter und Henker" (judges/executioners) would perhaps be more apt, nevertheless the former description does speak to a very attractive feature of the German social landscape, its confidence that to be a land of poets and thinkers would be worthwhile.
(Imagine an American calling the United States a country of poets and thinkers! This is not to say that there aren't great poets and thinkers in the United States; it's simply that Americans who aren't culturally literate would interpret that description either as a falsehood or an insult, whereas those who are would interpret it, at best, ironically.)
All of this is prelude to a discussion of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's outstanding film, "The Lives of Others." Many will -- and have -- interpreted the film either as a penetrating dissection of the levels of deception and soul-devouring violations of privacy that went to the core of the German Democratic Republic or as a tragic love story of innocents who -- to echo a line from the dramatist-protagonist of the film, Dreymann -- are crushed under the wheel of that inhuman system.
There is another way to read the film, however ... not against those other two interpretations, but alongside them. The film, its loving portrayal of those shabbily elegant, art-filled, book-lined, music-echoing apartments in Prenzlauer Berg, the writers' colony in the center of East Berlin, is a paean to the ideal of a land of poets and thinkers.
One such apartment is that of the playwright Dreymann. Unbeknownst to him, his apartment and his life have been infiltrated and interrogated by the Stasi (Staatssicherheitspolizei, the State Security Police) in the person of Stasi captain -- and surveillance and interrogation expert -- Gerd Wiesler. The contrast between Dreyman's apartment and Wiesler's utterly different, sterile, modern apartment, one in which only the television serves as a source of distraction, underscores, certainly, the emptiness of the life of a servant of the totalitarian state that was the GDR.
However, I couldn't help looking beyond the particular political circumstances in which the film takes place to see an even more universal message. How many apartments in 1984 West Berlin, or in the unified, utterly westernized, Berlin of today, parallel Wiesler's apartment in being devoid of culture? How many people, like Wiesler, lead lives, at work and at home, of quiet desperation? The underlying, redemptive message of the film is that culture has the power to change lives -- that it's the work of poets and thinkers that gives our lives depth and meaning.
One reason that non-German-speakers might have ignored the more universal themes within the film is that class subtleties that existed even within the GDR, portrayed through the actors' accents, cannot be transmitted through subtitles. Thus, Wiesler's assistant in the surveillance, Udo, immune to the effects of an exposure to Dreymann's world, speaks with the broad Berlin accent of the working class, both East and West -- a seemingly intentional choice, given that the actor who played Udo, Charly Hübner, was born in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, an area not known for a Berliner dialect.
Such subtle clues are not the only ones that indicate that it would be a mistake to inoculate ourselves against the force of the film's argument by interpreting it as limited with respect to the historical phenomenon that was the GDR. It ought not escape notice, for example, that the minister who ordered Wiesler's surveillance of Dreymann in the first place, Minister Bruno Hempf, seems to have survived the transition to a unified Germany quite well; he's among the well-dressed audience members of the performance of Dreymann's play in 1991, after unification.
The film is the 33-year-old von Donnersmarck's first, and, in a few places, it shows. The long shots of the Stasi workers' first approach to Dreyman's apartment building in order to install surveillance equipment provide just one example; cinematographically, those shots display an awkward lack of depth of field. Such criticisms, however, are insignificant in comparison to the magnificence of von Donnersmarck's achievement. (Writing in The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz invoked Citizen Kane in speaking of the impressiveness of von Donnersmarck's debut; that's a bit of an overstatement, but it's high praise indeed that it really is only a bit of an overstatement.)
One would be remiss in closing a discussion of the film's greatness were one to ignore the consistently exceptional quality of the actors. As Georg Dreyman, Sebastian Koch recalls a young Bruno Ganz, both in his easy, endearing physical presence and in his prodigious talent. Martina Gedeck, who plays Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman's leading lady and romantic partner, is outstanding, recalling a younger Anjelica Huston circa "Crimes and Misdemeanors."
The dramatic fulcrum of the film, however, is the Stasi captain Gerd Wiesler. Von Donnersmarck has acknowledged that the idea for "The Lives of Others" came to him when he recalled a statement on Beethoven's "Appasionata," attributed by Maxim Gorky to Lenin. According to Gorky, Lenin said:
I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps naively so, to think that people can work such miracles. ... But I can't listen to music very often. It affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty.
In portraying Wiesler, Ulrich Mühe has crafted a performance that is absolutely remarkable. The subtlety with which he indicates the way in which his exposure to the lives of Dreyman and Sieland and their companions, the poets, musicians, and writers filling the book-lined apartments of Prenzlauer Berg with discussions of art and ideas, has affected his nerves, transporting him from the sterile hell of his existence, is yet another testament to the transformative power of art, and is the astonishing, superhuman miracle at the center of this miraculous filmic achievement.
Comments