Quotes from The Lives of Others

Gerd Wiesler: No. It’s for me.

Gerd Wiesler: An innocent prisoner will become more angry by the hour due to the injustice suffered. He will shout and rage. A guilty prisoner becomes more calm and quiet. Or he cries. He knows he’s there for a reason. The best way to establish guilt or innocence is non-stop interrogation.

Anton Grubitz: I have to show you something: “Prison Conditions for Subversive Artists: Based on Character Profile”. Pretty scientific, eh? And look at this: “Dissertation Supervisor, A. Grubitz”. That’s great, isn’t it? I only gave him a B. They shouldn’t think getting a doctorate with me is easy. But his is first-class. Did you know that there are just five types of artists? Your guy, Dreyman, is a Type 4, a “hysterical anthropocentrist.” Can’t bear being alone, always talking, needing friends. That type should never be brought to trial. They thrive on that. Temporary detention is the best way to deal with them. Complete isolation and no set release date. No human contact the whole time, not even with the guards. Good treatment, no harassment, no abuse, no scandals, nothing they could write about later. After 10 months, we release. Suddenly, that guy won’t cause us any more trouble. Know what the best part is? Most type 4s we’ve processed in this way never write anything again. Or paint anything, or whatever artists do. And that without any use of force. Just like that. Kind of like a present.

Georg Dreyman: The state office for statistics on Hans-Beimler street counts everything; knows everything: how many pairs of shoes I buy a year: 2.3, how many books I read a year: 3.2 and how many students graduate with perfect marks: 6,347. But there’s one statistic that isn’t collected there, perhaps because such numbers cause even paper-pushers pain: and that is the suicide rate.

Gerd Wiesler: Madam?

Christa-Maria Sieland: Go away. I want to be alone.

Gerd Wiesler: Madam Sieland?

Christa-Maria Sieland: Do we know each other?

Gerd Wiesler: You don’t know me, but I know you. Many people love you for who you are.

Christa-Maria Sieland: Actors are never “who they are.”

Gerd Wiesler: You are. I’ve seen you on stage. You were more who you are than you are now.

Christa-Maria Sieland: So you know what I’m like.

Gerd Wiesler: I’m your audience.

Christa-Maria Sieland: I have to go.

Gerd Wiesler: Where to?

Christa-Maria Sieland: I’m meeting an old classmate. I…

Gerd Wiesler: You see? Just now, you weren’t being yourself.

Christa-Maria Sieland: No?

Gerd Wiesler: No.

Christa-Maria Sieland: So you know her well, this Christa-Maria Sieland. What do you think – would she hurt someone who loves her above all else? Would she sell herself for art?

Gerd Wiesler: For art? You already have art. That’d be a bad deal. You are a great artist. Don’t you know that?

Christa-Maria Sieland: And you are a good man.

More on cinematography

The Lives of Others was shot mainly at practical locations in Berlin; the production built one set, the interior of Wiesler’s high-rise apartment, in an empty warehouse. Cinematographer Bogdanski said, “Berlin has changed so much in the last 10 years that finding the right locations took almost two months”. “At one point we thought we might have to go to Bucharest, but we really wanted to be true to the story and shoot in Germany. The most challenging location to light was Dreyman’s apartment, where much of the film’s action is set. “It was on the third floor of an apartment building on a narrow street in a very crowded neighbourhood,” recalls Bogdanski. “Because of the schedule, we had to shoot day for day, day for night, and night for day there; it was a wintertime shoot, so the days were short, and Florian began each day with a thorough rehearsal of the scene at hand. Some of the scenes in the apartment are quite long, and we had to be ready to recreate daylight very quickly.” The light is the perpetual dusk of an unknown season and there’s a claustrophobic feeling to all of the shots that’s only lifted at the end. The camera rarely moves, so the sense of stasis is tangible too.

In some instances, the camerawork was influenced by a 70s film that was not at all political in nature: Love Story. “What Bodanski and I noticed when we analysed Love Story is that director  Arthur Miller uses quite smooth and inconspicuous editing, but from time to time, as if to show us what we’re seeing is real, he’ll have one shot that goes on forever and ever,” explains Donnersmarck. “I really like the idea of staying in one take for a long time, but inconspicuously, not in a dogmatic way. We did it, for example, in the scene where Dreyman is pretending to write in the foreground while Christa is getting dressed for her date with the minister in the background, and he confronts her about the affair. There are a few shots like that which go on for a very long time, but they seem natural. I stole that directly from Arthur Miller!”

Cinematography in The Lives of Others

The writer/director of The Lives of Others Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck recalls that in an early discussion about the picture’s look with cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski, he told the cameraman he wanted “to create a world where you feel the only warmth comes from the people themselves.” Bogdanski immediately understood this; like so many involved in The Lives of Others, the West Berlin native had encountered the chill of the GDR during his youth, when he crossed the border to visit relatives in East Germany. “I can still remember the smell and look of things in East Germany at that time,” says the 41-year-old cinematographer. “The streets were very dark. Everything was happening inside, in private. There were no big cafes outside, and public spaces were mostly empty.

Bogdanski said “Florian and I discussed The Lives of Others for more than two years.” “When we started to talk about visuals, we watched a lot of American films from the Seventies, some very interesting stuff: The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, The French Connection, Harold & Maude, M*A*S*H. Florian was very influenced by those films.” The director explains, “There was something about those political and psychological dramas that seemed so plausible in that setting – the characters seemed real and cool at the same time. Those filmmakers were aiming for greater realism, looking for light and images that wouldn’t immediately call attention to big studio sets and a certain level of artificiality. I also liked the films’ slightly subdued colours; they didn’t have the vulgarity that was present in the Sixties and somehow returned in the Eighties. The Seventies films have a strange dignity.”

In keeping with the muted palettes of many of those films, “we talked about not having too much contrast in The Lives of Others,” says Bogdanski. “I had never tried to create that kind of look before – I’d rather work in the opposite direction – and I was surprised when Florian said he wanted to do it. I didn’t like the thought at first. When you’re creating a soft contrast look, you have to be careful not to make it look too flat, too ugly; you have to work against it with another lighting concept. But then I thought, why not? A new director gives you a chance to try new things.”

Bogdanski decided to slightly desaturate the images by pull-processing the negative. “We never wanted the image to have grain, which is, of course, something else you can consider when you’re emulating the look of the Seventies,” he notes. “That’s a quality we never liked for this film. Both of the Vision2 stocks are virtually grain-free and looked fantastic when pull-processed.” Achieving the desired look through the digital-intermediate process was not even considered, he adds. “First of all, this was a very low budget film, about euro1.2 million. Second, Florian was determined to be analogue all the way, even down to recording the sound that way. The sound engineer had to find an old Nagra!” Donnersmarck adds, “I wanted The Lives of Others to be pure cinema, in a way – no digital effects, no major lab tricks. It became clearer and clearer that the film didn’t call for excessive stylization. Even though we did pull-processing, the effect is quite subtle.”

The Turning Point

The Lives of Others shows how East Germany’s paranoid secret police service, the Stasi, invaded the lives of so many of its own citizens, destroying many along the way. It is a very precise analysis of a police state but on another level, it asks if it’s possible to maintain one’s humanity in a totalitarian system.

Wiesler begins the film as a committed Stasi man, even conducting classes for new secret police recruits about interrogation methods but cracks begin to form in his worldview as he immerses himself in the lives of the artists he is spying on. The sterility of his own overly fastidious life is highlighted as he discovers the richness in the world of the urbane playwright and his talented girlfriend.

The turning point for the character occurs while Dreyman plays a sonata on the piano after his friend Jerska whose works have been banned by the regime kills himself and a tear rolls down Wiesler’s face as he begins to realise how cruel and bankrupt the system he is supporting actually is.

Director’s Portrait

When his film The Lives of Others was released Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was aware that the topic of Communist dictatorship would give rise to discussion, and what is more – that is exactly what he wanted. No system of spies in the world, the director knows, is as comprehensive as that of the GDR was: more than a quarter of a million people were employed by the “State Security” (Stasi) to sound out their fellow citizens. This is a bitter truth that has now – in the 17th year after German reunification – been examined in a feature film for the first time. Donnersmarck did not make his material into a didactic film, but backed a technique of emotionalising personification. Peter Schneider, German author and member of the German Film Award jury, summed this up: “For a long time, there was a tendency to portray the GDR as a state where no one really suffered and the Stasi was regarded as something of a joke.” He went on to say that The Lives of Others was the first serious attempt at showing how the Stasi terrorized millions of GDR citizens. Even though the Stasi officer and the poet that he keeps under surveillance were not taken directly from official files, Donnersmarck insists that his film plot is very close to reality. “Everything could have happened that way at that time in GDR history.”

The director experienced the Stasi-debate “as something necessary for Germany, but also as something sad. I can imagine that the success of, shall we say, Run Lola Run was a reason for pure celebration for Tom Tykwer. For me, there is also a sense of despair over The Lives of Others and its victory march. Daily, I receive letters from people who tell me how they were mistreated and how they recognise themselves in the film. And the poet Guenter Ullmann sent me one of his volumes of poetry, with a grateful dedication. He was the one who – after endless, brutal Stasi interrogations – had all his teeth pulled, because he was convinced that bugs had been implanted in them (in fact, his closest friend was an IM – an unofficial Stasi employee – something he simply could not fathom). And the next day, the actor Henry Huebchen tells an audience of millions that people in artists’ circles laughed at the Stasi rather than anything else. That is the kind of roller-coaster ride I have experienced over the last 4 months. I will be glad to leave the subject behind me. I have just turned down a big American project because it would have brought me back into contact with the same set of themes.”

From Director’s Portrait

Gerd Wiesler

The Lives of Others traces the gradual disillusionment of Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a highly skilled officer who works for the Stasi, East Germany’s all-powerful secret police. The changing behaviour of Wiesler is essential to the narrative progression of The Lives of Others.

The life of Wiesler is all about the lives of others. He is a devoted member of the Stasi, an organisation that keeps the country’s citizens under the most stringent surveillance. We see him first as an authority figure, lecturing operatives on the practice of interrogation, and in flashback we watch him practising what he preaches, using sleep deprivation to elicit the confession he wants to hear. Wiesler has an austere style and a single-minded approach, whether on or off duty. He’s a true believer in the state and in his job, a literal-minded, efficient operative who is fastidious about detail. His colleagues are nowhere near as thorough; his superiors are far more cynical. Yet – and it’s a little hard to believe that this hasn’t happened before, in a world in which surveillance is an almost compulsive state practice and blackmail and betrayal are accepted modes of behaviour – he’s a little shocked to discover that there’s an ulterior motive to the latest assignment he is handed.

Wiesler is given the job of collecting evidence against the famous playwright Georg Dreyman. The job begins after Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), a former classmate of Wiesler’s who now heads the Culture Department at the State Security, invites Wiesler to accompany him to the premiere of the new play by Dreyman, also attended by Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme). Minister Hempf tells Grubitz that he has doubts about the successful playwright’s loyalty to the SED, the ruling Socialist Unity Party, and implies that he would approve of a full-scale surveillance operation. Grubitz, eager to boost his own political future, entrusts the monitoring, or “Operative Procedure,” to Wiesler, who promises to oversee the case personally. Wiesler is also convinced that Dreyman cannot possibly be as loyal to the Party as has always been assumed.

However, Hempf’s distrust of Dreyman is not politically motivated. Hempf cannot take his eyes off the attractive lead actress Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman’s girlfriend. While Dreyman is away from their home, his apartment is systematically bugged. A neighbour who notices the operation is forced to keep silent by a personal threat. Wiesler sets up his surveillance headquarters in the attic of Dreyman’s apartment building, thus beginning Wiesler’s cold and calculating observation of the lives of the playwright and his girlfriend.

At first Weisler’s observations show that, unlike most of his artistic peers, Dreyman does not display any outwardly contempt for the GDR. Dreyman’s position slowly changes however, as he discovers that Christa-Maria has been pressured into a sexual relationship with Minister Hempf. When his close friend, theatre director Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) is driven to suicide after seven years of unofficial “blacklisting” by the government, Dreyman can no longer remain silent about the GDR. Now determined to alert the outside world about the conditions of life under the GDR, he begins a plot to place an article with the famous West German publication Der Spiegel, exposing the GDR’s policy of covering up the high suicide rates under the regime.

Wiesler, who has been monitoring all of Dreyman’s activities, finally has the proof he needs to destroy his subject and to serve the GDR by foiling Dreyman’s plot. But Wiesler’s unemotional façade is showing signs of erosion. While he observes the day-to-day life of Dreyman and Christa-Maria, he begins to be drawn into their world, which puts his own position as an impartial agent of the GDR into question. His immersion in “the lives of others,” in love, literature and freethinking, also makes Wiesler acutely aware of the shortfalls of his own existence.

When we first meet Wiesler and Dreyman we can understand them as opposites. Dreyman is a radical playwright and Wiesler is a member of the Stasi Party and as such works to police the output of people such as Dreyman. However by the end of the film we see that these characters have become less polarised, and through Wiesler’s actions the two men have an important connection. As Wiesler becomes more and more invested in his act of surveillance, a curious thing happens. He becomes an actor rather than an observer. Mühe, in subtle ways, shows a transformation in the body language of his character. It almost seems as if the relationship between the Stasi operative and his subject is reversed. Strangely, Wiesler the secret policeman becomes a creative figure, while the Dreyman takes on the role of the covert operator, the figure embroiled in secrecy and concealment. The consequences, however, are not what Wiesler intends them to be: control is an illusion.

A message of hope in The Lives of Others

Director Von Donnersmarck said, ‘One of the great challenges of modern film is to find a way of having a happy end – and that isn’t a 1930s cinema happy end, because that’s no longer appropriate to what we know about the world today. And to me, that consists of one thing: films should convey a message of hope. What is incredibly hard is facing the dark side of the world and trying to spin it into something somehow positive. Without lying.’

To achieve this, ‘The Lives of Others’ sets up a complex, fascinating relationship between Wiesler and Dreyman – between that of aggressor and victim, hunter and prey, where the two, despite never meeting, influence and affect each other.

Interiors in The Lives of Others

The look of East Germany was painstakingly recreated for The Lives of Others.  Did you note the lack of advertising or graffiti in the GDR?

In the film there are two dominant styles used in the interiors – the grey state style and the warmer personal style of Georg Dreyman. Georg’s apartment is large, airy and filled with old furniture and art, it is an artist’s home, but one before multimedia, computers and too much plastic. While not colourful, his home is warm, cosy and personal. Tones are browns and reds and plenty of dirty whites. This is the modest home of a person of passion and personal dignity. In the film all of the interiors are modest. None of them scream money, designer brands or seek to overpower. The rooms sit quietly back while the humanity of the inhabitants comes forward. As a viewer, it creates a rich experience, and reminds us that the aim of design is to enable humanity, not distract from it.

Mort and Richard review ‘The Lives of Others’

Cinema Scene’s Mort and Richard review “The Lives of Others”.

Lenin

Time Magazine named Vladimir Lenin as one of the twenty leaders and revolutionaries that helped define the political and social fabric of the twentieth century. Read their view of Lenin here.