The Lives of Others (2006) Script Review | #52 WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century

A gripping tale of espionage, love, and betrayal behind the Iron Curtain of East Germany.

Logline: In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.

Written by: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

SCRIPT UNAVAILABLE!

A Stasi agent bugs a house and begins to develop what might be termed as a ‘parasocial’ relationship with its occupants. It is a deeply human if implausible scenario about what happens when an officer of the state becomes conflicted about the enemy he is spying on, and his gradual willingness to protect them from the very apparatus that put him there in the first place. I say deeply human because it is a reminder about how ideologies force men and women to do things they might otherwise never have considered; I say implausible because no Stasi officer would have ever stuck their necks out for an ordinary citizen or defied their superiors in reality. But in Florian von Donnersmarck’s hands, we forgive these trespasses because the merits outweigh the suspension of disbelief.

Sadly, no script is available for The Lives of Others, so all I have to go on is the film. That’s a shame because Donnersmarck has crafted a story that echoes classics such as The Conversation—which is also about surveillance— and Rear Window, which taps into themes of voyeurism. But we’ll make do with what we do have and try to reverse-engineer the images into words.

The premise is simple. Captain Wiesler is one of the Stasi’s best interrogators. He is meticulous and patient in his methods of breaking people to confess the truth, shown in an opening sequence in which he relentlessly interrogates a prisoner and succeeds in worming out the information he wants— which is then played and dissected in a classroom.

The scene achieves two objectives: It allows Wiesler to explain his process to the audience, and it shows exactly why it would be dangerous for any person to fall into his crosshairs. When his friend and superior, Lt. Colonel Anton Grubitz, recruits him to monitor one of East Germany’s top playwrights, Georg Dreyman, and his partner, actress Christa-Maria Sieland, you know at once that they are doomed.

Why is Dreyman put under surveillance? It is not because he is a political agitator like his mentor, Jerska; in fact, Dreyman shows himself to be pro-communist. No, it’s because Minister of Culture Bruno Hempf is infatuated with Sieland and wants any excuse to get Dreyman out of the way.

When Wiesler learns about Hempf’s personal reasons for this mission, he isn’t merely disappointed— it primes the Stasi Hauptmann to turn against his superiors. Unlike the career-climbing Grubitz, Wiesler is a true believer in communism. We learn this when he chooses to sit at the table with the lower-ranking officers at the canteen in practicing equality; though in doing so, he unwittingly condemns an officer to misfortune when the man chooses to crack an untimely joke about East German leader Erich Honecker in Grubitz’s presence.

Wiesler’s turning point begins when Jerska kills himself, and a grief-stricken Dreyman plays Sonate vom Guten Menschen (Sonata for a Good Man) on the piano (earlier, Jerska had given him the sheet music as a birthday present). At this point, Wiesler has already broken into the apartment and stolen a Brecht book to read; he is moved to tears by the music. Gradually, he begins to falsify the surveillance records especially as the passive Dreyman begins to rebel. Dreyman publishes an anonymous article in Spiegel about the suicide rates in the German Democratic Republic that infuriates the Stasi. It also puts pressure on Wiesler because they suspect Dreyman but can’t prove it.

Dramatic irony steeps The Lives of Others in tragedy. Although Wiesler begins to act with good intentions, he also winds up causing severe damage to Dreyman and Sieland. When Dreyman and his friend Paul pretend to defect to West Berlin in order to test whether the apartment is bugged, Wiesler chooses not to make the call to the checkpoint. But in doing so, Dreyman is lulled into a false sense of security. This matters because Spiegel gives him a special typewriter to write his articles that the Stasi cannot trace. It’s the smoking gun that the Stasi needs to put Dreyman away.

And in the end, it is Sieland who gives Dreyman away. The threat of being blacklisted from the theater overwhelms her, and forces her to divulge the secret location of the typewriter. But Wiesler, whose sympathies are with the artists, is able to remove the typewriter before Grubitz can get there. Alas! Sieland deliberately runs into the path of a truck rather than live with the shame of her guilt. Although Dreyman escapes the clutches of the Stasi, he loses Sieland. Wiesler does not fare better. Although Grubitz can’t understand how he did it, he knows Wiesler interfered and has him demoted to 20 years sealing letters. Luckily, the Berlin Wall falls four years later. But even then, his circumstances never improve, as Wiesler ends up working as a mailman.

Dramatic irony creates suspense, and this story is loaded with it. The Lives of Others also works because it paints Wiesler, Dreyman, and Sieland in complex colors. Sieland chooses to sleep with Hempf not because she wants to, but because she knows that in such circumstances, such choices are unavoidable. When Dreyman learns about it, he doesn’t confront her directly or condemn her. Although saddened, he understands why she had to do it. The story is a cautionary tale about what happens when we hand over our lives to an oppressive state apparatus like that which existed in East Germany. In many ways, their successful surveillance of citizens surpassed that of the Nazis at the time, considering technological limitations.

Donnersmarck insists that The Lives of Others is not a Stasi story. His aims were simpler: he wanted to portray the universality of music, and how it can touch something deep inside us. He came up with the story when he remembered Maxim Gorky once said that Lenin didn’t want to listen to Beethoven’s Appasionata because it made him want to “tell people sweet stupid things and stroke their heads” in times when it was “necessary to smash in those heads, smash them in without mercy.” At the time, Donnersmarck was in film school and struggling to complete an assignment where he had to come up with 14 original movie treatments in 8 weeks. An image popped into his head, “a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening to what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his idea, and what is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him.” Galvanized, Donnersmarck had written a treatment within a couple of hours. Though it would take him a few more years to research the Stasi, and learn that unlike Wiesler, few operatives truly regretted their actions.

The implausibility of the scenario does not erase what Donnersmarck has achieved here. He captures the feeling of living in fear and paranoia, not just from the state but from each other. Just as the Stasi turned Sieland against Dreyman, they were successful in turning friends and neighbours against the other, causing everyone to view each other, in the words of Elvis Presley, with “suspicious minds.” It also portrays the importance of music as an instrument of connection— for when you can’t trust or have faith in anybody, what else can you do but trust to music for hope and humanity?

Notes:

Riding, Alan (7 January, 2007) | Behind the Berlin Wall, Listening to Life (NY Times)

‘The Lives of Others’ Press Booklet (Sony Classics PDF)