Spy games

Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe) works for East Germany's secret police in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. (Sony Pictures Classics)

In the years before the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, when Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was a child, he and his family would occasionally travel from West to East Germany by car. Von Donnersmarck remembers a thickening of the air in the vehicle, a palpable anxiety, as the group approached the border. His parents were East German natives who left before the Wall went up, and every time they attempted to cross, the police stopped and interrogated them.

“I remember one time my mother was let out and taken somewhere else. After several hours, she came back all shaky. She had been strip-searched and humiliated,” says von Donnersmarck, folding his 6-foot-8-inch frame into a Toronto hotel room chair. “I thought: My mother has the right to undress us and put us to bed, and here this powerful state can turn my mother into a child and undress her. It was very strange.”

The strangeness – a comically mild word – of the communist state next door inspired the 33-year-old writer-director’s Oscar-nominated first feature, The Lives of Others. An Academy Award for best foreign-language film would be a nice addition to von Donnersmarck’s shelf, presumably buckling already under the weight of seven recently won Lola Awards (the German Oscar), including best picture.

A domestic box-office smash, The Lives of Others is also one of the first films to confront head-on the mental and physical abuses perpetrated by the East German Ministry for State Security, the secret police known as the Stasi. The late Holocaust historian and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal once said: “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.” Estimates are that the Gestapo had 40,000 officials surveilling a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed at least 102,000 to control only 17 million. Even more chilling is the fact that up to 500,000 East German civilians may have acted as informers too, including thousands of children. And yet, only a handful of Stasi have ever been sentenced for systemic human rights violations.

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. (Jim Cooper/Associated Press)

“There is no closure in Germany,” von Donnersmarck says. “America is much better at examining the dark chapters of their historical past. Think how many great films have helped the American people look at their role in Vietnam. That’s courageous and important. If you can see something is not being talked about, it’s high time to make a film about it.”

The Lives of Others takes place in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when clenched Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe) – he looks like he has a broomstick for a spine – is assigned to spy on an apolitical playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck). While his colleagues relish the bureaucratic tyranny that is the job, Wiesler is actually a devout ideologue; he spies not for the turn-on, but because he truly believes it’s the right thing to do.

Yet while eavesdropping on the artists from an apartment attic, Wiesler experiences a slow, painful change of heart. An accidental encounter with a piece of music nudges him toward faint deliverance, with tragic consequences.

“Lenin once said to his friend Maxim Gorky that he didn’t want to listen to Beethoven’s Appassionata anymore, his favourite piece of music. He said something like: ‘It makes me want to stroke people’s heads and tell them stupid gentle things, but I have to smash in those heads without mercy in order to finish my revolution,’” quotes von Donnersmarck. That idea caused von Donnersmarck to imagine the cinematic possibility of a Lenin-like villain who is forced to listen to the Appassionata just before a moment of violence.

“I thought: Why would [a character] be listening to music that he doesn’t want to listen to? Maybe because he’s not expecting to hear music but is actually expecting something else. So suddenly this image popped in my head of a man listening to music with earphones on his head. He’s listening to someone who he thinks is going to be the enemy of his ideology but actually what he’s hearing is beautiful music. From that mental image came the entire story, in a few minutes, really.”

The elegant piece of music used in this pivotal scene, by composer Gabriel Yared (The English Patient), is called Sonata for a Good Man (“I don’t really like the Appassionata myself. Too old-fashioned,” laughs von Donnersmarck), a title of some irony in a film where the central characters flounder in the grey between good and evil. This great faith in the restorative power of art seems particularly European somehow, and romantic; would a government go after a playwright today?

“There’s always an attempt to control the artists,” von Donnersmarck says. “It’s interesting that the first thing Bush did with his new administration was to try to get Hollywood onside: ‘Support me in this war on terror! Don’t make un-American films! Talk about the values we stand for!’”

Von Donnersmarck was born in Cologne, and spent parts of his youth in Britain and the U.S. (hence his flawless, unaccented English). While a politics student at Oxford, he worked on a film with legendary director Richard Attenborough, who was at the university as a temporary professor.

“Most of my life, I wanted to be a novelist, but I realized it’s not the art of our times. Films can definitely have an impact on how things are perceived. I can really influence the mood of an entire people,” von Donnersmarck says.

Capt. Wiesler (Ulrich Muehe, rear) spies on Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) in The Lives of Others. (Sony Pictures Classics)

The only previous film about East German politics to make a ripple was 2003’s Good Bye Lenin!, a light, almost wistful look back at a nation outside capitalism's clutches. The Lives of Others is much straighter – a tense spy film wrapped in a political melodrama – and devoid of Cold War nostalgia. When von Donnersmarck began to research his script, the director spoke to many former Stasi members, and found little remorse in the community.

“I actually discovered this organization of former officers who joined together to clear the name of the Stasi. Mainly they pat each other on the shoulder for all the great things they did for communism. I even think that when they started telling me their stories, there was a slight sense of satisfaction over the fact that they could speak so freely now after 16 years. Nobody’s going to try you after 16 years.”

But why haven’t these officers been held accountable for invasions, humiliations, and in some cases, physical attacks – possibly even murder? Timing, perhaps: When the Wall came down, German courts were still dealing with perpetrators of the Holocaust. One wonders if the lack of official recourse has something to do with Germany’s complicated history; rightly or wrongly, the Holocaust may be enough psychic pain for one country to attempt to manage.

“There’s something to that idea, yes,” von Donnersmarck says. “People didn’t want to acknowledge that right after those 12 ominous years, that first dictatorship, followed a second dictatorship that lasted 40 years. They said, ‘Let’s just laugh about it and pretend it didn’t happen.’ But I don’t think that’s healthy. I think it’s worth exploring the darkness in one’s personal past and one’s national past, too.”

The director claims that the film’s popularity has resulted in a sudden increase in the number of Germans retrieving the formerly secret files kept by the Stasi, which are available to citizens in the same grey, hostile East Berlin state buildings where much of the film was shot. Ulrich Muehe, who plays Wiesler, discovered in his own files that his ex-wife had allegedly spied on him in the '80s. Von Donnersmarck is now worried that the government is looking to close the open archives, which require costly maintenance.

“I hope they don’t shut them down,” he says. “It takes time to confront your past. I see this in the case of my own parents. They haven’t asked for their files yet. It’s touchy. Perhaps a friend informed on them. They’re probably frightened of what they’ll find.”

The Lives of Others opens in Toronto and Montreal Feb. 9.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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