The Lives of Others (2006): At 20, the Oscar-Winning Stasi Thriller Is About a Spy Who Becomes an Audience

A man sits in an attic in East Berlin with headphones clamped over his ears. Below him, in an apartment he has wired from floor to ceiling, a playwright who has just learned that his oldest friend hanged himself sits down at the piano and plays the sheet music that friend gave him for his birthday. It's called "Sonata for a Good Man." Upstairs, Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, a man who has spent his life hearing other people's words as evidence, stops taking notes. A tear runs down a face that hasn't moved all day.

That's the whole of The Lives of Others in one image: a spy thriller in which the spy slowly turns into an audience. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut opened in Germany on March 23, 2006, beat Pan's Labyrinth for the foreign-language Oscar the next February, and turns 20 this year. It plays differently now that most of us carry a microphone in our pocket. We used to watch it as a film about being watched. Watch it again, and it's about what listening does to the person who listens.

Why It's a Masterpiece

The year is 1984, and Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is the Stasi's star interrogator. We meet him teaching a class on breaking prisoners, and the methods are chillingly practical: as Roger Ebert noted, suspects sit on their hands so the chair cushion can be kept as a scent sample for bloodhounds. Then a government minister with designs on the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) wants her partner, the regime's favorite playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), dug up for dirt. Wiesler gets the job. He finds nothing. So he keeps listening.

What makes the film great is how small its explosions are. Jim Emerson, writing for RogerEbert.com, singled out the moment it first catches fire: Wiesler, wanting Dreyman to see something, simply makes the couple's doorbell ring at a moment of his choosing. A doorbell. In this world, that's a heist.

Ebert praised Mühe's "performance of infinite subtlety," and it's built almost entirely on stillness: a zipped-up gray jacket, a face trained to report nothing, eyes that barely travel. Because Wiesler never explains himself, every change has to surface on that face in millimeters. By the end you can read it like a book, which turns out to be the point.

Behind the Scenes

The idea came from Lenin. In late 1997, in his first year of film school in Munich, Donnersmarck was listening to Beethoven and remembered a story Maxim Gorky told: Lenin loved the "Appassionata" but refused to listen to it, because it made him want to stroke people's heads when the revolution required smashing them. Donnersmarck told NPR's Fresh Air that he set out to find a way to force Lenin to listen. The image that came was a man in a depressing room with earphones on, expecting to hear his enemies and hearing beautiful music instead. He wrote the story in under three hours, researched for a year and a half, and wrote the first draft in six weeks at a Cistercian monastery in the Vienna Woods, where his uncle is a monk.

Real history pushed back. The opening interrogation is set in Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi's notorious Berlin prison, but the director of the memorial there refused permission to film. When Donnersmarck pointed to Schindler's List, he answered: "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler."

Others brought history onto the set. The property master, Klaus Spielhagen, had applied to leave East Germany around the time the film is set and spent almost two years in a Stasi prison. According to the production notes, he refused to fake anything, borrowing real bugs from collectors of Stasi electronics; the Stasi Museum in Leipzig lent an original machine that steamed open 600 letters an hour. "I don't want those SOBs to be able to fault us on anything!" he kept saying.

Then there's Mühe, a star of East Berlin's Deutsches Theater. He was one of the first people to request his own Stasi file, and learned that four members of his theater company had been placed there to report on him, and that he was on a list of people to be interned in a national emergency. Asked how he prepared for Wiesler, he answered: "I remembered." He flew to Los Angeles for the Oscar win, had major stomach surgery when he got home, and died of stomach cancer in July 2007. He was 54.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• No red, no blue. Donnersmarck told Fresh Air he found red and blue the most "shockingly Western" colors, so he banned every red and blue object from the film. Remember that when Dreyman's smuggled typewriter turns out to have only a red ribbon, one that stains his fingers. In a world drained of color, red is the color of the truth getting out.
• A Casablanca wink. The Stasi's code name for the operation against Dreyman is "Lazlo," and in the production notes Donnersmarck asks whether anyone caught the nod to Rick's café. It's another story about a cynic who protects someone else's love affair.
• The real headquarters. The Stasi HQ scenes were shot in the genuine building on Ruschestraße, now the Stasi Museum.
• A real bookstore. The shop where Wiesler finds Dreyman's novel is the Karl Marx Bookstore on Karl-Marx-Allee, the Soviet-style boulevard once named Stalinallee.
• The timing of his punishment. The main story ends on the day Gorbachev's election is announced, with Wiesler demoted to steaming open letters. History starts to move just as he's buried.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the final scenes of the film.

After the Wall falls, Dreyman reads his Stasi file and finds reports full of lies that protected him. On the final report there's a red fingerprint: the mark of agent HGW XX/7, who carried the typewriter out of the apartment before the search. Dreyman tracks Wiesler down, now a mailman, and decides not to speak to him.

Donnersmarck told Variety the ending nearly beat him. He wanted the two men to meet, "either physically or spiritually," and nothing worked, until he sat with a calligraphy pen and wrote the word Widmung: dedication. Two years later, Wiesler passes that bookstore window and sees Dreyman's new novel, Sonata for a Good Man. Inside it's dedicated "to HGW XX/7, in gratitude." The clerk asks if he'd like it gift-wrapped. "No," he says. "It's for me."

A man who spent his life filing other people's private sentences finally gets one addressed to him. Donnersmarck once compared a film's ending to the runway at the airport in Telluride, which ramps slightly upward so the plane seems to lift off. Watch Mühe's face at the register. That's the ramp.

Another Way to See It

The sharpest criticism is the memorial director's: there was no Wiesler. Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, called it a superb film in The Guardian while arguing that it couldn't have happened, because Stasi officers worked in teams and were watched themselves. Donnersmarck calls it "a truthful account, but not a true story," and concedes most officers stayed loyal to the end. But he cites Captain Werner Teske, tried in 1981 after confessing his doubts and executed, and a Stasi man assigned to the poet Wolf Biermann who loved the poems in his headphones so much he started a Stasi poetry group.

Here's another way in. According to the Yale Film Archive's notes, Donnersmarck's film-school outline was itself titled "Sonata for a Good Man," the name of the book Wiesler buys. So the movie we're watching is, in a sense, that novel: an artist's thank-you note to a man who may never have existed, written because someone needed him to. Biermann said the film finally gave his faceless watchers faces. It isn't a documentary claim. It's a wager about art, the same one Lenin was afraid to lose.

That wager is why the film still gets to people. Wiesler goes home to a bare apartment, and when loneliness drives him to pay a woman for company, it only shows him what he's missing. He falls for the couple downstairs the way lonely people fall for a radio show or a band: by paying close attention to lives that aren't his. The film understands that attention is a kind of love, and that it can change the giver more than the receiver. Almost nobody will ever know what Wiesler did. He knows, and for a man who was only ever a listener, that's enough.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, especially if you love thrillers where the suspense is moral rather than physical, or if a song or a book has ever quietly rearranged you. It runs 137 minutes, it's rated R, and it's in German: watch it subtitled, in a quiet room, with someone you'll want to talk to afterward. You can buy it digitally through Movies Anywhere or rent it from Apple TV, Prime Video or Google Play.

On a rewatch, look for that red smudge on Wiesler's last report before the film points it out. For a double bill about a hard man who gives up his own wants so two lovers can escape, Lazlo's original movie, Casablanca, is waiting. And if Wiesler's night shifts leave you wide awake, we've got six films to keep you company at 3 A.M. Then picture Wiesler one last time, headphones off, holding a book with his code name in it: the first thing anyone ever wrote for him.