Poster of Gerd Wiesler played by the late Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others
Noni Ford studies the questions of morality, complicity, and humanity that permeate the Oscar-winning German drama The Lives of Others.
Why do so many pieces of media that involve an overbearing authoritarian government feature male leads who are working from within the system when they begin to grow conscious of the rot and corruption around them? While watching Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, I could not help but see the parallels between the central figure of Gerd Wiesler and Fahrenheit 451’s Guy Montag, along with 1984’s Winston Smith. While the aforementioned two characters inhabit Earth in different or alternate timelines, Gerd Wiesler is solidly based in East Germany of 1984. As a member of the Stasi, Wiesler’s primary talent is in the relentlessness with which he investigates suspicious citizens, pushing them to the brink so that he can gain even a morsel of information. He’s precise in his work and prides himself on his thoroughness; in our first scene with him as he teaches students about his techniques, he quickly notes down a student who states some dissent to his tactics. Whether in the classroom or in the field, he is always looking for an undercurrent of pushback to the regime to report.
While Guy Montag suppresses free-flowing information by incinerating books and Winston Smith shapes reality by changing historical documents to fit the ideology of his government, Wiesler is more involved than either in the fate of the people who are targeted in his country. What they all share is a surveillance state that they are actively participating in. All functioning as cogs in the machine, they perform their jobs well, go home, and have accepted the reality of their lives. They then experience an inciting incident that pushes them to consider what their role is in the system, the moral code of their society, and ultimately the individual over the collective. For Montag and Smith, the push comes from a woman, and for Wiesler a couple.
In the search I carried out on the word surveillance, I found in its original French origin that there was particular emphasis on the act being “to over watch,” indicating a degree of primacy and control of the surveillant over the surveilled. One commonality across all definitions and interpretations was the lack of consent or awareness of the surveilled, which is certainly the case in The Lives of Others. When Wiesler hears about the operation to surveil a writer and his girlfriend, he quickly volunteers himself, seemingly eager to bust more political dissenters. Viewing them through a pair of opera glasses first, his transition into listening to their phone calls and watching them over video keeps him at a distance with intimate awareness. Almost like a hunter stalking prey, he moves in closer. It’s when he learns that the case is being conducted due to Minister Hempf’s sexual advances towards the woman in the couple that he becomes less enthused by it and begins harboring sympathy for the pair.
As the investigation continues, we see Wiesler clearly growing closer to them and more disgusted by his superior Grubitz, who is trying to turn up dirt where there is none to curry political favor. While he has almost nothing in common with his subjects — Georg Dreyman and Christa-Maria Sieland — as he listens to them go about their lives, his attachment for them blossoms. Their love seems to be what he attaches to the most as we see in contrast his life has a vast emptiness in it. His sexual experiences are transactional and his apartment almost looks like a set, it is so void of character. We never see Wiesler with any friends or family throughout the course of the film, and it seems apparent as he begins to crave his surveillance shift more and read over reports when he’s gone that this detail has consumed his life. Before this he had the job and the collective of Stasi, but that was all he really possessed to give him purpose; hearing this slice of life reveals a richness to its inner workings which he wants. He wants to feel love like they have, to have friends with the bonds they have, and to be so moved as to stand up for what is right.
Christa-Maria Sieland and Georg Dreyman
It’s unclear if Grubitz has always been so abhorrent to Wiesler, perhaps he became more unbearable the closer he got to higher positions of power. As Wiesler engages with him more, we see his distaste peak, particularly for the ambition Grubitz has that allows him to see Georg and Christa-Marie as pawns he can use for his advancement without any care to their humanity. Even as the beginning of the film takes us to a play all of the characters are at, it soon becomes clear that men like Grubitz and Minister Hempf don’t actually care for art. For them the world is scattered with opportunity for status and fun, with art as a backdrop. In one scene, Grubitz nonchalantly discusses the best way to punish an artist like Georg, happy with the success of potentially silencing a writer. He’s not thinking about the loss of art to the culture or the world, he’s just thinking about how to perform his job more effectively. This single-mindedness and blind cruelty separates the leadership from Wiesler, who maybe at one time thought like them until his mind was changed by this case.
Just as in Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, you want so badly for our lead to break out of the society they are in as they reveal the horrible nature of their superiors and way of life. However, we as an audience are often living in a world very different from these fictions. These characters grew up and only knew this way of life breaking away sounds simple but isn’t when it comes down to logistics. The reason these societies, broken as they are, come to exist and stick around for so long is the way they feed upon paranoia and collusion of the populus. That thought at the back of your mind about whether or not you yourself are being surveilled is ever present and is meant to spark fear of retribution for protest to the state. The complicity of your neighbors, your coworkers, and others is just as rampant in keeping the status quo. If you suspect anybody of government defiance, it’s safer to report it than be caught having witnessed it, not reported it, and being seen as a criminal yourself. Even as Wiesler intercedes to help the couple, he does so in ways that will hopefully not come back to him; he never at any point refuses to surveil them. As he slowly becomes an ally there’s still the unavoidable fact that he is spying on them, ingratiating himself into their lives unknowingly.
While the moniker of “voyeur” does not match Wiesler exactly, especially by the close of the film, although one of the other spies working with him could be classified as that. He does believe in Georg and Christa-Marie’s love and many of his meddlings have to do with preserving their relationship. In some ways he is in practice more of an emotional voyeur to them than anything else. Of course it’s a complete invasion of privacy and boundary-crossing, but mostly it is just sad to see him so attached to these people who do not know him. The film is shown through his eyes primarily, but we end up being more intrigued and getting more information about the couple than him. He seeks out the truth in others while hiding his own truth — he is achingly lonely and hollow inside. He’s a model citizen by the looks of it, but it has gained him nothing in life and the “virtuous” leaders he works for are greedy men with no moral quandaries about throwing around their power to gain access to things and people they want. Though he aligns himself more and more with his subjects, he is still a member of the Stasi. When he attempts to do right by them for their cause, he would never have performed any of his actions if he wasn’t curious in the first place about this invasion of their home.
Georg Dreyman’s typewriter
To answer the question I initially posed, I think so many of these characters are given these jobs in fiction because it provides a commentary on those “just following orders.” Despite the power Montag, Smith, and Wiesler hold, they are nowhere near the top or in command of their offices. They are granted a somewhat standard life and thus being assigned a place in society allows them to go through life with very little question or self-reflection. For each, though, their job consumes them too, which by design gives them no time to really think about things. So when the switch happens in the story, there is a mix of enlightenment to both the world around them and the orderly way with which they in some part contributed to the control of a governmental body. They aren’t clean in that they are simply citizens of the worlds they inhabit, they all have some grime on them because they have inflicted so much pain and agony on the people they begin realizing are morally correct. In the structure of their worlds, they are also above others as Montag looks down on book readers, Smith on the economically poor proles, and Wiesler on any person who finds themselves on the other side of his investigation table. Reckoning with their conception of order, they realize that those who they once separated from themselves are just people like them, suffering in this state of control on various levels. They are no better than these people or really even above them; the state has stripped away their senses of humanity and camaraderie because it benefits the state to sow division. Division helps keep them unsteady with little power to coalesce to take down the state.
Without revealing too much in terms of endings, I think the film’s conclusion falls more in line with Fahrenheit 451. Set in our reality with the full awareness of the history of East Germany, there isn’t so much a fairytale bow on the story as there is a sober, practical account of where our characters end up in the future. The world they know changes and they adjust with it. The decay of social fabric that existed during most of the movie does begin to repair. And even at its highest points of depreciation, there were still pockets of commiseration, truth, and selfless sacrifice. No one is quite as heroic or brave as we want them to be, instead they are complex creatures grasping at some sense of rightness in their purview. Characters like these and stories like these aren’t trying to teach us how to upend totalitarian regimes; there are no lessons here about organization of resistance or how to perform a coup. Instead these stories are trying to make us remember that even amongst those in control and in power, doubt can be the harbinger of change. Just a drop of it can spread and soon flood an entire worldview. Changing a person’s perspective from on high to eye-level makes all of the difference.
The Lives of Others will be screened at IU Cinema on March 25 as part of the series I Like to Watch: Voyeurism in Cinema.