It is said that Lenin once stated, “If you listen to Beethoven’s sonata, it will be difficult to continue a revolution.” This movie is a story of the men who listened to the sonata.
It is 1984 in East Berlin. Captain Wiesler of the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) is a talented member of this secret service. He is ordered to spy on a playwright, Dreyman, who is suspected of anti-establishment thought, and Dreyman’s lover Christa, a stage actress. Wiesler wiretaps the apartment they live in, but finds out that the real reason the wire was placed was because the Minister of Culture wants Christa for himself. Wiesler is moved by the sonata Dreyman plays. Dreyman had carefully separated himself from anti-establishment groups, but after a close friend who was oppressed as a writer by the government commits suicide and leaves behind a piece of sheet music titled, “Sonata for a Good Man,” Dreyman decides to publish a story in the West to disclose the reality of East Berlin. Meanwhile, Christa loses the favor of the Minister of Culture and is pushed into a difficult situation, so she becomes a spy to inform the authorities of Dreyman’s secrets. Wiesler, developing sympathy for the two through the wiretap, tries to help Dreyman and Christa using the information that he knows, but Christa commits suicide, and Wiesler is suspected and demoted to a dead-end job.
A while after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Dreyman discovers that he had in fact been wiretapped by the authorities, and from these surveillance records, he learns that Christa was a spy. However, the person in charge of gathering this intelligence, whom Dreyman only knows by his codename, did not report any evidence to his authorities that Dreyman was the author of the story published on the West side that revealed the reality of the establishment in East Berlin. For the first time, Dreyman discovers that this anonymous spy had protected him. After many years, Wiesler, now living a quiet life, becomes aware of the recent publishing of Dreyman’s book titled, “Sonata for a Good Man.” The movie ends with Wiesler opening up the book in the bookstore and seeing a note that said the book was dedicated to him with gratitude.
Ulrich Mühe, who splendidly plays Wiesler, at first appears to be a highly skilled and ruthless man dressed in uniform, but as he listens in with the wiretap, he is gradually transformed into an ordinary, middle-aged man with unfashionable pants and a balding head. Wonderful themes, acting ability, images, sounds and voices, and suspense make this the “perfect movie,” but if there is a criticism for this movie, it would be the following.
The historical inaccuracies within this movie may be the target of criticism. The Stasi wouldn’t have the room to produce people of kindness like Captain Wiesler. Observing each other is among the duties of a spy, and it would be impossible for a spy to help someone. Even if there were spies that were kind like Wiesler, I would think that the punishment wouldn’t be something as simple as, “doing a boring job for 20 years.” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who wrote the script and directed the movie, spoke of this in an interview: “The more I studied the Stasi, the more I found that what they did was too cruel to depict as it was, so I intentionally avoided cruel scenes.” The only cruel scene is the one of Christa’s death, and even in this scene, it is not clear whether it was an accidental death or a suicide. This movie poses a question that cannot be answered: when conveying a theme through art, which method has a more lasting impact on the audience, depicting cruelty as it is or abstractly?
Ulrich Mühe who played Wiesler was highly esteemed as a stage actor in East Germany, but he also participated in anti-government demonstrations and was involved in plays that criticized the system. He had two children while with his first wife, stage director Annegret Hahn, but they divorced, and he married actress Jenny Gröllmann in 1984. However, he later learned that four of his theater colleagues and his wife Jenny Gröllmann were spying on him and reporting information to authorities, and he divorced his wife in 1990. After that, he married again in 1997 to actress Susanne Lothar.
The Lives of Others won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007, but Mühe had to rush back to Germany immediately after in order to undergo surgery for his stomach cancer. Mühe passed away at the young age of 54, at the height of his fame due to the many prizes The Lives of Others received.
In 2006, in an interview included in his book that was related to The Lives of Others, Mühe confesses that, in the days of East Germany, his former wife Gröllmann spied on him as an “unofficial collaborator”—similar to the story of the movie—and reported to a Stasi officer who had the codename of “HA II/13.” Ex-wife Gröllmann filed a suit to the Berlin district court against what Mühe claimed, and argued that she had become a source of information on Mühe as an unofficial collaborator without her knowledge, and that the publication of the book be prohibited. The court approved this statement and prohibited the publication of the book; Mühe’s appeal was rejected and he was prohibited from denouncing Gröllmann as the source for the Stasi as an unofficial collaborator. Immediately after, Gröllmann died from an illness, and then one year later, Mühe also died. In addition, his third wife Lothar died in 2012 at the age of 51. All three certainly died prematurely.