The ancient world had Sparta, that perfectly organized police state, shored up by concentric circles of true believers, spies, and soldiers. The modern world had East Germany, that gray, sooty, impoverished version of a worker’s paradise, where everyone spied on everyone else courtesy of perhaps the most extensive secret police network known to history, the envy of even North Korea and Romania. The state security apparatus, or Stasi, relied on the eyes, ears, and tongues of more than a million collaborators, or one in every eighteen citizens of the DDR; it employed more than 100,000 full-time staff, as compared to the 180,000 estimated employees of its Soviet counterpart, the KGB, which monitored a population of 290 million in the Soviet Union.
So many spies, so few to spy on: Small wonder so many East Germans were caught up in the intrigues of the state. Small wonder the Stasi had files on more than six million of them, files that have haunted their subjects to this day.
And small wonder that, in the 2006 film Der Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), the one writer in the country who is known not to be subversive and in fact is demonstrably not so must come under surveillance: as the police official assigned to the case, a by-the-numbers Stasi captain, remarks knowingly, anyone who appears so blameless must be hiding something. The writer, Georg Dreyman (played with neat irony by Sebastian Koch), has secrets, all right, and the efficient cop—portrayed by the late Ulrich Mühe, famed for his subversive portrayal of Hamlet in the East German theater—ferrets them out one by one, spinning a tragic web out of the void.
Set in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and six years before the reunification of Germany, The Lives of Others seems to depict a country that could not have existed. For why would its people stand to live under such a state? We can only wonder, but history tells us that people can accommodate to all manner of evil if they perceive it to be in their self-interest to do so. The film, the first feature directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, won the Academy Award in 2007 for best foreign-language movie of the year; his sophomore film, the Johnny Depp/Angelina Jolie thriller The Tourist, will hit screens worldwide next month.
