DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN

Das Leben der Anderen ("the life of others") is a terrific German film, which I saw again on television last night. It takes place in the former East Germany in 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall comes down. Ulrich Mühe plays Captain Wiesler, a dedicated Stasi officer, who carries out a bugging operation on the flat of Dreyman, a playwright who is officially suspected of wanting to undermine the regime. However, while sitting at the listening station up in the building's attic, he gradually works out that he is being used. Dreyman's actress girlfriend is coveted by the lascivious Culture Minister, who has asked Wiesler's ambitious boss to dig up dirt on Dreyman and thereby clear the field for himself. Wiesler is horrified by this systemic abuse of power. Within the tight constraints of his job, he manages to doctor his reports and remove evidence from the flat, so that Dreyman is exonerated (though the girlfriend is forced to collaborate and commits suicide in remorse). The immediate price for Wiesler's human kindness is demotion to a drudge job steaming open letters in the basement of the Stasi building. After Germany is reunited, Dreyman discovers - from the former Culture Minister - that he had been bugged all along, and gets to read his (copious) Stasi file. The film ends with Wiesler, now a humble postman, purchasing a copy of Dreyman's new hit book, which is dedicated to the anonymous Stasi agent, who had saved his skin.

There are two great things about the film. The first is the depiction of East German society, filled with drab colours, Trabant motor cars, and dead-end jobs. Everyone is either miserable or afraid or both. The second is the brilliant performances, particularly from Mühe as the robotically bureaucratic Wiesler and from Ulrich Tukur as his boss, the oily apparatchik on the make.

The film won the 2007 Oscar for best foreign language film, and has won a host of other prizes. They were well-deserved.

Walter Blotscher