The Lives of Others (revisited)

I gave The Lives of Others another watch recently (I was fortunate enough to find the DVD under a certain decorated tree one fine December morn), and while watching the film, I tried to pinpoint the exact moment that Wiesler, the Stasi officer who's the story's main character, has his change of heart. What I found instead, was the possibility that he never did!

One thing that really struck me about The Lives of Others, at least on this viewing, was how it addressed the use of power over others, because to a certain degree, each character wields a great degree of power in the course of their daily lives. Grubitz, Wiesler's boss, demonstrates his power when he toys with the state worker who tells a joke at the lunch table. Minister Hempf wields his power when he turns over Christa-Maria to Grubitz for spurning him. And Georg Dreyman more subtly uses his power as an artist to subvert the system and inspire anti-establishment thought.

And Wiesler, most of all, has so much power over Dreyman and Christa-Maria that he is, in essence, their puppetmaster. Take, for example, the scene where Wiesler decides to expose the affair between Hempf and Christa-Maria. This state of power he held over them caught me more off-guard than it did on previous viewings, and while watching it from that perspective, I truly began to wonder if all the events depicted in The Lives of Others were really meant to illustrate how great and how damaging power over other people can be.

Let's go back to the aforementioned lunchroom table when Grubitz first encourages the worker to tell the joke about the party chairman, then does a complete 180 on him and threatens to turn him in—just to prove that he (Grubitz) could. In that moment, Wiesler can see the degree of power Grubitz has, and when watching how Wiesler manipulates his reports to conceal Dreyman's writing of the suicide article, it made me wonder if Wiesler really wasn't trying to protect Dreyman, like I had previously thought . . . but was actually trying to prove to Grubitz that even he could be overpowered and brought down. Don't forget that Grubitz was very ambitious and protective of his career, always stressing how important "Operation Laszlo" was to their respective careers.

When Grubitz begins to suspect something amiss with Wiesler after the suicide article gets published, it also began to seem quite feasible that Wiesler might not have been out to protect Dreyman and Christa-Maria—but instead, was out to protect himself. When he takes the typewriter from Dreyman's apartment, is he really trying to protect Dreyman from prosecution, or is he trying to destroy any evidence that he was consciously hiding Dreyman's authorship—in the process bringing down Grubitz by showing that his theory of Dreyman being the author of the suicide article was false? Again, the destructive use of power over others.

It would be almost tragic if this were true of Wiesler, because The Lives of Others is a powerful movie when viewing Wiesler's character through the lens of becoming sympathetic to Dreyman and Christa-Maria . . . but it's equally as powerful when viewing Wiesler as the unchanged, cold, and calculating state robot who wants to illustrate to his superior his own use of power over others.