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Starting slowly by laying out the repression of some theatrical people, it expands into new dimensions on the age-old theme of the indomitable will to be free. At the pulse of its performances, under a dense mood of menace, is the charismatic Ulrich Muehe, with a delicate and heartrending victimization role played by Martina Gedeck.
East Berlin at the time, still part of the long-failing system of Communism, was a dark world of Orwellian essence. Still behind the infamous Berlin Wall, the East German populace was controlled by Stasi, the paranoiac police state system. The film enters this world where 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers have orders to spy, pry and probe into everyone's most personal lives.
Individual thought is considered dangerous; forbidden and punishable. Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Muehe), a devoted Stasi officer, prides himself in ferreting out dissidents anywhere. Indeed, Wiesler, an instructor in sophisticated interrogation technique at Potsdam U., has his whole world in his work.
When he finishes his shift, he retires to his bleak apartment where he eats state-sponsored food, watches state-sponsored TV and sleeps with state-sponsored hookers.
Wiesler is focusing now on Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright who seems much too happy. While happiness is not illegal, it is very suspicious. So Dreyman must, according to profile, be a subversive.
Wiesler then feels challenged to a personal mission of investigating this man. With the support of two loyal colleagues, he has Dreyman's apartment wired. At first, Dreyman appears to be as faithful to socialist ideals as Wiesler.
But an intrigue develops when, for one quirk in the surveillance, one of Wiesler's colleagues feels an erotic attraction to Dreyman's live-in girlfriend, stage actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). And, even more significantly, Wiesler is becoming fascinated and even sympathetic to Dreyman and Sieland.
Wiesler finds himself being drawn into their world so closely that his chief, Lt.-Col. Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), is becoming suspicious of him.
After Dreyman's stage director colleague hangs himself, he writes an article on the high number of suicides in East Germany – exceeded only by that of Hungary – and smuggles it to the West German magazine Der Spiegel. Grubitz is now furious.
Framed in chilly hues throughout, shadowy in both spirit and image, the scheming and counter-scheming of conspirators and authorities float a cloud of dread and menace over the participants.
Darkly educational, the film probes the diabolical interrogation mentality of the secret police, methods which subtly elicit information by methods beyond the crudities of painful torture. For example, will a repetitive question to a guilty suspect bring forth inconsistent responses? No, quite the contrary, for a guilty person has memorized his lies. An innocent person, flustered, will keep changing his words.
As the police close in, the film becomes a masterpiece of depiction of authorities so insecure of their position that their victims become their masters.
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