The Lives of Others

Are the prophets really only killed in Jerusalem? This is one of the strange claims we hear in Jesus' tirade against Herod, in the rebuke he levels at the religious leaders of his day in Luke's gospel (13. 31ff.). Yes, they are surely killed in Jerusalem, then and now - and just as surely in many other cities and town beyond. I've been thinking about the plight of prophets and the conspiracy of silence that tolerates their demise having just seen the stunning film which won this year's Oscar as "Best Foreign Film," "The Lives of Others." It is set in East Germany during the early mid 1980s, long before "Glasnost" was on the horizon and while "the Wall" was still firmly in place. The story focuses on a group of writers and artists living under socialist rule, and the attempts of the "Stasi" ("Secret Service") to monitor any thinking that was critical of the state machine - that is, to find out everything they could about the 'lives of others.'

As the story unfolds the central character, a charismatic playwright loyal to the regime named Georg Dreyman, comes under suspicion as an untrustworthy writer, initially because of the jealousy of an older party leader who has lecherous interests on Dreyman's girlfriend. It is a milder version of the old story about David and Bathsheba, and the king's plot to have her husband Uriah killed - murdered, really - in battle (2 Samuel 11 - 12). The party leader concocts a perverse scheme, hoping to find some way to discredit Dreyman and imprison him so that his girlfriend, Christa-Maria, might be free for his nefarious purposes. The mid-level security officer assigned to bug Dreyman's apartment, Captain Gerd Wiesler, is assigned to monitor his conversations from a god-like system of surveillance installed in the attic of the apartment building. From his attic perch, Wiesler is able to hear everything that is said, and knows of all that is happening - with cameras and microphones revealing things meant to be said and done in private. He has the power of judgment over Dreyman's future. He controls his fate with god-like might.

This is where things begin to go wrong: Wiesler begins to sense, through what he witnesses in the lives of these "others," the pressure of lies manufactured by the state, its deceptions and manipulation, its cruelty to the innocent. This dawning awareness leads to a crisis when one of Dreyman's friends, Albert Jerska, a brilliant director who had criticized the government ten years earlier and had since been denied any work in the theater, commits suicide. Dreyman receives the news by telephone in the middle of the night, which of course Wiesler overhears. In his shock and grief, he sits down at his piano to play a piece of music, at once turbulent and tender, from the score Jerska had given him a few weeks earlier for his birthday: "Sonata for a Good Person." As he plays, overcome with tears, he asks in a whisper that Wiesler overhears from his surveillance post whether "anyone who had heard, I mean truly heard, this music could be a bad person?" Wiesler, his eyes also moist from this news and from the power of the music, begins to recognize the horror of which he is an unwitting part. At that moment, he begins to construct an elaborate process of fabricating his reports about what is happening in the apartment - to protect the truth, and the innocent.

I won't spoil the end of the story, which is in its own way one of redemption and the power of mercy as a gift that offers and invites our conversion, that opens us to "the lives of others." What I will say is that it offers a compelling tale of the cyclical nature of violence, and the unsettling truth that we often tolerate injustices toward others driven by the fear that what they know might hurt us, threaten our "way of life," or jeopardize our "peace and security." This is a story all too familiar in our nation in these days. In our desire to protect ourselves, we are willing to tolerate all sorts of interventions into the lives of others, and often spin for ourselves webs of lies and deceit to maintain our sense of calm.

The film also offers a compelling story about the power of art, and the strength of beauty, to arouse compassion, to awaken a sense of justice, and even to convert the heart. These are powerful themes, and "The Lives of Others" articulates a vivid statement of them. What is also striking in the story is how naming the truth is itself a threatening, and even dangerous, expression of prophecy - and how such naming sometimes moves us from the conspiracy of silence and indifference to resist the violent forces that seek to curtail justice for others through manipulation, harassment, intimidation, and, yes, torture (by whatever euphemism we call it - "alternative methods" is the one favored by our government at present). This, in short, is the prophet's work. It is why prophets are harassed, silenced, and sometimes killed - in and beyond Jerusalem. It is also why it is not enough to know the truth if one is unwilling to "do" it.

Dr. Mark S. Burrows, Professor of the History of Christianity