i]Good Bye Lenin turned the collapse of the German “Democratic” Republic into a comedy. There is not a single moment in The Lives of Others you feel like laughing. The film chronicles how an estimated 91,000 full-time employees and 300,000 informants recruited by Ministry for State Security (Stasi) helped the communist party to keep control over society by spying on and neutralizing everyone who seemed to harbor doubts about the regime. If you have ever traveled to East Germany you will recognize immediately that the director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has captured superbly the character and ambiance of this German version of a 20th-century police state. The Lives of Others reminded me that it was simply bad geographic luck that stripped East German of the freedoms that enjoyed by their West German compatriots.  I think the film resonates with audiences around the world because of the events after September 11.  Now that governments around the world demand more powers to be able to spy on citizens in name of protecting us from terrorist’s threats, we have become sensitive about losing our privacy as the East German did under communist rule.  In the western world, it took hundreds of years and countless lives to protect citizens in democratic states from the capricious acts of government. The thought that we might come to live under a regime that recruits your family members and friends to spy on you sends shivers down your spine. The film is a masterpiece because it manages to show the brutality of the East German police state while uncovering the remaining reservoir of humanity that allowed East German’s to overthrow their rulers when the first real opportunity presented itself.  At the end of the film, the English-speaking audience in my local cinema spontaneously broke out in applause because it realized that it just watched a great moment in the history of cinema.

Now that governments around the world demand more powers to be able to spy on citizens in name of protecting us from terrorist