I realize this is a ridiculously belated comment, but I only got to watch the movie last night. And it was your post, which I only tasted but didn’t read in its entirety, that was the initial impetus to find out more about, and then watch, the movie.

I agree, a terrific movie. The score was very noteworthy too I thought.

While watching, the first thing that struck me was how easily people are ready to conform to “totalitarian” strictures and to be complicit in the requirements of systematic “State security” and informing on fellow citizens. And this coming in East Germany after the experiences of Naziism and WWII. Milan Kundera deals extensively with this theme.

On your specific point, my take was that Christa did “shop” him, and Wiesler knew this about her and her “tragic” weakness given his skills as an interrogator and on the basis that he would heroically try and remove the typewriter. Hence the detailed map of the apartment. And it was her overwhelming remorse of this that caused her to suicide.

What do you think?

I never thought of the end like that. I though her death was a tragedy lost in an earlier time. We’re not menat to worry about her death after the wall comes down. We are just meant to celebrate the freedoms earned. Her death sort of belonged to another era.

Good movie.

Laura: I’ll try to absorb your lesson on tragedy versus melodrama.

Paul: I knew the actor was East German, but not the rest.

Henry: Wiesler and Hempf get moral if not material justice, but C-M gets neither and indeed seems to be forgotten altogether in the feel-good ending — that’s a different kind of poignancy.

On first viewing of this film, I thought the end could have come at the point you allude to. On second viewing, it seemed to reinforce the theme that my post was about – how authoritarian regimes induce a sense of loneliness through fear. That Wiesler and Dreyer never met in person was a powerful point – it is the point.

BTW, are you aware that the actor who played Wiesler was in real life spied on by his wife for the Stasi for some ten years or so? She denies it to this day, but apparently there is a huge file of information that implicates her.

For genuine tragedy you need irreconcilable tension between competing necessities: the Law that faces down the individual has to have some degree of legitimacy, and the East German regime hasn’t got that by any stretch of the imagination.

I didn’t like The Lives of Others much. That recourse to Art as justification for historical implausibilities which you mentioned is part of the reason. The same ethos motivates the basic perspective of the movie – it appears that artists are assumed to be somehow more interesting and worthwhile human beings than non-artists and art-making literally gives you a get out of jail free card. I find this a bit distasteful and think that art can’t successfully be used to justify deformities of truth, it should be used in the service of revealing truth rather than the other way around.