This film has conquered all the known world, winning an Oscar Awards, but it hasn't pleased everyone.
Anna Funder, the Australian writer of the acclaimed taking the side of the two people he has under surveillance.
"Joachim Gauck, the former head of the Stasi File Authority, has said that the records of the Stasi show that such a thing never, ever happened," she told The Independent in London, in January.
Even if there were such examples, she said, why would you tell that story?
about this rotten core. How would we feel about an equally terrific movie made, say, in the early '60s, which showed the change of heart, redemption and comeuppance of a Gestapo agent?
Whose interests does this serve?"
It's an interesting question, almost. What Funder appears to be saying is there were no nice guys in the 100,000 staff of the Stasi, and even if there were, telling a story about one would be only following orders.
It takes only a moment to realise that her truth, gained in researching the Stasi files, does not overrule the right of tool of denunciation as her non-fiction.
apologia - one good German doesn't excuse the others, they cried; and presenting Hitler as a human being, however awful, should never be allowed. Funder's argument seems to me fundamentally bad, so all movies on these subjects must reflect that.
Socialist art was similarly one-dimensional, as Funder must know. In fact, in 1989. What makes it better than most is precisely the element of compassion in its story.
country in 17 shades of grey with bad cars, bad food, bad art, bad leaders and a deeply unhappy populace, cowering in fear. The only thing that works well is the Stasi, which has become exceedingly efficient at spying on the 16 million inhabitants. What's ones.
The film is clear about the Stasi's efficient and unsavoury an apparatus both exploits, and encourages, human weaknesses.
behave. He plays tapes of actual interrogations to his students in which we hear how relentless he can be.
When one protests that such methods are inhuman, Wiesler puts a black mark by the student's name. Wiesler is a true ideologue, a born snitch. His thin, pale Nosferatu.
Wiesler's boss, Lieutenant Colonel Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), is His main aim is to court favour with the minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), another rank opportunist. That is why Grubitz establishment.
Wiesler takes the job with enthusiasm.
We've seen how he looks at Dreyman's girlfriend, the leading actress Christa-Maria Sieland What Wiesler doesn't know is that Hempf also fancies her. He's using the Stasi to get Dreyman out of the way.
It's a very old story, in that sense, but the surveillance adds a fresh angle.
Wiesler's team wires Dreyman's apartment in 20 minutes flat, including a threat to the neighbour to keep quiet. Wiesler then takes up his position, like a spider, in the attic. All is recorded and summarised, in situ.
Parties, arguments, love-making, even the music they listen to. But the spider is also being watched, as is the spider's boss. When Hempf doesn't get results quickly enough, he tells his driver to watch the actress directly.
Von Donnersmarck, a member of an aristocratic family with ties in both east and west Germany, was only 16 when the wall came down. as rich in human behaviour.
Lenin, who wrote to his friend Gorky that he was going to stop listening to Beethoven's Appass-ionata, because "it makes me want to stroke people's heads and tell them nice, stupid things, and I have to smash in those heads, smash them in without mercy, to bring artists.
His bosses think a good writer is one who writes nothing. more of the work of the late, great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, especially A Short Film About Love. It has the same creepy emotional flow and quasi-religious moral underpinnings, a desire to admit the possibility of love, even in the context of one man's repression of others.
This requires eventually that we understand, or even forgive, Wiesler and that's a place that some viewers are not prepared to go. I can understand that, but I ask it of us.
What good are artists who only ask the easy questions?
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