The Lives Of Others Film Studies Essay

The Lives Of Others hit Studies EssayThe Lives of Others is set in 1984 East Berlin, five years onward Gorbachevs glasnost policies, and the f all of the Berlin groyne. The film centers on the East German Ministry for State Security, which is a secret police known as the Stasi, created by the German elected Republic (GDR) in an attempt to maintain its power and protect the choice of Socialism in East Berlin. The secret police force consisted of 100,000 investigators and oer 200,000 informants. The Stasi investigated any and all citizens in Berlin who posed a threat to socialism. The investigations often included wiretapping and tailgating, with every action being meticulously documented. As a result of the Stasi, those who were found guilty were arrested, interrogated, imprisoned, and in many cases, blacklisted. In the film, stanch Stasi officer Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler is assigned to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman. Wiesler wiretaps the apartment, and investigates Dreymans acti vities, writing a detailed report every evening.Fear is a common fore throughout the film. Every citizen fears the GDR and the Stasi, knowing that their sleep withs can be critically modify if they do non oblige to the brass placed before them. proto(prenominal) in the film we see Dreyman neighbor watching the surveillance squad bug his apartment. Wiesler is aw atomic number 18 of the womans observations and provides strict ball clubs for her to keep quiet, and re estimations her of the consequences if she does not obey. Later in the film the Dreyman asks the woman to help him with his tie, and the neighbor is uneasy slightly associating herself with Dreyman beca utilise she does not want to be associated with him. That scene conveys a message almost how a Stasi investigation can harm not only a persons passage plainly their social lives as well. Dreymans friend and former director Albert Jerska is an exemplar of how the Stasi can damage and destroy an individuals biog raphy. Jerska was one time a prominent coiffure director with an optimistic outlook on breeding, after an investigation Jerska was blacklisted and could never direct again. The effects of his blacklisting rivaled the way others treated him, as they wished to distance themselves from him in fear of the Stasi. As a result of the Stasi, Jerska lost all hope in life and took his own life in order to escape the restrictions placed on him under the GDR. The power of blacklisting is displayed maliciously in the film, as Dreyman girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland is forced to run an informant for the Stasi in order to concern her c areer as an actress. That scene offers the audience and explanation on how the GDR was surefooted of convincing citizens to report on their friends and family.Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, the loyal Stasi investigator, is an example of the ideal German citizen in the GDR. He is introduced as an educator, teaching his students how to become Stasi investigators. H e never doubts the GDR and shows no mercy in fighting the enemies of socialism. His personal life in the film conveys a message of what life was like for the investigators living the leftic lifestyle in the GDR. Wiesler lives a lonely life in a dull apartment, eating food from a tube, and watching the evening risings. His life is dedicated to the GDR and because of that, his life is empty. To suppress his loneliness, Wiesler orders prostitutes to fill the void in his life. audience to the lives of others makes Wiesler aware of his loneliness, and he compares his life to Dreyman, envying his happiness. After discovering the motives behind the investigation, Wiesler cannot help but feel compassion for the writer he is spying on, and ignores Dreymans anti socialist actions in his nightly reports. Although Wiesler is a loyal socialist, he becomes dissatisfied with the curate of the GDR, and questions the ethical reasons behind government monitoring. Within a few months, he went fro m a proud socialist citizen to an apathetic Stasi employee.In November 1989, the GDR police perchance bluffed the borders in Berlin, and reunited east and West Germany. Germans began tearing down the Berlin Wall and were making way for reunification. The end of the GDR marked a turning shoot for for capitalism in East Germany. The film adieu Lenin centers on Alex, a young man whos proud socialist niggle falls into a coma weeks before the fall of the Berlin groyne. Eight months later, she wakes up in the co-ordinated Germany, but has no idea that these changes have happened. The doctors explain her fragile dispose to Alex, explaining that any excitement could lead to a fatal relapse. Alex and his sister Ariane are placed as caregivers to their mother and are forced to come up with creative ways to keep their mother from discovering the truth that everything she believed in has collapsed. disparate from the Lives of Others, this story follows the lives of an median(a) East Berlin family struggling to cope with the changing world.Goodbye Lenin is set during the fall of the Berlin Wall, which results the audience to witness the changes in East Germany and how they affect the population. By opening up to the western hemisphereern world, Berlin was introduced to capitalist markets, and easterners wanted to become a part of it. The film displays how the youths in East Germany were more ablaze about the reunification than the seniorer generation. The young stack traveled to the west for the first time, and viewed West Germany as though it was a huge shop mall. Ariane represents the younger generation, and how the youth was attracted to consumerism due to the division. Ariane changes her style from the old bleak colours of the GDR and adopts the bright colors of the west. She even starts changing things around the house by throwing away all the furniture and piling it outside with the rest. The bracing open market economy offered a variety of products from different brands allowing citizens to purchase items of higher(prenominal) quality that had not previously been available. There is a scene in the film in which Alex is desperately trying to maintain the illusion that the GDR lock exists, while Ariane grows upset with his behavior because she prefers the new products. She makes a statement about the diapers in the scene explaining how the ones from the old GDR are of poor quality and how she prefers to use the new ones that are available. Ariane is hot to adopt change since it is completely new to her, and she makes choices that are not always in her best interest, such as leaving the university to sell hamburgers at Burger King. The actions made by Ariane represent how eager the East Germans were to get rid of socialism but failed to question how the German economy will be affected by the reunification.The former and the new economic system displaced many citizens, especially those who were closely comfortable with the GDR. pursuit the fall of the wall, citizens in the East experienced massive unemployment due to the overcrowded hypothesise market. In the film, Alex finds a new job by submitting his name into a job lottery, which he is lucky enough to win. The unemployed characters in the film, by and large the older generation, have a difficult time adapting because everything they believed in was over. sparing change not only effected employment but in addition the currency of the former GDR. After discovering the location of his mothers money, Alex goes to the bank to convert the old currency into deutschmarks only to learn that the deadline has passed. Alex immediately becomes distressed when he discovers that his mothers life savings had become useless pieces of paper. That scene reminds the audience that although East Germany has been freed from socialist oppression, they now face new economic challenges. The cultural wave of capitalism that Germans openly support is the same capitalism that has destroyed the savings of millions. end-to-end the film, Alex is desperately trying to maintain the illusion that the GDR still exists for the sake of his mother. He seeks out old food brands, forces everyone to wear the old style of clothing, and creates fabricated TV report. His extreme tactic to preserve a world for his mother is not so different from the way she raised him. In the most powerful scene in the film, Alexs mother confesses the truth about his father. She reveals that she had once had a plan to move the family to West Berlin to meet with their father, but changed her mind because she feared the GDR. Her confession challenges everything her children were taught to believe, as she reveals that her loyalty towards the GDR was not genuine, but was instead a product of fear. She never left for Berlin and dedicated her life to socialism to find out that her children would not be taken away from her. The mothers confession relates to the Lives of Others because it di splays the fear that average citizen felt towards the Stasi and the GDR.Goodbye Lenin tells a fun, heartfelt story about an ordinary family during the reunification of Germany. The power of the Stasi and the influence they have on people is envisioned very gently in the film. The director shows the forcefulness of the agents and how they would go about investigating a home, but failed to show how and why the Stasi provoked fear, and instead relied on the audiences memories of the horrific past. The film pokes fun at the old system of the east while conveying the hardships that citizens experienced in a amiable and family-friendly tone. The film did not accurately represent the puritanic time in the German past. The Lives of Others on the other hand, is a harsh, realistic depiction of the dark side of former East Germany. The film has a darker tone and is snap with low lighting to convey the dreary feeling of what it was like to live in East Germany. The films story included deat h, drugs, and corruption to accurately limn Germanys past. The most disturbing aspect in the films are the scenes with Stasi officers discussing surveillance operations. Their conversations are casual, and spying on the lives of others is an everyday norm.The Lives of Others and Goodbye Lenin are two films that allow an audience to relive Germanys gloomy past. The films displayed every aspect of life in East Germany, and the restrictions citizens faced. The clothing available to the Germans were dull and grey, and the single product markets give how oppressed these people were, and they all knew it. On the other side of the wall capitalism flourished, and citizens were not forced to follow a government they did not support. It is this unbelievable to think that twenty years ago such tyrannical governments existed throughout Europe. It is important for films like these to be made to show people around the world the realities of what it was like to live during the GDR.