Before the Fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany's Secret Police…
Listened to Your Secrets
Tagline from “ The lives of others”.
Information is power, intimacy in “The Lives of others” is a luxury, however for Lisa Sanders, who “deciding what to say and what to keep to myself is not an easy decision, it’s more of a continuous exercise of balance”. But, what happens when you don’t own your own information? What happens when the establishment invades not only your privacy but also your intimacy?
In the award winning film in 2006, the decision isn’t that difficult, the main character, an intellectual, a writer, Georg Dreyman knows that confessing and talking about his ideas publicly could be harmful to his freedom, and even to his life. The only time he does, in an anonymous matter, he’s almost caught. Bugs are installed in his home; the most intimate issues are recorded, and he listens to everything even the writter’s sexual intercourse with his girlfriend the actress, Christa- Maria Sieland.
The plot thickens, , Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, agent HGW XX/7, designated to the case, since the writer may be conspiring agains the RDA government, this agent decides freely, even though his life might endanger, he starts passing on phony informs to his superiors’ to protect Georg.
This film is a response, of what East Germany lived trough in the last half of the 80´s, that would be the last 5 years of the life of the Berlin Wall. The public spaces, totally under control, were quite limited, even artistic expression was controlled. If any subjects that are delicate for the government would censure them, and of course the artists would be out of a job, never to be heard of again.
West established: “the theory of communication gestation of privacy […] contains five basic points: private information, private limits, control and property, and a system base don rules”: those are things that the characters involved in this movie didn’t have. There wasn’t a public opinion, more than the one the government controlled, through the media, mainly the TV. And those disobedient citizens who didn’t respect that, were tortured, and even killed in cold blood, creating great fear in the general population.
Close to the end of the movie, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the public spaces are modified, in pro of the liberty of speech. Finally homeostasis occurs, with the needs and meanings of the citizens, which beforehand didn’t exist. For Noelle-Neumann, in the Spiral of Silence, governments fall, then credibly is lost between the populations, that´s what happened with East Germany in the movie, some citizens were willing to fight the power and create spots in the public image of the establishment.
WEST. Richard, Communication. Theory, analysis and Aplication. Pp. 202.
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