THE DDR: Utopia for Dick Cheney

Rating: 9/10 (23 July 2007)

Welcome to East Germany (DDR) in the 40th year of Communist rule right before the fall of the Berlin wall.
Meet Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) he's East Germany's most accomplished playwright deemed loyal to the Regime. Komrad Dreyman is so loyal he has been befriended by the Communist Dictator Honnicker and especially Honnicker's wife. Dreyman has produced a play entitled Other People's Lives which centers around a character who has The Second Sight, the ability to see and feel events happening at a distance. His gal-pal Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) who plays the leading role on the stark East German stage has attracted the attention of the Dick Cheney-ish Minister of Culture Kamarad (Herr) Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme).
Official interest is not purely artistic. The Cheney look-alike Komrad Minister would like to unload Dreyman to win Christa. He calls on Stassi. Anyone that loyal has to be hiding something.
Stassi is overjoyed at the opportunity. Oberstleutnant (LTC) Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur) thinks Stassi is about to take down a member of the Politburo (cabinet). The mission is entrusted to Hauptmann (Capt)Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a hardboiled instructor in Stassi's spy school. In the process of intensive surveillance Hauptmann Wiesler starts to read books he steals from Dreyman's apartment and in a bemused mood deletes adverse information from surveillance reports.
Can Wiesler save Drayman and Frau Sieland or will the caprices of the totalitarian state swallow Dreyman and Frau Sieland? The story skillfully told with multiple layers of ironies is a stark warning to Patriot Act America. How can people like you lead a country? Dreyman would ask Minister Bruno Hempf
Dreyman does get that opportunity. In a revival of the play Other People's Lives staged with more pizazz in wealthy united German after the fall of the wall, Dreyman meets the former minister displaced by the dissolution of the East German State.