One of the Top Films of the Decade in My Book

Rating: 10/10 (27 August 2014)

I watched this movie again after reading Anna Funder's book, Stasiland, about life in East Germany under the paranoid psychopaths of the state security police. The film is a masterpiece of tragedy and hope and the triumph of good.
One of the most moving scenes in this and in any movie is when he discovers that his copy of Brecht is missing which, of course, has been nicked by his nemesis/deus ex machina in the Stasi. We cut to him reading it at home. "Can anyone who has heard this music, I mean truly heard it, really be a bad person?" From what I have read about the Stasi I doubt that anyone would have talked freely on a telephone line in this era but I could see how the writer, after years of keeping within the party lines, would think that his home was not under surveillance.
"To think that people like you once ruled a country." I had the same thoughts during the Bush/Cheney years in America.