Q:Build a movie plot around this: Where did Weisler see Dreyman's new novel? On a poster at a bookstore.
A:
The Lives of Others is at once a political thriller and a human drama. The film opens in East Berlin in 1984 with a sequence that alternates scenes from an interrogation with scenes from a training class for aspiring officers of the Stasi, or secret police. Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), code name HGW XX/7, is demonstrating his interrogation technique using audio of his own interrogation of a suspect. Wiesler instructs the students on how to tell whether a subject is lying. A student asks a question that Wiesler judges to be a bit too compassionate (read "bourgeois"), and the professor marks the student's name on the attendance record: surely this student has just flunked the course, or worse. During the feature's first thirty minutes, writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck draws a portrait of Wiesler that borders on caricature: Wiesler is a highly skilled officer of the Stasi, a proud, zealous, disciplined and entirely cold-blooded professional. He is one of the many cogs in the wheel of "the System," working anonymously and tirelessly, convinced that his efforts are building a better Socialist society.At the end of the class, Lieutenant-Colonel Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), Wiesler's old school friend (and probably his only friend), who has risen to the position of head of the Culture Department at Stasi, comes to invite Wiesler to a theatrical premiere. The play is by the celebrated East German playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and its leading character is played by Dreyman's lover, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), an actress of great reputation. Dreyman, who writes plays about the heroic proletariat, lives a rather comfortable life in a plush East Berlin apartment, enjoying a certain notoriety among DDR officials who value him because he's one of the few East German writers whose work is read in the west. He preserves the respect of the artistic community by using his (relatively) secure position for occasional interventions in favor of dissident fellow artists....