For his part, the playwright Dreyman has managed to navigate the treacherous shoals of working as an artist in a totalitarian society. He oversteps himself early on in the film, when he mentions that his former director has been "blacklisted" and is reprimanded for using the word by the minister of culture. Fear sparks behind his eyes. He has been provocative. He quickly tries to find another word, a safer word. But he, too, doesn't know that the minister is looking for anything he can use to press his advantage against Dreyman so he can control and dominate Christa the actress.

As Wiesler finds himself pulled--unwillingly--away from his narrow dogmatism into a state of vertiginous confusion, Dreyman's safe bubble starts to collapse around him as well. He feels himself being drawn into a dangerous form of social activism, and yet feels safe doing so because he can't imagine he is being watched 24 hours a day.

He is--by Wiesler.

It's hard to know where to begin in praising The Lives of Others, the first movie written and directed by a 33-year-old German with the traffic-stopping name of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The Lives of Others joins the Russian film Burnt by the Sun on a very short list of motion-picture masterpieces that portray the compromises a totalitarian state demands of those unfortunate enough to live inside a prison-country. And it joins Citizen Kane, no less, on the very short list of the most impressive debut films in the history of cinema.

Donnersmarck grew up in New York and West Berlin, and was all of 16 when the Wall came down. And yet what he has managed here is a fully conceived and realized portrait of life in the bleak, bleak East that is told with startling delicacy. We don't see truncheons beating people senseless, or prison camps, or men shot near Checkpoint Charlie. Donnersmarck conveys the horror of life in East Germany through the omnipresence of suspicion. No one can trust anyone else--friends, colleagues, lovers. Everyone is potentially compromised, and people possess what little they have on sufferance. The state giveth and the state taketh away.

Donnersmarck has said he got the idea for the movie while he was struggling to come up with a movie scenario for a class he was taking. As a piece of music played on his stereo, he recalled Maxim Gorky's story about Lenin listening to Beethoven's 'Appassionata.' As Gorky wrote:

"I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps naively so, to think that people can work such miracles!" Wrinkling up his eyes, Lenin smiled rather sadly, adding: "But I can't listen to music very often. It affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. One can't pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. They ought to be beaten on the head, beaten mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm--what a hellishly difficult job!"