Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - The Lives of Others: A Screenplay

The Lives of Others will always remain for me one of the seminal experiences of my later life, as deeply ingrained in my consciousness as Arthur Koestlers novel Darkness at Noon.

Like The Battle for Algiers it is both a political document and an enduring work of art, collecting together in one convincing story such themes as political obedience, moral courage, the award of power to the weak, and the spiritless void of a police state that suppresses individualism, makes an enemy of humanity, and has nothing to offer on its own account but a descent into paranoia and greyness.

Even those would-be experts on East Germany, who for decades on end sat the other side of the Berlin Wall struggling to second-guess the Stasis mindset, never fully succeeded in breathing the foul air of universal and mutual superstition that pervaded its barren corridors. But The Lives of Others does that. It breathes the air, and makes us breathe it too. Better still, it offers a tacit message that is as important to our own society today as it ever was to the vanished GDR.

All across the world, intelligence services, despite repeated examples of their incompetence, have proved disproportionately powerful in the making of what passes for foreign policy. And we do well to remember how quickly even our own spies, in choosing the profession of secrecy, become not just its practitioners but its prisoners; and that by disavowing their natural humanitarian instincts in the name of a supposedly Great Cause, they too display a dissatisfaction with their own lives that can only be appeased by reducing the lives of others to the same condition.

And when that happens, even in relatively healthy societies, the supposedly Great Cause for which they imagine they are sacrificing their finer feelings becomes misty and finally forgotten, until all that matters is that no man should be free while they themselves are captive.

Film scripts are hybrid creatures, neither film nor literature. But when set beside a film of such excellence as this, the script provides an essential route map of a directors journey, first as the bald document that is acceptable to his backers, then as the springboard to his inspiration.

John le Carr, August 2013

This text is the original script for my film The Lives of Others, that is, the one with which we began shooting on October 26th 2004. It is not, as so often with screenplays, a transcript produced after the film has been completed of the scenes and dialogue that actually made it into the picture. Anyone who reads this screenplay and compares it with the completed film will get an inkling of how film-making works: of the ability great actors have to make small alterations even right before shooting that bring whole new nuances into a sentence; of compulsory economizing (that does sometimes actually make the scenes better) and of the terrible, wonderful radicalism you have to display in the cutting room to be able to leave it happily in the end (the first cut of the film was three hours long, and you can see precisely what we took outbecause we actually shot all of it).

Accompanying the screenplay is an essay on the historical background to the material by our specialist adviser, Manfred Wilke, who until September 2006 was head of the Lankwitz department of the Freie Universitt Berlins Research Association on the SED State. There are also contributions from two of the leading actors: an extensive interview with Ulrich Mhe, in which he responds to some very direct questions about working on The Lives of Others and about the GDR, and an extract from Sebastian Kochs shooting diary.

Film-makers always hope that the audience will engage with their picture for longer than just one evening. Should that hope be realized for our film, this slim volume will present a good opportunity for diving considerably deeper into The Lives of Others.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

GEORG DREYMAN

Celebrated East German playwright, National Prize laureate

CHRISTA-MARIA SIELAND

His girlfriend, actress in the Gerhart Hauptmann Theatre ensemble

PAUL HAUSER

His closest confidant, a journalist

KARL WALLNER

Another close confidant of Dreymans, printer and author

MFS CAPTAIN GERD WIESLER

Interrogation and surveillance specialist at the Ministry for State Security, in charge of leading Operation Lazlo

MFS LIEUTENANT COLONEL GRUBITZ

Wieslers boss, head of Division XX/7, responsible for monitoring the GDRs entire cultural sector

MFS STAFF SERGEANT UDO LEYE

Covers the night shifts in Operation Lazlo

MINISTER BRUNO HEMPF

Member of the SEDs Central Committee

NOWACK

Hempfs assistant

ALBERT JERSKA

Famous theatre director, blacklisted since signing the petition against Biermanns denaturalization in 1976

GREGOR HESSENSTEIN

An editor at Der Spiegel

FRAU MEINEKE

Dreymans neighbour, a widow

EGON SCHWALBER

Director at the Gerhart Hauptmann Theatre; run by the Stasi as informant Max Reinhardt