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Starting slowly by laying out the repression of some theatrical people, it expands into new dimensions on the age-old theme of the indomitable will to be free. At the pulse of its performances, under a dense mood of menace, is the charismatic Ulrich Muehe, with a delicate and heartrending victimization role played by Martina Gedeck. East Berlin at the time, still part of the long-failing system of Communism, was a dark world of Orwellian essence.
Still behind the infamous Berlin Wall, the East German populace was controlled by Stasi, the paranoiac police state system. The film enters this world where 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers have orders to spy, pry and probe into everyone's most personal lives. Individual thought is considered dangerous; forbidden and punishable.
Capt. Gerd Wiesler (Muehe), a devoted Stasi officer, prides himself in ferreting out dissidents anywhere. Indeed, Wiesler, an instructor in sophisticated interrogation technique at Potsdam U.
, has his whole world in his work. When he finishes his shift, he retires to his bleak apartment where he eats state-sponsored food, watches state-sponsored TV and sleeps with state-sponsored hookers. Wiesler is focusing now on Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a playwright who seems much too happy.
While happiness is not illegal, it is very suspicious. So Dreyman must, according to profile, be a subversive. Wiesler then feels challenged to a personal mission of investigating this man.
With the support of two loyal colleagues, he has Dreyman's apartment wired. At first, Dreyman appears to be as faithful to socialist ideals as Wiesler. But an intrigue develops when, for one quirk in the surveillance, one of Wiesler's colleagues feels an erotic attraction to Dreyman's live-in girlfriend, stage actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).
And, even more significantly, Wiesler is becoming fascinated and even sympathetic to Dreyman and Sieland. Wiesler finds himself being drawn into their world so closely that his chief, Lt.-Col.
Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), is becoming suspicious of him.
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