Gerd wiesler biography books

May -- In the previous issue, I wrote: “I offer Pan’s Labyrinth as exhibit ‘A’ that the independent revolution is over.” After seeing the captivating Cold War espionage movie The Lives of Others from German writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, I realize I may have spoken prematurely.

Let me now humbly (but gladly) eat those words.

Made on a shoestring budget of $2 million, The Lives of Others is the most suspenseful psychological thriller I’ve seen in a long time, ranking with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate.

What’s more, it presents one of the strongest pro-individual, anti-collectivist themes of any movie I’ve ever seen—all the more surprising because it hails from, of all places, Germany.

Its key lies in its title, which seems at first glance drippingly altruistic.

The year, appropriately, is , and Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is in his twentieth year as an agent of East Germany’s dread