Announcement: The Gregorian Calendar is off by ten years – the millennium actually turned on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down…before and after freedom was declared in the Western World.

Five days earlier, on November 4, Urlich Mühe, a 36 year old popularly acclaimed East Berlin stage actor, organized a demonstration of half a million people at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz square – things were heating up.

Mühe was born into post-World War II East Germany, in 1953; all he knew, growing up, was a life of Cold War totalitarian control, under Communist rule. As did all young men of that era, Mühe was drafted into GDR military service in 1972. He was stationed at the Wall, where he was ordered to “shoot to kill,” anyone who might try to escape from East Berlin. This was where Urlich Mühe went to war; he did not come back the same man.

Mühe decided that in East Berlin, there was only one place where he could find any semblance of freedom. He would say, “Theater was the only place where people weren’t lied to…the only place where we could speak and be heard.” Urlich Mühe sought his freedom portraying other people, but he was no mere walk-on. He displayed a great talent in a multitude of roles, from serious drama, to romantic comedy. In several plays, he starred opposite the renowned East German actress, Jenny Gröllmann. In 1984, they married. Their marriage bridged the Fall of the Wall, mirroring a time of wrenching and tearing, until a 1990 divorce.

As the two Germanys opened their borders and reunified, Ulrich Mühe’s career breeched all previous boundaries, now to include television and film – he would make 30 movies. Mühe married actress Susanne Lothar; they costarred in the 1997 film “The Castle,” and had two children.

From 1998, to 2007, Mühe starred as a pathologist in the hugely popular TV forensic crime series, “The Last Witness.”

Ulrich Mühe had a habit of reading scripts, but turning them down if the theme was the GDR (funny how the “D” stood for Democratic) or any subject on the Cold War. He didn’t connect to any of them, until he was given “Das Leben der Anderen,” or as the American film audiences know, “Lives of Others.” He made his choice. It spoke to him, just as it would speak to a world-wide following.

Mühe received many awards for his stunning performance in the role of the Stasi officer who listens to every word, every personal move made by an East German playwright and his actress/girlfriend. Mühe (or Wiesler in the film) learns the intimate details of their lives, but in so doing, he begins to care for them and protect them – Wiesler becomes human. As the audience, we watched him watch them, and saw his transformation. And we agreed when “Lives of Others,” received the Oscar for Best Foreign Film at the February 2007 Academy Awards.

You remember in the movie, the file room where after the Fall of the Wall, ordinary German citizens had the opportunity to look at their own Cold War records, to see what the Stasi saw and said about them… (if only the FBI could be that open for us). In real life, Ulrich Mühe decided to check his own files…and those of people he knew – why not? Turns out, there is a record of his then-wife Jenny Gröllmann being approached and questioned by a Stasi agent regarding her husband’s political activities – the Stasi claims they had an ongoing arrangement with her.

Imagine the betrayal Mühe must have felt from the person he trusted most, as he revisited his memories of terror and repression. And at the time, he had been so confident theater was the only place where he could escape the lies.

Gröllmann claimed the Stasi files were contrived, and she was innocent. But Mühe knew it was common practice for the Stasi – spying that would involve your neighbors, maybe your relatives, even your lovers, listening and reporting on you to the government. Mühe put his comments in a book; Gröllmann sued him for libel. She died of cancer just after the release of the movie, “Lives of Others.” Soon, a court judgment leaned in her favor, requiring Mühe’s words to be blacked out of the book, and a lock put on relevant Stasi files.

Ulrich Mühe’s publisher is currently trying to get the ruling reversed. They believe the public wants to read those files and decide for themselves.

Back when he was a guard at the Berlin Wall, Ulrich Mühe was bothered by a temperamental stomach, brought on by anxiety – he did not want to “shoot to kill.” His discomfort resurfaced in recent times; he died of stomach cancer on July 22, at the age of 54, just as he became a star on the world stage.

Thinking of his TV series title, Ulrich Mühe was a major “last witness,” to the Fall of the Wall. He was a bridge between the before and the after, experiencing it all. “Lives of Others,” was… and was not made especially for Ulrich Mühe.

The key to the success of “Lives of Others,” is two fold: the excellent cast…and the fact that it is the real thing. You won’t get any closer to a portrayal of those times. This was spying at its worst. The movie is not filled with car chases and shoot-um-up fighting. What is so insidious – yes, it’s actually creepy in its lurid truth – is that a government could actually believe it had the right to control literally every facet of every citizen’s life. This kind of control works on the mind; it breaks down will to live, the will to strive, the will to create.

My plan is to watch "Lives of Others" at least once a year, just to remind me of what life would be like without freedom.

Additional Information:

Movie Review - Ulrich Mühe in "The Lives of Others" (playing Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler of the secret service)
German actor Ulrich Mühe, Article by Matthias Heine