My favorite scene in the film The Lives of Others is when the Stasi agent Wiesler--(right, the astonishing Ulrich Mühe, who died a year later; here's his obituary in Sign and Sight)--sneaks into the apartment of Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), the playwright he is spying on. Dreyman's apartment, even empty, is alive with ideas, images, music, friendship.In contrast, you later see Wiesler alone in his bleak antiseptic room, lying on the couch reading a book he has stolen from Dreyman's apartment (below). It's a yellow-covered volume of Bertolt Brecht's poems, one of which Wiesler had overheard on his surveillance equipment read aloud during Dreyman's birthday party.
I found the complete poem at Harper's Magazine. Here it is:
1
On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.
2
Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what's happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can't remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can't recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.
3
And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.
-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927) (S.H. transl.)
(Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232)
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And here is a brief (1:58) excerpt of Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, the director of the film, talking with Charlie Rose.
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Review: "Beware, The Walls Have Ears"
Neal Ascherson, the Observer's Berlin correspondent at the height of Stasi rule, is transported back to a world of mistrust and fear. He discusses how faithful The Lives of Others is it to the memory of existence under the all-seeing eye of the hated secret police.
