The Lives of Others is set in communist-ruled East Germany a few years before it disappeared from the map of the world in 1990. The government employed hundreds of thousands of spies and civilian informers to work for Stasi, a KGB-like secret police agency.

It snooped on the lives of all those citizens, especially writers and artists, who were suspected for their lack of faith in ‘socialism’ and were therefore treated as ‘enemies of the state’, with varying degrees of punishment. Of course, since the system was steeped in corruption, even loyal citizens were often spied upon and terrorised for the selfish interests of party bosses.

The film’s protagonist is a low-level Stasi official, a tough and incorruptible interrogator who genuinely believes in socialism and thinks it to be his duty to keep an eye on suspects in the literary and artistic community. He is assigned, under instructions from a powerful minister in the government, to spy on a famous playwright and his actress girlfriend. He wires up the playwright’s apartment and begins listening to their conversation from an attic in the building. To his surprise, he finds nothing damning about the playwright, who, on the contrary, comes across as an honest citizen and devoted believer in socialism. In the course of his spying, he also discovers that the real reason behind the assignment is that the minister, who has blackmailed the actress for sexual gratification, wants the playwright out of the way so he can have the actress for himself.

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