"You get the sense that the film's sterling performances don't come simply from the actors digging deeply into their characters -- but from their own memories of how it was just twenty years before," Kinn and Piazza write of the 2006 film directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. "In its transcendent epilogue, The Lives of Others shows us the end of a nightmare and something more precious than any political movement -- the opening of a lost man's soul."
Director Henckel von Donnersmarck told the New York Times that he was inspired to create the film after he remembered a quote by Lenin. "I remembered Maxim Gorky, who quoted Lenin as saying that Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ was his favorite piece of music," he said. "But Lenin said, ‘I don’t want to listen to it because it makes me want to stroke people’s heads, and I have to smash those heads to bring the revolution to them.’... I suddenly had this image in my mind of a person sitting in a depressing room with earphones on his head and listening into what he supposes is the enemy of the state and the enemy of his ideas, and what he is really hearing is beautiful music that touches him."
