Why Dictators Fear Artists

With the exception of Scott, most every other critic concurs that Wiesler's transformation is the primary dramatic engine of the film and the key to its meaning. It's the substance and motivation behind the transformation that befuddles some of von Donnermarck's admirers, admirers who praise his overall accomplishment but who find fault in the crucial dramatic element in the film's plot. The British political commentator Timothy Garton Ash writes in the New York Review of Books that he was "powerfully affected" by the film, and yet "Wiesler's own conversion, as shown to us in the film, seems implausibly rapid and not fully convincing. . . . It would take more than the odd sonata and Brecht poem to thaw the driven puritan we are shown at the beginning." Even Catholic screenwriter and blogger Barbara Nicolosi is "a really big fan," and yet "the film needs a stronger moment to cause the Stasi agent to move out of coldness towards the objects of his spying and into empathy. Right now, the film is a bit too mysterious about it. An American studio story meeting would have caught that early on."

These admirer-critics do slight harm with their praise. Any criticism that calls into question the plausibility of Wiesler's transformation calls into question not only the coherence of the film itself but also the power of the artist against totalitarianism and ideology. Wiesler's change is indeed "mysterious" but in the way that Albert Einstein used the word: the sense that "behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly." I quote a scientist here on purpose: A scientist's work relies on the premise that reality is intelligible, and for Einstein such intelligibility does not nullify mystery. Wiesler experiences the mysterious when he encounters beauty, and it changes him.

Jacques Maritain writes in Art and Scholasticism that the splendor in beauty lies in its intelligibility: "If beauty delights the intellect, it is because it is essentially a certain excellence or perfection in the proportion of things to the intellect." This doesn't mean that beauty is ordered and logical in the way mathematics is ordered and logical; it has its own kind of order, distinct from quantitative order. But the appeal that beauty has for human beings is a reasonable appeal; human beings are rational animals, and our taste for the beautiful is not simply visceral, but rational. The contemplation of beauty is a rational endeavor that lies in the realm of knowledge—nonconceptual knowledge, but knowledge nonetheless.

Captain Wiesler himself does not develop a profound conceptual understanding of his own experience. As Maritain describes it, his intellect, "diverted from all effort of abstraction, rejoices without work and without discourse." But the lack of abstract reflection on his experience does not take away from its reasonableness and persuasiveness. Wiesler does not have time to "reflect . . . on the causes of this delight." He must act. He saves Dreyman's life.

Wiesler's experience of change is completely different from that of the poor dissident being "broken" by the Stasi in the opening scene of the film. To compare the two as one of my colleagues does ("The secret policeman claims it takes 40 hours of interrogation to break down a suspect; von Donnersmarck manages to dismantle Wiesler in a mere two hours and 15 minutes") is like arguing that the experience of entering prison is the same as the experience of leaving prison, because they both require the turning of a key. Ash's criticism is more damning, however. Ash directly rejects the notion that music and poetry could really transform a totalitarian mind. He reminds us that the Nazi soldiers in Schindler's List, during the long and painful scenes depicting the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, knew enough about music to debate with each other whether it was Mozart or Bach that the doomed Jew was playing on the piano. Neither was moved to tears; neither changed.

But the question to ask is: What else does Ash think is needed in order to make Wiesler's transformation believable? What else is needed to convince the Nazi soldiers to stop their butchery? I doubt that reasoned and sustained argument could accomplish what beauty and pity could not. The problem is not that poetry and music are not persuasive enough, but that the totalitarian mind limits the scope of reason within itself and is not open to being persuaded by a new experience—especially the experience of the mysterious, which it quickly debunks. The greatness of The Lives of Others lies in showing us that the totalitarian mind is more vulnerable than we think, and that a single moment of beauty can pierce through decades of ideological brainwashing. As Glenn Gould's case shows, the power of the artist lies not necessarily with the political content of his work but rather in the intelligibility of the beauty that he creates. The Cold War is over, but lies of ideology and totalitarianism are still with us, and that's why this film—itself a work of intelligible beauty—will endure.