The German cinema has a long tradition of artists and performance films, more specifically of films focusing on writers. Classic poets such as Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin and Büchner have been favourite film protagonists almost since the beginnings of film production in Germany. 1 Literary bio-pics as well as films about fictional writers and the writing process have traditionally offered filmmakers pertinent characters, issues and situations for self-reflexive investigations and commentaries on their métier. While reviewers and scholars have variously characterized Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others as a thriller, spy film, historical drama, fairy tale, melodrama and psychodrama, and focused almost exclusively on the story's presentation of the systematic surveillance by the Stasi in the GDR, in this essay I consider it from the perspective of a fictional literary film. The filmmaker himself emphasizes in the distributor's official press booklet this context of the film being about the art of film making:Because, at the end of the day, although I spent much time researching this topic, my true passion is films, dramaturgy, actors, psychology, not the Stasi or communism. I am not a preacher, nor a historian or politician but a filmmaker, a storyteller. I enjoy thinking and talking most about how to help actors live their art to the fullest, I spend my free time philosophizing about colours, shapes and beauty. Of course, the Stasi is an interesting topic, but the story was there first. And that's what the film is really about. 2Taking this claim at face value most obviously focuses attention on the figures of Georg Dreyman, a successful dramatist, and his partner, the stage actress Christa-Maria Sieland, but it also allows us to consider the protagonist, Stasi agent Wiesler, in his role as performer (in the classroom) and performance spectator (surveillance operative) who himself becomes at a crucial turning point in the
