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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Das Leben Der Anderen 2007)





Wiesler is a fascinating character. His face is a mask, trained by his life to reflect no emotion. Sometimes not even his eyes move. As played in Muehe's performance of infinite subtlety, he watches Dreyman as a cat awaits a mouse. And he begins to internalize their lives -- easy, because he has no life of his own, no lover, no hobby, no distraction from his single-minded job.

The story is set in communist East Germany (GDR) around 1984, and the main character is a Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) operating under the secret code HGW XX/7.
He is a veteran in the Stasi whose specialty is interrogations and one way or another he is able to get  information he needs from those he is questioning.

One night his boss takes Wiesler to the theatre and suggests he take an interest in a potentially dissident playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), whose beautiful girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) is appearing in his new play. 
Once the playwright's apartment is wired, Wiesler and an assistant start 24/7 surveillance  from the apartment above.

The film turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive, and  in the process Wiesler himself gets transformed (The scene in elevator with neighboring kid powerfully showcases that change) .

 At the end of film Wiesler , working as postman,  years after the original events took place ,two years after the fall of Berlin Wall and GDR dissolution , spots the book in the store window, titled Sonate vom Guten Menschen (Sonata for a Good Man), and immediately recognizes the author's picture.
He goes inside and opens a copy of the book and reads the dedication "To HGW XX/7, in gratitude". 

 This brilliant film won the best foreign language film at the 2007 Oscars, and has been regarded by some as the best-ever German film.




"He sits like a man taking a hearing test, big headphones clamped over his ears, his body and face frozen, listening for a faraway sound. His name is Gerd Wiesler, and he is a captain in the Stasi, the notorious secret police of East Germany. The year is, appropriately, 1984, and he is Big Brother, watching. He sits in an attic day after day, night after night, spying on the people in the flat below.

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