The Lives of Others (#18)

Mark and Cory discuss The Lives of Others, a modern classic about Stasi surveillance in 1980s East Germany. They start off talking about how to cope with a terrible dictatorship and how the film is about the power of art. However, they quickly get sidetracked with some suspicious behaviour of the Stasi officers including keeping bottles of tomato sauce in the sink and drawing floorplans of flats a little too quickly.

(A note of caution: this episode does contain discussion of themes including suicide and sexual assault where this is relevant to the film's plot.)

Anna Funder's article on the film which Cory references can be found here, and the more academic article on suicide can be found here. Timothy Garton Ash's The File is highly praised by both Cory and Mark in the episode, whilst you can also buy tickets for the play here.   This episode kicks off a special miniseries in which we will be putting out weekly episodes for the next month or so. Next Thursday, we're starting a two-part series on the classic TV serial State of Play.   Cory’s email newsletter is Paperback Rioter and Mark has a family of email newsletters.   Subscribe to our newsletter for some additional bonus content and to get alerted whenever a new episode comes out.   Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod/incompetech.com and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.