My friend had tears in her eyes as the film credits rolled for “The Lives of Others.” She had grown up in East Germany, the wall fell when she was 11, and the movie resonated with her memories: the East German government spying on citizens, instilling fear in and exacting control over the populace, people disappearing never to be spoken of and other such 1984- and Animal Farm-like rotten things.

Scott Holleran’s review captures the film, artistically and philosophically. At boxofficemojo.com he states, the movie “is an extraordinarily powerful drama that repudiates altruism, the idea that one must live for the sake of others, as a moral code.”

Holleran notes:

The picture opens in a prison, a proper metaphor for the Soviet-controlled country, which tortured its citizens with a secret police known as the Stasi. Every citizen feared the agents of East Germany's Stasi….

The Lives of Others proceeds from there, swiftly moving along and rewarding the mind that grasps what totalitarianism means in theory and in practice; how it envelops a nation in fear—how it elevates the mediocre—how it destroys that which is good.

Holleran concludes:

What begins in prison and ends in a bookstore—where man is free to think, choose and profit—is a bittersweet tribute to that which cannot be fully controlled or killed: man's ego. There is no equivocation of evil in The Lives of Others; there are only men and women whose lives are moved by ideas in a revolving intellectual mystery, powered by an unconquerable love for life.

“The Lives of Others” is worthy of a wide audience, especially in the United States. This film, which has won an Oscar, among many other awards, it is a monument to why individual liberty, property rights and limited government are essential to prosperity as well as the pursuit of personal fulfillment and happiness.