To the imposingly named writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Ostalgie — the East Germans' wistfulness about the bad old days before the Wall fell — was a sickness in need of treatment. His antidote: an urgent, exceptional first feature, The Lives of Others. It's set in 1984, when the Stasi, East Germany's internal spy network, kept watch on artists and political dissidents, forcing many into obeisance or jail, silence or suicide. Gerd Wiesler \(Ulrich Mühe\), a mousy Stasi captain, plants bugs in the home of chic playwright Georg Dreyman \(Sebastian Koch, who played the engineer in The Tunnel\) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland \(Martina Gedeck\). Wiesler enjoys spying and prying because he's good at it. So when Dreyman decides to write a sub-rosa exposé of the communist state for a West German magazine, the spy is all ears.
Is this a political thriller? In part, yes. The Lives of Others has whisper](https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltba29df29d1e51bc1/6998c2b4f1b082687d6f0e79/top_10_berlin_wall_movies_the_lives_of_others.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9)
To the imposingly named writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Ostalgie — the East Germans' wistfulness about the bad old days before the Wall fell — was a sickness in need of treatment. His antidote: an urgent, exceptional first feature, The Lives of Others. It's set in 1984, when the Stasi, East Germany's internal spy network, kept watch on artists and political dissidents, forcing many into obeisance or jail, silence or suicide. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), a mousy Stasi captain, plants bugs in the home of chic playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch, who played the engineer in The Tunnel) and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Wiesler enjoys spying and prying because he's good at it. So when Dreyman decides to write a sub-rosa exposé of the communist state for a West German magazine, the spy is all ears.
Is this a political thriller? In part, yes. The Lives of Others has whispered conspiracies, a typewriter smuggled inside a cake box, a violent death, the sexual compromising of a beautiful woman. But those are mere trappings of a social structure that puts everyone at mortal risk, the spies no less than the spied-upon. Gradually, Wiesler is drawn into the couple's story — as is the viewer, for this is a gnarly tale of mixed motives, covert conspiracies and sexual deception on both sides. In a corrupt state, no one can be 100% pure.
The conflicts are not all fictional. Mühe had been a top East German stage actor under Stasi surveillance; he later learned his actress wife was listed as a state informant. The Lives of Others brought him a slew of awards, but he had little time to enjoy his renown. Mühe died of stomach cancer, at 54, in July 2006 — just months before the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. micahernst
## Introduction
The building of the Berlin Wall, which began Aug. 13, 1961, gave a stark architectural face to the Cold War and spawned a slew of spy movies located on the fault line of East-West intrigue. Hollywood masters like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock were among the first to spin political fables in this divided city. But in the '80s and beyond, as Soviet ideology cracked along with its most notorious edifice, German filmmakers addressed their own fissured history. micahernst
## The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John F. Kennedy may have loved Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, but the true literary spymaster of the '60s was John Le Carré. Under his real name, David Cornwell, he worked for MI6, the British foreign intelligence service, in Berlin and then Hamburg, where he wrote The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Its publication in 1963 alerted readers to the morally gray nature of espionage and the very un-Bondian nature of its players. "They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me," says Le Carré's MI6 protagonist Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) in the movie version. "Little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives." Fiedler (Oskar Werner), the East German agent who interrogates Leamas when he pretends to defect to communism, has an even worse opinion: "You are a traitor... the lowest currency of the Cold War. We buy you, we sell you, we lose you. We even can shoot you! Not a bird would stir in the trees outside."
The bracingly bleak film version — easily the most famous Berlin Wall movie — was scripted by Paul Dehn (who had co-written the Bond film Goldfinger) and directed by the American Martin Ritt, taking a break from his '60s run of five Paul Newman movies (including Hud and Hombre). Burt Lancaster was originally cast as Leamas until sanity intervened, and the newly-hot Mr. Elizabeth Taylor got the part. Burton's black-Welsh eloquence proved an ideal match, and Ritt pulled similarly impressive-depressive performances from Werner and Claire Bloom, who plays Nan, an English librarian of communist ideals who is drawn into the deadly game.
Like the novel, the movie (shot in England and Ireland) starts and ends at the Berlin Wall. At the beginning, Leamas watches as his prize double-agent is shot as he tries to cross, thus forcing the English agent into his own double duty "in the cold." Discovering a residue of ethics through his love for Nan, Leamas decides that capitalism and communism are equally bankrupt and returns with her to the Wall — still a spy, but no 007, and still a man who would risk his life to be with his woman.
micahernst
## Funeral in Berlin
While Hollywood scampered to make spy movies even more frivolous than the mega-popular Bond films and produced short-lived secret-agent franchises for Dean Martin (as Matt Helm) and James Coburn (as Derek Flint), the Brits hewed to the dour tradition established by The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In the 1966 The Quiller Memorandum, directed by Michael Anderson from the novel by Adam Hall, an MI6 operative (inappropriately impersonated by the American smirker George Segal) skulks through Cold War Berlin tracking a ring of neo-Nazis run by Max von Sydow. Senta Berger was the romantic interest who may be playing both sides. In the script by Nobel Prize-winning cynic Harold Pinter, the proceedings are monitored back in London by two senior spies of the upper-class-twit species (George Sanders and Robert Flemyng), who exchange bland pleasantries about international murder while taking lunch at their club. Britain's premier semirealistic spy was Harry Palmer — an ex-thief with a independent spirit who had been dragooned into the secret service — in the three-film series from Len Deighton novels that began with The Ipcress File. Between Ipcress and Funeral in Berlin, Michael Caine had blossomed into an international star as the blithe womanizer in Alfie. He brought that luster to Palmer's second case: a trip to East Berlin to vet the defection of General Stock (Oskar Homolka), a Soviet intelligence officer. Palmer's terse wit may simply be truth (his reason for spying: "I get paid"), but he knows the fine points of negotiating with a blustering Russian. Stok: "For you it is a propaganda victory. My name is worth a headline." Harry: "We get plenty of Russians. A pity you're not Chinese." Directed by Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger) and scripted by Evan Jones (the spy spoof Modesty Blaise), the movie triggered its own Cold War incident on location in West Berlin. As the crew shot near Checkpoint Charlie, Russian soldiers on the other side of the Wall tried to ruin the scene by reflecting sunlight into the cameras. micahernst
## One, Two, Three
Billy Wilder, an Austrian Jew who was writing scripts in Germany until he emigrated in 1933, returned twice to make political comedies: the 1948 A Foreign Affair, with Marlene Dietrich superb as a world- and war-weary frau; and this cockamamie satire of Cold War relations. C.C. MacNamara (James Cagney, in his last film for 20 years) is head of West Berlin operations for the Coca-Cola Company and dreams of a promotion to run all of Europe. But his boss's daughter (Pamela Tiffin) is in love with scruffy Otto, an East German communist (Horst Buchholz) who wants to whisk her off to Moscow. MacNamara must transform the Rednik into a European gentleman while negotiating with a Soviet apparatchik. Wilder and co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond packed the film with dozens of Cold War jokes (The apparatchik boasts that "We have trade agreement with Cuba: they send us cigars, we send them rockets") and Soviet-poverty gags left over from Wilder's script for the Garbo Ninotchka. (Otto says his Moscow supervisors "have assigned us a magnificent apartment — just a short walk from the bathroom"). It's frenetic fun with a suitably bitter aftertaste. Wilder was shooting in Berlin the morning the Wall went up, and the crew had to move to Munich. When the movie opened that December, the writer-director appended this preface: "On Sunday, August 13th, 1961, the eyes of America were on the nation's capital, where Roger Maris was hitting home runs #44 and 45 against the Senators. On that same day, without any warning, the East German Communists sealed off the border between East and West Berlin. I only mention this to show the kind of people we're dealing with — REAL SHIFTY." Reviewers found One, Two, Three pretty shifty too: they denounced it for political insensitivity). According to the Village Voice's J. Hoberman, liberal screenwriter Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg) "deemed Wilder's jape so tasteless, he felt obliged to apologize for it at the Moscow Film Festival." The irreverent tone may have alienated critics of the day, but the movie now looks like the highest, most ruthless form of comedy: world politics played as uncompromising farce.
For decades, Alfred Hitchcock had been alchemizing world politics into silky thrillers. The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, Sabotage, The Lady Vanishes and Foreign Correspondent, to choose only from films he made in the 1930s, all showed ordinary people stumbling into espionage plots. Torn Curtain, written by ex-Brit-intelligence agent Brian Moore, brought the spying front and center. American rocket scientist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) defects to East Germany with his fiancée Sarah (Julie Andrews); in fact he is a U.S. operative charged with locating a mathematical formula invented by a Leipzig scientist. Filming in Berlin and Copenhagen, and on the Universal Studios back lot, Hitchcock managed one brilliant, brutal sequence as Armstrong gets in a death match with an East German thug (Wolfgang Kieling) — proof that, as the director said, "It's very difficult to kill a man."
The shoot was also agonizing. Newman is palpably uncomfortable, as is Andrews, whom the studio insisted replace Hitchcock's choice, Eva Marie Saint. Behind the scenes, the director acceded to Universal's veto of Bernard Herrmann, his longtime composer, firing Herrmann in front of his musicians and hiring John Addison (an Oscar winner two years before for Tom Jones) to write a more sonorous score. The director also wanted to end the film on a pensive note: "Paul Newman would have thrown the formula away..... It speaks to the futility of all, and it's in keeping with the kind of naïveté of the character, who is no professional spy and who will certainly retire from that nefarious business." That idea too was overruled, leaving Torn Curtain as a sour compromise with one saving moment: the desperate, clumsy, unheroic death struggle of a man from the West and a man from the East. micahernst
## Octopussy
A secret agent in a circus-clown suit is pursued toward the East German border by knife-wielding twins. A knife finds its way into the clown's back, but he survives and makes it to the British Embassy, where he falls dead as a Fabergé egg rolls from his hand.
The opening of Octopussy, the 14th official James Bond movie, filmed near Checkpoint Charlie, may be the only scene in the series having even the remotest connection to the Berlin Wall. (For most of the rest of the film, Roger Moore's 007 hobnobs with an Indian prince with terror intentions on a nuclear scale.) The absence of East German intrigue may seem odd, considering that Ian Fleming's suave creation was the 20th century's most famous spy, and that the first 007 movie, Dr. No, came out a year after the Wall went up. But the Broccoli family, producers of all the official Bond films from then to now, was a conglomerate of fantasy-spinners. They knew that audiences loved to see the impossible: a cocksman with an Oxbridge education, the spy as solitary superhero. And with a worldwide audience lapping up the franchise, why write off the whole Communist world by casting Soviets as villains? So Bond found villains in rogue warriors, not cold warriors. Indeed, in A View to a Kill — released in 1985, two years before Ronald Reagan charged Mikhail Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall!" — "Comrade Bond" is awarded the Order of Lenin.
You could call the whole Bond mystique the cinema's answer to the Cold War: no international fracas was so dire that it couldn't be solved by a gentleman stud who knew that Dom Perignon '53 should only be served at 38 degrees Fahrenheit. Especially as incarnated in six of the first seven films by Sean Connery, Bond comprised equal parts of Jack Kennedy's playboy glamour and Hugh Hefner's Playboy Philosophy. He was the Cold War's sexiest byproduct. And unlike John Le Carré's Alec Leamas, he wouldn't be found dead near the Berlin Wall. micahernst ## Wings of Desire 
Two years before the fall of the Wall, two angels — yes, real angels, with wings and ponytails — listen keenly to every wounded soul in Berlin. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) patrol the city's streets, libraries, offices, homes. Their job is to "observe, collect, testify, preserve," to offer the unseen hand of consolation to lonely old men, restless scholars, frustrated workers, angry wives. In Wim Wenders' gorgeous, dead-serious fairy tale, chosen for the all-TIME Movies list, the Berliners' voices rise like the choral symphony of a great city. All these creatures are angels, too, Damiel decides, but most important they are human. They can bleed and see colors. They can feel warmth and pain. Damiel hopes to enter their world, "if only to hold an apple in my hand." He wants to say "Ah!" instead of "Amen" — to create his own story in his own voice.
In their earlier work, Wenders (An American Friend) and novelist Peter Handke (The Left-Handed Woman) charted some pretty bleak terrain. In Wings of Desire, whose original title translates as Heaven Over Berlin, they boldly go where just about everyone has gone before, into the realm of romantic fantasy. You could say this film is It's a Wonderful Life as told by an angel tired of earning his wings. But it's lots else: a fable about the common yearnings of people on both sides of any border, and about the search to reconcile wisdom with feeling, purity with experience. Who knows what Fate has in store? Nobody, for sure. And that is the risk held out, like an apple in Eden, by life, art and political dreams. micahernst ## The Legend of Rita 
Four young people rob a West German bank, shouting, "Property is theft!" to the startled citizens cashing their paychecks. Outside, one of the robbers — Rita Vogt (Bibiana Beglau) — dumps hundreds of the bank's deutschmarks into the hat of a beggar. "The 1970s were our glory days," Rita recalls in a voiceover. "We wanted to abolish injustice and the state along with it. Politics was war, all over the world." But what's a revolutionary to do after the war is called off due to a change in political mood and the death or imprisonment of many of its soldiers?
Rita, with the implied blessing of the Stasi state spy network, settles in East Germany under a new identity and works first in a textile factory, then at a summer camp. Rita doesn't miss her outlaw days; she wasn't in it for the excitement. She is a dedicated ideologue who loves East Germany because it has "less poverty and less wealth." If the Berlin Wall had been built to keep West Germans out of the East, Rita would have tunneled her way to the communist state. But sometimes nations disintegrate faster than political beliefs. When the Wall falls, and East Germany with it, the West Germans — now just the Germans — want her to stand trial for killing a policeman. Who will help Rita escape now?
Screenwriter Wolfgang Kolhasse, who lived in East Germany, based the script on the exploits of Inge Viett, whose June 2nd Movement was an anarchist offshoot of the Marxist Red Army Faction. Viett sued the filmmakers for plagiarism, apparently believing that fictionalized biography is theft. Whatever the legal niceties, The Legend of Rita (whose original title translates as The Silence After the Shot) presents the volcanic changes in its protagonist's life in a nuanced style that lets viewers choose their own sides. Director Volker Schlöndroff also made the 1975 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, about a young woman who spends the night with a young man who doesn't tell her he's a wanted terror suspect; after he escapes she is arrested as his accomplice. Rita, who might be a female version of Katharina's one-night stand, is made plausible and fascinating thanks to Beglau's sinewy charisma. micahernst ## The Tunnel 
Harry Melchior (Heino Ferch), an East German swimming champion, defects to the West in 1961, the year of the Wall, but his beloved sister and her family are left behind. To help them escape, he and his engineer friend Matthis (Sebastian Koch) devise the scheme of a tunnel from West Berlin to East. With the aid of about 30 friends, they dig a hole the length of two soccer fields, as Melchior's sister receives anxious, furtive messages. The East German state police are listening too.
This engrossing movie, written by Johannes W. Betz and directed Roland Suso Richter, plays like The Great Escape in German. And like that Steve McQueen blockbuster, it is based on a true story. For Hasso Herschel, the real-life swimming champ who defected to the West, insurrection was nothing new; he had spent years in jail for his participation in the 1953 protests in East Berlin against the communist government. In a making-of extra, Herschel recalls both the back-stooping ordeal of digging the tunnel and the unwavering belief that it had to be done. Staring into the mouth of the movie tunnel, he smiles and says, "It's much smaller than I remember it." micahernst ## Good Bye, Lenin! 
A Rita without the rifle, Christiane (Katrin Sass) is a true believer in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Throughout the '70s and '80s, she works with cheerful zeal to help her East Berlin neighbors realize the benefits of communism. Then she suffers a severe heart attack and falls into a coma, regaining consciousness after eight months. A doctor urges her grown son Alex (Daniel Bruhl) to shield her from any further shocks.
Just one problem: it's 1989, and the Wall has crumbled; communism is kaput. Christiane will die, literally, if she discovers that her socialist dream has predeceased her. So, Alex, out of love and desperation, tries to keep the old East Germany alive in her apartment. He rigs up their TV to a VCR and pipes in old news broadcasts, hires kids to sing the party songs, does his best to explain away the huge Coca-Cola sign outside her window.
Good Bye, Lenin! may sound like sitcom stuff, a wacky mistaken-identity plot inflated to national dimensions. In fact, as handled with gentle expertise by director and co-writer Wolfgang Becker, the trope works splendidly as both political metaphor and love story. Lenin explores Ostalgie (Eastalgia) — the post-Wall tendency of some East Germans to get a little misty over the Honecker regime — and taps the universal suspicion that whatever Now is like, Then was better. But it's also a sweet fable of the tenderness a son may invest in assuming the responsibilities of caregiver for a declining parent. Politically and emotionally, the movie is so mature, it's liberating. micahernst ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7125955/top-10-berlin-wall-movies/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7125955/top-10-berlin-wall-movies/"},"headline":"Top 10 Berlin Wall Movies","datePublished":"2011-08-11T15:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T07:01:26.069Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/archive/7125955/top-10-berlin-wall-movies/","keywords":["cinema","film"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7125955/top-10-berlin-wall-movies/","name":"Top 10 Berlin Wall Movies"}}]}] ```