In the 20 years between the Oscar-winning film and its new stage adaptation, The Lives of Others has become uncomfortably resonant.
Back in 2006, we still enjoyed the moral certainties of Cold War bipolarity. Market capitalism’s hiccup was still a few years away. Free societies had conclusively won the argument, and it didn’t occur to many of us that the winners had learned so little from their victory. But, in the shadow of the Covid psychosis and its residual frictions, what originally felt like a cosy retrospective on ‘the end of history’ now feels more like PTSD.
