Both films depict life in East Germany and address the issue of how that life is to be depicted. “Goodbye Lenin” is a dramatic comedy, depicting a young man who attempts to maintain the illusion that the Berlin Wall and the German Democratic Republic have not fallen for the sake of his ill mother. The film part of the new eave of ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany) emerging in the early 21st century. The subject here is East Germany’s depiction, raising questions of how we construct its place in nostalgia, memory, and tradition. “The Lives of Others” depicts an East German secret police officer surveilling a writer and his lover and involving himself in their lives, evoking a very different historical memory of East Germany, one of surveillance and the police state, and questioning the role of surveillance in people’s lives, even as it show how difficult it was to question such a role while living under East German rule.