Pereira Declares and the The Lives of Others take place under authoritarian governments. Antonio Tabucchi and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck created two amazing pieces of literature that show the life of the main characters, Pereira and Wiesler. These two start out the text by either not caring about the oppression by the government and in Wiesler’s case, he actually worked for the government, they both go on to have one main event that changes them to be against the government. They both do subtle things to help others who stand against the regime. To compare and contrast Pereira Declares and the Lives of Others you have to look at the main characters, the types of governments, and the median through which the text is conveyed.

The main character, Pereira, in Pereira Declares is an overweight middle aged man who writes for a small newspaper in Portugal during the 1930s. He is discontented with his life and wants to live in his past where he was fit and his wife was still alive. The main character in The Lives of Others is Wiesler. Wiesler is part of the Stasi, a part of the government that spies on people and interrogates them if they are found to be suspicious. How the main characters start out in each of their text is one of the differences. Pereira starts out by doing his own thing and Wiesler is working for the government. They both change their views on their governments after a certain big event. For Pereira it was meeting Montiero Rossi and helping him. For Wiesler it was having to spy on a play writer, Sebastian Koch and his girlfriend Christa-Maria. Blah blah blah

The differences in the government types are important to compare and contrast the two text. In Pereira Declares, the government was a dictatorship underneath Antonio Salazar. The government in The Lives of Others is communist. 

The type of literature that both of these text are conveyed is important to be able to compare Pereira Declares and The Lives of Others. Pereira Declares is a book, so everything that Tabucchi deemed important had to be described in text. In The Lives of Others, von Donnersmarck was able to take more liberty with what had to be said and could use images to describe things. 