Pereira Declares and 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 lives 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. Tabucchi and von Donnersmarck show the true nature of totalitarian governments in Pereira Declares and the Lives of Others. They show this through their characters, the types of governments, and the median through which the text is conveyed.

The main characters are used to show how the government's true nature in these two text. 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 dislikes how his life is going 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. Pereira starts out by writing for an independent paper 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. Pereira had already been questioning the government because of the carter who was murdered by the police, and Rossi made Pereira realize that he could actually do something good for a change. For Wiesler, it was having to spy on a play writer, Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend Christa-Maria. After listening to the thing that they said, Wiesler realizes that the government is wrong for spying on people.

The differences in the government types are important in understanding the disdain for the governments in each text. In Pereira Declares, the government was a dictatorship underneath Antonio Salazar, and the government in The Lives of Others is communist. In Pereira Declares, the government killed a carter that was socialist and sent people to murder Rossi after he had been recruiting help for Republican Spain. These types of things actually happened in real fascist dictatorships in history, and I think that Tabucchi is trying to give everyone a warning of what can happen if the government has complete control over the people. In The Lives of Others, anyone who is even acting suspiciously would be spied on. Although getting spied on is very a very unpleasant, this is nothing compared to what Stalin did. Stalin ordered millions of murders and for people to be sent to the gulag (Snyder). Since von Donnersmarck painted such a bad reputation about Eastern Germany when all they did was spy on people, image what it would have been like under Stalin. Both of these things show what governments can do with unlimited power, and make it obvious why the creators of the text make it so clear that they dislike the government in their stories.

The type of literature that both of these text are conveyed is important to be able to compare the governments in the text. Pereira Declares is a book, so everything that Tabucchi deemed important had to be described in the text. He was unable to use visual cues to get his point across. 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. This was important in showing all the equipment that was being used to spy on Dreyman. Both Tabucchi and von Donnersmark did a very good job with making the governments seem like terrible entities that hovered over the people in their respective countries. Tabucchi describing the carter and Pereira thinking about it over and over really painted the government as despicable people. Von Donnersmark showing how Dreyman wrote about all of the suicides taking place in Eastern Germany at the time, and talking about how the government doesn’t even consider them suicides. 

Tabucchi and von Donnersmark use the main characters, the types of governments, and the median through which the text is conveyed are all used to show what totalitarian governments are really like. These two use their creative ability to show people how life under an authoritarian government is really like, while still making a great story that is interesting to read. Hopefully, these two text will convince some people that the government does not need unlimited power and teach people to question what the government does.
