Some of the facts that show up in my blog statistics are real mysteries. And this week there is one that has me fascinated.

All of a sudden my post about Ulrich Mühe —  Friedrich Hans Ulrich Mühe: An Actor Who Needed Only One Tear —   had an unexpected  increase in hits. I’d love to hear from anyone who knows why. (And right at the moment I write this,  I realize that — at the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — it makes perfect sensed that people would think about him.)

His performance in 2006 as an East German Stasi agent  in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen ( The Lives of Others)  is so  emotionally shattering  that, as I sit here playing it over in my head scene by scene,  I find it hard to even discuss.  Mühe died in 2007 and lived a life inextricably tied to the separation and later reunification of Germany. He should be remembered and his work honored. Much of his early work took place on the stage in East Germany before unification.

Actually I do have one more thing to say: Sometime Media and Mayhem commenter Dominic, my friend from high school and a talented filmmaker and animation artist, once told me something about the film that mortified me so much that I never even mentioned it to him again.  Ever since I have been silently trying convince myself that he really didn’t  say it.

But I still have to ask: There isn’ t going to be a Hollywood re-make, is there?

Say it ain’t so.