He was active in politics and denounced Communist rule in East Germany in a memorable address at the Alexanderplatz demonstration on 4 November 1989 shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The son of a furrier,[1] Mühe was born on 20 June 1953 in Grimma,[2] Bezirk Leipzig (part of present-day Saxony), in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

After leaving school, he trained as a construction worker, then did compulsory military service in the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army) as a border guard at the Berlin Wall.

[7] He appeared in his first professional stage role in 1979, as Lyngstrand in Ibsen's Fruen fra havet (The Lady from the Sea) at the Städtisches Theater in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz).

"[8] On screen, he co-starred with his second wife Jenny Gröllmann in Herman Zschoche's film Hälfte des Lebens [de] (Half of Life, 1984) about the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).

He often gave public readings from Walter Janka's essay Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit (Difficulties with the Truth, 1989) at the Deutsches Theater, before the book was permitted to be published in East Germany.

On 4 November 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in front of half a million people during the Alexanderplatz demonstration, he declared the Communists' monopoly on power to be invalid.

[4] In the same year, he became internationally known after playing, next to Armin Mueller-Stahl and Klaus Maria Brandauer, the leading role in Bernhard Wicki's Das Spinnennetz (Spider's Web, based on the expressionist, fragmentary novel of the same name by Austrian writer Joseph Roth) the right-wing lieutenant Lohse who sleeps and murders his way to professional success in the early Weimar Republic following a near fatal injury during the Wilhelmshaven mutiny of 29 October 1918.

[7] In 2006, he appeared at the Barbican Arts Centre in London in Zerbombt, Thomas Ostermeier's German production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, playing a middle-aged journalist whose encounter with a young girl leads to pandemonium in a Leeds hotel room.

The film is set in the mid-1980s, and Wiesler is a Stasi agent who is assigned to bug and conduct surveillance of the apartment of an East German playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

[1][12] After German reunification, Mühe allegedly discovered evidence in his Stasi file that he had been under surveillance not only by four of his fellow actors in the East Berlin theatre, but also by his wife Gröllmann.

[13] This mirrored the plot of Das Leben der Anderen as in the film pressure exerted by the Stasi on the playwright's girlfriend makes her betray him as the author of an exposé of covered-up GDR suicide rates.