When goodbyes hurt!
Movie: Good Bye Lenin!
Director: Wolfgang Becke
Cast: Daniel Brühl, Kathrin Sass, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Simon, Florian Lukas, Alexander Beyer, Burghard Klaussner
Screenplay: Wolfgang Becker, Hendrik Handloegten, Bernd Lichtenberg, Christoph Silber, Achim von Borries
Good Bye Lenin! is a 2003 German language political drama film set in 1989-1990, when the world officially bid goodbye to berlin wall and many communist ideas. Wolfgang Becker’s social satire explores the life of a young man, Alex (Daniel Bruhl) in east Germany who must protect his fragile mother, Christiane (Kathrin Sass), from a fatal shock after a long coma by keeping her from learning that her beloved nation of German Democratic Republic as she knew it has collapsed and a wall no more divides Germany. This is the story of Christiane Kerner, a middle aged single mother, who is a fiercely communist East German and her two children. In the historic year of 1989, Christiane witnesses her son Alex participating in an anti-communist protest demanding an end to the Wall. Upon seeing this, she collapses into an eight-month coma, during which time the GDR collapses. ”Mother slept through the relentless triumph of capitalism” Alex notes. When Christiane wakes up, her doctor tells Alex she mustn’t be excited or upset in any way. So he hides from his mother the biggest news of the 20th century, and pretends that the world remained the same during those eight months. Alex creates a microcosm of the old order in Christiane’s room and he fanatically searches the shops for Spreewald pickles and Mokka Fix Gold coffee found during the communist regime in East Germany. To further the illusion of the non-existent GDR for his mother, he spends his mornings refilling old juice bottles so that she does not see Western labels, abandons the new cable system on their television and even rewrites the evening news programs. He shows the original footage of the East Germans pouring to the west side and describes the scene as West Germans fleeing to the East to escape capitalism and drug addiction. In the meantime East Germany was engulfed by West Germany quickly. The hated brand names of capitalism sprout everywhere in the streets, and Alex’s sister Ariane (Maria Simon) quits her college to take a job with Burger King. The film also tries to connect the personal with the political by intimately tracing the lives of its main characters through the political atmosphere. The decisions, opinions and world views of each character in the movie express their strong political stands.
This articulated little movie recreates the lost world of communist East Germany; and what makes the film more special is it generates an ‘Ostalgie’ – the nostalgia for a communist past. ‘Ostalgie’ is a recurrent theme in Good Bye, Lenin! Alex shows signs of Ostalgie when he increasingly disapproves the changes brought by westernization. Therefore the attempts to make his mother comfortable eventually become his own search for a lost world. The true story of East Germany’s birth and death could never be conveyed in a film such as this, within two hours. But this is surely one of those films that depict real life of the ordinary people involved and thus the humane side that rarely surfaced in the conventional Cold War narratives before.
Written by Vinaya K, 3B
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY 