It is 1989 and Communism is crumbling everywhere except in the heart and
mind of Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass), a middle-aged Berlin resident
who has a picture of Che Guevara on her bedroom wall and is fiercely
loyal to party leader Erich Honecker.
Her son Alex (Daniel Brühl, who played the schizophrenic youth in the
powerful "White Sound") and daughter Ariane (Maria Simon) are typical
young Berliners. They have little use for ideology and yearn for the
material goods and personal liberty of the West. Despite their
differences with their mother, they love her deeply and would do
anything to make her happy.
One night as Christiane is heading toward a party celebration, she
happens upon a police crackdown on anti-Communist protestors, including
her son who is being thrown into the back of a truck in handcuffs. This
sight causes her to collapse on the street with a heart attack. She is
brought to a hospital in a coma.
When Alex visits the hospital, the doctor tells him that there is no
guarantee that she will ever awake from the coma. If she does, the
important thing is to prevent any shocks to her psyche since another
heart attack would prove fatal. For the next eight months, as Christiane
lays motionless in her hospital bed, everything changes around her. The
Berlin Wall collapses, the two Germanys are reunited and the East is
flooded by Western companies.
Finally Christiane regains consciousness but in a weakened state. In a
ploy that constitutes the dramatic tension of the film and its
underlying political and social theme, Alex resolves to create an
artificial environment in her bedroom back at home that is faithful to
the Communist past. After elaborately preparing the bedroom with the
clunky furniture and Stalinoid photos they had discarded, they spirit
her from the hospital making sure that the ambulance attendants stay mum
about the political sea change.
Alex, who has befriended a co-worker and aspiring video artist at a
Western satellite-dish company (his former employer has gone bankrupt,
like almost all "Ostie" firms), relies on him to assemble archival news
programs from the Communist past that they play for Christiane on a
concealed VCR. The joke is that it really doesn't matter, since the
"news" consists mainly of reports about dissatisfaction in the West with
unemployment, drug addiction and other social problems.
This joke is part of an ensemble of comic situations as Alex goes to
greater and greater lengths to sustain the illusion that Communism is
still in power. He searches desperately for consumer goods from the past
that apparently not only appeal to his mother, but to other elderly East
Berliners who feel swamped by Western products that are alien to their
culture. Although the word "globalization" is not mentioned once in the
film, an astute member of the audience might think of the French farmer
José Bové who vandalized a Macdonalds for its encroachments of native
cuisine and values.
As Alex ventures out into the brave new world of capitalism, he begins
to question the changes. For example, when he brings his mother's East
Germany currency to a bank to be converted into Deutschemarks, he is
told that the deadline was two days earlier and that they are worthless.
When he raises his voice in protest, bank guards throw him out. He calls
them assholes.
In the final scene of the film, as his mother is approaching death, he
stages one last ruse that summarizes the sensibility of Wolfgang Becker,
the film's director and co-author (written with Bernd Lichtenberg).
After she has discovered traces of the West during an unsupervised
stroll in her neighborhood (Coca-Cola signs, BMW's, etc.), they convince
her that immigrants from West Germany have recently begin flooding into
the East, seeking refuge from unemployment and crime. The film's coda
consists of a televised speech by East Germany's "new" head of state, a
renowned former cosmonaut (a cab-driver recruited by Alex), who
addresses the profound changes in Germany as it is reunited under socialism.
However, the speech does not consist of Stalinist jargon. Instead it is
a heartfelt plea for an egalitarian society that is based on human need
rather than private profit. Obviously written by Alex, it is a sign of
his final reconciliation with his mother on both familial and
philosophical grounds.
On January 13, 2004 the New York Times reported on the phenomenon of
"Ostalgie", a neologism that indicates nostalgia for the "East" or the
Communist past, which is epitomized in a small museum in the town of
Eisenhüttenstadt near the Polish border and that has gotten a boost from
the popularity of "Good Bye, Lenin". It evokes Christiane's bedroom:
"The museum is just a few rooms, mostly on the second floor of a former
day-care center, but it holds 70,000 to 80,000 objects from the former
East Germany. About 10,000 people a year come to look at Mikki
transistor radios, jars of Bulgarian plums, schoolbooks, plastic water
glasses that never seemed to come in the right colors. Seeing these
familiar objects clearly stirs warm feelings about the vanished and
unrecapturable past."
This is not just about nostalgia for chintzy objects that might be
regarded as a German version of "camp". It is also about a growing
disenchantment with the new capitalist world that they had assumed would
be a kind of utopia:
"Ostalgie is complicated, made up of various ingredients. One is clearly
the disillusionment felt by many former Easterners over German
reunification, which took place 13 years ago. Unemployment these days is
commonly 25 percent in regions like Eisenhüttenstadt. Rents are no
longer subsidized. Doctor visits cost money. People can be fired. In
addition, as Andreas Ludwig, the West German scholar of urban history
who started the museum a few years ago, noted, even capitalist products
break down or are shabby and schlocky."
It would be too much to expect the New York Times to acknowledge what is
truly driving "Ostalgie". It is the memory of Easterners that the old
system guaranteed cheap rents, a job, medical care and low crime. With
"globalization" turning most of the planet into an ever more ruthless
competition for disappearing jobs, such a past might retain some appeal.
Indeed, a Lexis-Nexis search on "East Germany" and "nostalgia" returned
529 articles, many with headlines like "Wealth and freedom? No thanks,
we'd rather have a Trabant" (referring to a defunct automobile).
The true story of East Germany's birth and death could never be conveyed
in a film such as this, but there are realities that never surfaced in
conventional cold-war narratives. In Carolyn Eisenberg's "Drawing the
Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949", we learn that
FDR intended that Germany be deindustrialized, demilitarized and--most
importantly--denazified after the war, a goal shared by his partner
Joseph Stalin. Then along came Harry Truman, who saw Communism as just
another impediment to American hegemony. In violation of the Potsdam and
Yalta agreements, Truman pushed for reindustrialization of West Germany
under the Marshall Plan and the creation of a formal West German state.
Washington then abruptly ended denazification, leaving 640,000 war
criminals unprosecuted and canceled steps to break up the cartels that
had provided much of Hitler's economic and social base. Defying
conventional notions of Stalin's intractability, Ambassador Walter
Bedell Smith confessed that "we really do not want nor intend to accept
German unification in any terms that the Russians might agree to, even
though they seemed to meet most of our requirements."
And what did the Soviets seek? Nothing but what had already been
hammered out at Yalta and Potsdam, namely $10 billion in reparations,
four-power control of the Ruhr Valley and vigorous denazification and
permanent demilitarization. In exchange, they would accept free
elections throughout Germany modeled along the lines of the old Weimar
Republic--hardly the stuff of Communist subversion.
When the West reneged on all this, the Soviets began to crack down in
the East. The rest is history.
(Good Bye, Lenin is scheduled to open in NY theaters at the end of
February. It was the winner of the Best European Film at the Berlin Film
Festival.)
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