Set during the era of German reunification (1989-1990), Goodbye Lenin! follows the story of a young man, Alex Kerner, who must protect his mother's fragile health from the shock that East Germany has collapsed. The fall of the Berlin Wall was, without a doubt, an iconic moment in history.
Months after the fall, the exuberance had faded, but the pain of reunification was still felt. This difficulty of coming to terms with a new reality is portrayed in Goodbye Lenin! through the themes of deception and nostalgia. The opening sequence, a flashback of Alex's childhood, details his mother's emotion instability.His father runs off with, as Alex puts it, "his new enemy-of-the-state girlfriend.
" Alex's mother, Christiane, crumbles into a state of depression but soon emerges as a newly-committed warrior of the socialist state. Alex notes that she has "married the Socialist Fatherland. " A passionate crusader for social justice, Christiane worries about the workers of Mozambique and serves her neighbors as a writer of world-class letters of complaint to the state. One night, she witnesses Alex tangled up in a riot, suffers a heart attack, and falls into a coma, awaking when reunification is imminent.Alex states, "Mother slept though the relentless triumph of capitalism..
. the biggest eight months in modern German history... everything she believed in vanished in just a few months..
.. " Doctors warn that the slightest excitement could kill her weakened heart, causing Alex to hatch a plan to have her recuperate at home, where he hopes to shield her from the recent historical developments. He recreates a "miniature GDR" in their apartment, so that Christiane never learns of the socialist system's collapse.Alex immediately sets about concealing the realities of a reunified Germany and the political ravages of consumerism. With the help of his sister, Ariane, Alex redecorates his mother's bedroom in the unluxurious style of yesteryear and forces everyone related to his mother wear the drab clothing that was common before Westernization.
As GDR products disappear from grocery store shelves, Alex turns to recycling bins to track down old containers, which he then cleans and reuses, refilling them with Western contents.To celebrate his mother's birthday, Alex gathers old Party friends and enlists the help of local children to dress up as Communist juniors and sing patriotic songs. When Christiane observes a nearby building with a gigantic banner advertising Coca-Cola, Alex and his friend create a false news report that recodes these signs as markers of East German political triumph, stating that Coca-Cola was invented by East Germans. As time passes, Alex makes up more stories. Lies build upon lies, and soon Alex's fictional East Germany diverges far from the truth.In a series of mock newscasts, Alex creates the humane GDR of his personal dreams, a vision that is in stark contrast to the reality of a state which spied on its citizens' every move, kept political prisoners behind bars under terrifying conditions, and was responsible for shooting dozens of refugees attempting to leave the GDR.
As Alex blends recycled segments of old GDR programs with his own original stories, he reshapes the memory of the East, stating, "The GDR I created for her increasingly became the one I might have wished for.After Christiane discovers traces of the West during an unsupervised stroll in her neighborhood (she witnesses IKEA signs, BMWs), Alex presents a newscast that reports immigrants from West Germany have recently begun flooding into the East, seeking refuge from unemployment and crime: "[The leader has]... granted political asylum in the GDR to West Germans seeking refuge in a typically generous gesture. " The final mock newscast consists of a televised speech by East Germany's "new" head-of-state, a former cosmonaut turned cab driver, who addresses the profound changes in Germany as it is reunited under socialism.
However, the speech does not consist of Stalinist language. Instead, it is a heartfelt plea for an egalitarian society based on human need rather than profit: "We know our country isn't perfect, but the ideals we believe in continue to inspire people all over the world. Socialism is about reaching out to others and living with them. It means not only dreaming about a better world, but making it happen. Therefore, I have decided to open the country's borders. While the family is watching this final newscast, Alex is seen proudly smiling.
This is further evidence of Alex's fabrication of the East, reflecting his imaginary and idealized version of reconciliation between East and West Germany, with East Germany taking the initiative and leading the way.When Christiane awakes from her coma, Alex firmly decides that he knows what is best for his mother: "My mother doesn't know the wall fell... here she'll find out in no time.
.. we must take her home. He convinces himself that he needs to "protect" her from the truth, in order to keep her alive and well: "All this stuff has to go," Alex states, referring to their new Westernized apartment outfitted with a tanning bed and red window blinds. However, Alex could have easily informed her of the historical developments in increments, over a period of days or weeks.
Instead, he chose the route of deceit, even when the effort to maintain falsehood became more and more complex. "Somehow, my scheme had taken on a life of its own.Alex states during a voice-over. Clearly, Alex was mainly catering to his own needs.
Alex needed to feel that he was doing something for his mother and needed to hold onto the image that he cherished of his mother as a champion of the old social order. "My mother's room resounded with the melody of yesterday," Alex states as he refurnishes his mother's room with books by East German writers. Although Alex was not a fan of the old regime, he invents stories about East Germany slowly triumphing, out of love for his mother.Socialism triumphs over the evils of capitalism and East Germany becomes an idyllic place to live. He puts all his hopes and dreams into this illusion - if he doesn't, he may lose his mother. "It's creepy what you're doing to your mother," Alex's girlfriend, Lara, tells him.
Those around him begin to think he has gone too far, yet Alex continues to strive to make his mother happy, while trying to adjust to the new real world. He passionately recreates Socialism in one little room - the very thing that was Alex's childhood.The director cleverly recreates this in a montage of home movies and East German documentary footage in the beginning of the film - this was a time when he was genuinely happy, cavorting with his family, and proud to witness the first East German cosmonaut in space. Old Spreewald pickles and Trabants were a part of his past, but now, life is a consumer's paradise and West Germans are behaving like an occupation army. In trying to hold onto the past, both for his mother and for himself, Alex is nostalgic about their earlier Socialist times. This is also evident when Alex visits his father's home.
He sees his father's children watching The Sandman, an Eastern animated show. He asks the children if he could join them and sits happily, reminiscing in his childlike ideals while watching the sandman taking off to the moon in a spaceship. It is interesting to consider whether Alex's ability to conceal the truth is tied to his experience living under a government that perpetuated a distorted version of reality. This is displayed by the fact that Lara, who is Russian, objects to his lies and deceptions. "I feel sorry for your mother..
. you've got to tell your mother, not for my sake, but for her sake.Like Alex, the East German government used systematic false information to manipulate beliefs. With Alex attempting to protect his mother from the truth, his mother reveals having deceived her children into believing that their father abandoned the family for another woman in West Germany. Their father had used the participation in a Western medical conference as an opportunity to flee.
He had arranged for Christiane and the children to follow. However, Christiane confesses that she stayed in the GDR not out of ideological devotion, but for fear that she would lose her children if she applied for an exit visa: "I just couldn't do it.I was terribly scared. I didn't go.
" Christiane used her passion for the GDR as a false front for her mixed feelings about it and the collapse of her relationship with Alex's father. Lara ultimately reveals the entire plot to his mother. Despite this, Christiane doesn't give away that she knows the truth and plays along, realizing that it is Alex who needs the deception, not her. Christiane is content to let Alex persist in his belief that he has protected her from the truth. The deceiver thus becomes the deceived.
After Christiane dies and he scatters her ashes in a rocket, Alex still believes that his mother died without ever knowing the truth about her beloved country: "I believe it was a good thing she never learned the truth. She died happy. " He speaks of her as a true believer, even as she confesses that her reasons for state loyalty were largely personal: "The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother.Alex's errors suggest a disconnect between history and memory - neither his mother nor his mother's country existed quite as he remembers them. Overnight, the Eastern economy transformed from a socialist system to a capitalist one, Western consumer goods and ideas came flooding in, and people were able to pass freely into the Western sector of the city and beyond. For young people, it spelled new opportunity.
For instance, Ariane was willing to accept this change - in quitting her studies for a job at Burger King - she embodied the acceptance of capitalist values.One scene shows Ariane and her new Western boyfriend embracing Western dance and song. For many of the older people, it was the destruction of all that they had struggled to achieve for 40 years. As Alex rummages through recycling to find a can of Spreewald Pickles, an elderly man walks by and groans, "Forty years gone! They sold us up the river! " When Alex explains to his mother's old friends that she doesn't realize the wall fell, they reply, "lucky her," adding that their own children had lost their jobs as a result of the Fall.It was painful to those like Christiane, who had tried their best to make the GDR a better country, to see the entire system collapse overnight, and, thus, their life's work washed away in a landslide.
Alex's viewpoint, however, lies somewhere in between. Despite having worked against the Communist regime (he had attended a protest the night his mother suffered a heart attack) and enjoying the new freedom that comes with unification (making frequent trips to the West and viewing pornography), Alex continues to protect his mother from a united Germany.Pretending the radio is broken and swapping food labels soon becomes bribing children to demonstrate his charade and filming fake news bulletins - all indication that he, too, has difficulty in coming to terms with his new way of life and wishes to maintain a concrete link to his past. As Alex ventures out into the new world of capitalism, he begins to question the changes. For example, when he brings his mother's East German 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: "This is 30,000 marks. This was our money for 40 years, damnit. Now you Wessie assholes say it's not worth anything? " Alex doesn't have a perfect life under the new capitalism. Whereas before he had a steady job in a television repair shop, he is now constantly driving around, trying to sell satellite services.
His new life presents him with new challenges and although his circumstances may be better under capitalism, but it is certainly not easy.In addition, the film's ending evokes a sense of nostalgia. Following the ceremony to scatter Christiane's ashes in the skies over Berlin, the film cuts to a historic clip of Sigmund Jahn broadcasting from space, illustrating past GDR successes. The same somber piano score is played, returning to the sense of loss (when Alex is told his father left the East for a woman in the West) and nostalgia with which the film commenced.There is a cut to tracking shots of city streets that remind the audience that this Eastern landscape is disappearing.
In the final moments of the film, the same opening home movie footage is presented, but this time showing a middle-aged Christiane gazing proudly into the camera as she stands surrounded by laughing children at a Young Pioneers event. In order to reconcile reality and Christiane's political persuasion, Alex recreates the simple life of the defunct GDR for his mother.He himself begins to enjoy the simplicity of her small one room world. The daily routine gives him a sense of purpose and feeds his nostalgia for East Germany. However, just as Alex is deluding his mother, she has been deluding the children all her life about their father and, in the end, is the one deluding Alex that she is still in the dark about his deception. It is Alex who finally deceives himself by creating the idealized Socialist society of his imagination, one of acceptance and compassion, in his final news bulletin.
