Goodbye, Lenin!

One of the benefits of spending a lengthy amount of time in your local library is the chance of stumbling upon something as awesome as this. I was fortunate enough to find Goodbye, Lenin! in my library's foreign section of movies; ones that I can rent for free. In what seemed like a past life, I'd come across the film before, not knowing of its significance several years ago. Now that I'm more in tune with my East European heritage and intrigue of post-socialist life, Goodbye Lenin! seemed like a good idea the second time around.

The film, directed by Wolfgang Becker illustrates the story of a young man trying to protect his mother; a staunch Party (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) supporter from the startling changes occurring as a result of the crumbling USSR. Alex Kerner, his mother, sister and baby niece live in East Berlin at a time just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that Alex's mother misses due to a heart attack and subsequent coma. Her health condition puts an interesting twist on the plot because once she wakes from the coma, Alex can't bear to inform her that her comfortable, pro-communist lifestyle is no longer acceptable. Her children struggle with how to deal with the new social freedoms they've acquired, as well as the difficulties in keeping Berlin's drastic changes from her.

I thought that Berlin was an intriguing location to demonstrate the concept of Goodbye Lenin! because of its divided state between the formerly- 'fascist' West and 'communist' East (otherwise symbolizing the greater east/west divide installed by the Iron Curtain). Berlin illustrated just how far Sovietization had stretched, so much so that a wall was put up in the 1960s by the GDR, thinking that the FRG at that point wasn't de-Nazified enough. West Berlin/Germany however allotted its citizens much more freedoms and rights than its repressed, pro-Soviet neighbor, sparking emigration or at least attempted escapes by East Berliners to the other half. Mr. Kerner (Mrs. Kerner's former husband who made it to the FRG) was one such person, whom we do not meet in the film until later in the story. His absence makes an example of the strength of the unknown to East Berliners of the West and what types of more dynamic lifestyles they could possibly be experiencing.

What I liked about Goodbye Lenin! was the ability to visualize, even in one person's life what positive and negative experiences came with the reunification and the disappearance of Soviet ideology in Germany. While Alex and his sister embrace the excitement of being able to cross over a former boundary with little trouble, or the influx of capitalist media and consumerism, their mother's health evokes a sense of nostalgia for the past. This is not a yearning for the conditions set under the GDR, rather the 'little things' that people could rely on, such as the tasty brand of Spreewald pickles always found at the grocery. With the loss of jobs and economic uncertainty experienced by many groups of people formerly at the whim of the USSR, the loss of something as small as the limited, yet reliable brand choices at the grocery was something to remember.

One of the most alarming and hilarious scenes in the movie was the imagery presented when Mrs. Kerner escapes from her bedroom out onto the street. This is embodied in the statue of Lenin, whose legs are missing, and is being transported away from his former position of power and out of sight. The whole thing, that is, her five minute bathrobe-and-slipper stroll out onto the street is like a miniature trip into the West (and she still doesn't know about the wall). It presents the shock of change that I'm sure so many people underwent after years of oppression - being suddenly exposed to new concepts, new rights, and yet even new struggles. The hilarity of it however, is that such a scene allows people to poke fun at the Soviet era: to laugh at the tensions felt about the past, and at the chaos awaiting them as a result of change. Goodbye Lenin! is certainly odd and witty and extremely important to watch because it is so insightful and illustrative of how communism affected East Berlin, and suggests on a wider scale what life was like from 1989 onward.