Goodbye Lenin (5 Stars)

This is a brilliant film, one of the best German films ever made. I bought it in England as one of my first DVDs, but I now have the German Blu-ray release. Judging by the high prices at Amazon in both England and America, it looks like the stocks are running out and it will soon no longer be available. That's sad. This film is an important historical document, and the German release doesn't have English subtitles to make it more accessible internationally.

"Goodbye Lenin" is a comedy – yes, Germans do know how to be funny – but in this case the humour is difficult to understand for anyone not familiar with German culture before and after the reunification in 1990. I'm fortunate enough to have been living in Germany in 1990. The events in Berlin were on the news every day, but for me they were confusing. It all seemed too good to be true. Whenever something good happened I sat waiting for a catastrophe to undo it. Fortunately, the catastrophe never came. Mikhail Gorbachev was the Russian President in 1990. If Vladimir Putin had been president , Russian troops would have been sent to Berlin, and the bodies would be lying waist deep in the street.

The film begins on 7th October 1989, the 40th anniversary of the founding of East Germany, officially called the German Democratic Republic (DDR). There's an irony in the name, because the country was everything except democratic, but that's a subject for another day. Alexander Kerner is a 17-year-old teenager living in East Berlin. This is the day when protests against the DDR escalated into open demonstrations on the street, which were brutally repressed. This is also the day on which Alexander's mother, a loyal Communist, had a heart attack and fell into a coma.

Christiane Kerner lies unconscious for eight months, until 22nd June 1990. During this time there were political upheavals, including the demolition of the Berlin Wall on 13th June 1990. When she wakes up, Alexander is warned that his mother's state is still critical, so she shouldn't be subjected to any shocks.

Alexander thinks that the decline of the DDR might be a shock which could kill his mother, so he does whatever he can to hide the truth from her. Alexander and his friends wear their old DDR clothing. When Christiane returns home she can't leave her bed and she wants to watch television, so he collects videotapes of old news broadcasts. When they run out, Alexander gets help from a work colleague who's an amateur film maker. Together they film new news broadcasts to convince Christiane that nothing changed while she was in a coma.

As time passes, Christiane begins to look out of her bedroom window, and she sees things that make her suspicious. Alexander's news reports help to explain, but everything escalates out of control. The news reports rewrite history, presenting the fall of the Berlin Wall as a victory for Communism, with westerners desperate to flee into the East.

As we see, Alexander isn't just creating an alternative universe for his mother, he's doing it for himself. East Germans wanted reunification, but after it happened many of them were unhappy with the way it turned out. Maybe things could have been done better, but everyone knew that if Germany didn't act fast there might be a new Russian President who would block everything. Speed was essential.

The fear was that East Germans, disparagingly called Ossis, would become second class citizens. Even today, 30 years later, there's still no equality. That's to say, there's equality for individuals, but not for society. If an Ossi is intelligent or talented, he can move to the West. Anyone who stays in the East, out of choice or because he isn't good enough, will be at a disadvantage. The unemployment rate is higher in the East, and wages are lower. Some of the East German states are so desperate to attract rich westerners that they're offering apartments rent-free.

I want to recommend this film to my friends, but will you understand it? The only way for a foreigner to watch it is to sit and watch it with a German, preferably someone over 50. Or sit and watch it with me.

Success Rate:  + 10.2

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