With a personal touch and a statement about life far beyond Socialist Germany, "Good Bye, Lenin," playing at the Nugget this week and slated to show at the Hopkins Center later this month, is one of few films documenting one of the most important political and geographic shifts in the past 25 years: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In East Germany in October 1989, the protests that would eventually lead to the toppling of the wall and the end of socialist party power have begun. A party supporter herself, Christiane (Katrin Sass) watches as her protesting son, Alex (Daniel Brhl), is dragged from the police barricade by armed guards. She collapses to the pavement and for the following eight months, while East and West Germany are reunited, the sights and sounds of capitalism and the West flow into their long isolated streets, she lies in a coma in a Berlin hospital.
When she awakes, her condition is such that the doctors tell Alex and his sister, Ariane (Maria Simon), that any excitement or shock could be life threatening for her.
Alex, a twenty-something TV repairman, who, disillusioned with the Socialist Party, had supported the movement to open his city to the West, is suddenly caught between his excitement for a new future and the necessity of holding on to the past for his sick mother.
With a mother on her deathbed, what does one hope for more than that things will always be the same, that the inevitable change will never come?
What better recipe for nostalgia than a parent whose life depends on the recreation of the past? What begins as a caring attempt on Alex's part to make his mother comfortable at home, redecorating her bedroom to look as it did eight months before, becomes a more substantial denial of the collapse of Socialism in his homeland.
At first it is enough for Alex and his sister to serve her the same pickles and coffee they had when the markets were restricted in what they sold, and to wear clothes that are free of any obvious Western influences, but as their mother's stay at home lengthens and her health improves, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the events of the past year from her.
Alex invites old students of hers to sing the songs of the old regime for her on her birthday. He dumpster dives for old jars and cartons labeled with the brand names that were sold under Socialist power. The mini-East Germany that Alex begins to construct stretches to include the downstairs neighbors and the students and teachers from his mother's school who come for her birthday celebration, and the filmmaker Alex works with who helps him film fake news and television shows for his mother to watch.
These video clips don't let on about any of the changes that have taken place, and help to explain the ones she happens to notice, like the Coca-Cola banner hung outside her window.
When she gets up from bed for the first time while Alex is asleep and wanders outside to the city streets where advertisements for western goods are everywhere and the goods themselves -- most notably the cars -- are omnipresent, Alex begins to weave a more and more idealistic image of the successful socialist republic in which they live and to which people from all over the world are fleeing and bringing with them these remnants of their capitalist homelands.
The "rat-race" is not for everyone, of course, and the disillusioned teenager who once fought for capitalism begins to recreate for his mother the socialist ideal that her generation dreamed of but never attained. In this way, "Good Bye Lenin" looks back on the failed experiment of communism with a surprising edge of nostalgia.
Certainly, not a nostalgia for the old East Germany or for communism in particular, the fondness of the past depicted in this film is not a yearning for what is seen as the goodness of the Socialist Party leadership. The past that is held onto is not the past as it actually was, but the past as one wishes it had been.
Alex and his mother hold onto the past as the idealists hoped it would be when it was still the future. When there is a future for one to march toward, there is reason to see the past as it actually was and to see the benefits of change, but on one's deathbed, what harm is there in looking back on life not as it really was, but as one once hoped it would be?
While the story's premise is conducive to sentimentality, timely humor skillfully written into the script's honest portrayals of well rounded characters by the actors keeps the film from being overly so.
The sadness, doubt and regret that come with the changes in this story are countered by the comic aspects of western influences flowing into a previously isolated East Germany. The great change from socialism to capitalism is not treated in all seriousness at all times, but is seen from the point of view of young adults working at Burger King and going clubbing in their new Western clothes.
Crafted not as a political commentary, but as a personal story, this movie is an important and entertaining one even for those with little knowledge of Germany in the 1970s and 1980s.
