Response to Good Bye, Lenin!

Response to Good Bye, Lenin!

Goodbye Lenin! is an enjoyable film mixing comedy and tragedy, history and present, illusion and reality, lies and self-deception. Set in a time period that witnesses the changes the fall of the Berlin Wall bring to German Democratic Republic, the film is a collection of insightful ethnography.

By deciding to start the loving project of not to break the harsh news of the Berlin Wall and keep the German Democratic Republic alive for his fragile-hearted mother, Alex is in fact entering a double-sided life. Each of his lives by itself is a mini-ethnography.

Alex lives a life in the non-existing East Germany in the room he sets up especially for his mother. Though filled with out-of-fashion East German furniture and life seems to be the same as it has been before the Berlin Wall still stands, the room is not the true duplication of the 'GDR home'. What Alex fills the room with is his memory of East Germany; the room holds more personal nostalgia of Alex's than it seems. For example, in the fantasy news items Alex and his friend Denis create for his mother, he chooses only the positive news that focuses on the wonderfulness of GDR, while neglecting the depressing news that shows the defect of the country. His actions might seem solely meant to protect his mother's heart, but he is in fact subconsciously creating a more humane German Democratic Republic of his personal dreams.

Outside the room, Alex and every Eastern German are trying their best to adjust to the sudden changing world. For the young people like Alex and his sister, the brand new world spell countless possibilities. Even though they encounter trouble at first to adjust themselves to the modern Wester German way of life, they welcome the efficiency of the West (such as the cars). This is especially significantly shown in Ariane, Alex's sister. She does not hesitate to get rid of the old-fashion furniture in the room and change in to fashionable Wester German cloths. She proposes several times to Alex about breaking the news to their mother and her desire to move out. Her actions do not imply her dislike of their mother (in fact she lives her mother deeply and plays along with Alex to 'protect' her), but show her desperate wish to cut away from the old way of life and dive into a new, more popular way of life. For the old people, the reality is painful; it is the complete denial of their forty years of their hard work. What they believed, cherished and strove to achieve for so long now seem a joke in this 'new world'. Just as a neighbor of Alex's says: "Forty years gone! They sold us up the river!" For those who devoted to the career of trying to counter the defects and make the country better, like Alex's mother, seeing the entire system collapse overnight and work washed away is more unbearable.

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