Good Bye Lenin: a review by Graeme McIver. Graeme is the national Secretary of Solidarity and a regular contributor to DGS magazine

Wolfgang Becker’s multi award winning “Goodbye Lenin” is a moving, poignant and funny film. Set in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), in the days leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall it tells the story of a young man, Alex (Daniel Bruhl) and his relationship with his mother, sister and girlfriend.

As a young boy Alex is obsessed with space, rockets and cosmonauts. He is immensely proud that the first German into space, Sigmund Jahn, comes from socialist East – not capitalist West Germany. His ideal family life comes to an abrupt end when his father leaves home in order to set up a new life with a mistress in the West. (Or so his mother leads him to believe.) Alone, and with two children to bring up, his mother Christiane (Katrin Sass) throws herself wholeheartedly into work for the “The Party”, (The Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and for the betterment of ordinary people. She passionately believes in her cause but is not afraid to stand up to authority and an early scene sees her dictate a complaint to a state run underwear factory that not all East German women are the size of “Ice Princesses!”

In early October 1989, Christiane is returning from a party award ceremony when she sees the East German Army and Police break up a demonstration of mainly young people calling for press freedom. (The Stasi it seems, are easily identifiable by their atrocious line in stone washed denim jackets!) She sees Alex arrested and the shock gives her a heart attack. Doctors later confirm to Alex and his sister Ariane that their mother is in a coma. During the weeks that follow Alex visits the hospital every day and starts a relationship with a student nurse from the USSR called Lara.

 Whilst his mother lies in a hospital bed, East Germany starts to change beyond all recognition. As the Berlin Wall falls the streets no longer rumble to the sound of passing tanks and army trucks celebrating the GDR. In their place Coca Cola lorries thunder up “Karl Marx Allee.” (Alex beautifully understates the iconic fall of the wall when he describes it as a “huge and unique recycling campaign.”) His sister stops her university studies on “economic theory” and instead gains practical experience of “monetary circulation”…by working at a Burger King drive-thru! Alex loses his job as a TV repairman and instead has to sell satellite dishes, a new and exotic benefit of their exposure to the West.

Eventually Christiane regains consciousness. However, doctors warn Alex that any sudden shocks could cause his mother to suffer another, fatal heart attack. He is determined to shield her from the new reality of a Germany moving towards reunification on a capitalist basis and begins a long, hilarious and moving attempt to hide the truth from her.

He starts by trying to get his mothers bedroom back to the way it had been before his sister and her “class enemy” boyfriend, (he was a manager in Burger King) had added oriental furnishings and a sunbed. As his sister bemoans the horrible clothes she is forced to resume wearing, Alex contacts former pupils and a boss of his mother to arrange a birthday celebration. He is forced to rake in dustbins and scour charity shops to find the original packaging of the rather dour East German state run food shops. He offers the school pupil 20 marks each to pretend they are still in the Young Pioneers and to sing patriotic songs. All his hard work is nearly undone when a huge Coca Cola advertising banner is hung from a neighbouring tower block in full view of his mothers bed. He utilises the raw movie making skills of his workmate to create fake news reports that he plays on video that show that Coca Cola was actually a socialist invention that those evil western capitalists had stolen as their own!

As each day passes however, his elaborate scheme of lies and propaganda becomes harder to sustain. (Much like the former East German regime itself.) Children keep turning up at the door to act as Young Pioneers to earn 20 marks and his mother seems increasingly suspicious. Pride in military might and social advance is replaced in East Berlin by celebration of a different kind. Chris Waddle’s semi final penalty miss in Italia 90 means that as Erich Honeckar’s old order disappears, it is replaced by images of Franz Beckenbaur’s new German Football team sweeping all before them to win the World Cup.

As an exhausted Alex sleeps, Christiane manages to rise from bed and ventures outside for the first time. She is greeted by a surreal vision of garish furniture, nazi graffiti, western cars and the sight of a helicopter removing a huge sculpture of Lenin as she stands next to an advertising hoarding for Ikea. Rather than admit the truth, Alex goes to even greater lengths to protect his mother from reality. His latest phoney news report claims that the thousands of West Germans have fled the excesses of capitalism for a better life in East Germany. The cars and advertising hoardings are only part of a scheme to help the refugees settle into their new life. Yet the GDR that Alex is recreating for his mother is not an accurate reflection of the reality of life East Germany, rather it is how he wishes it were.

It is in a scene at the family’s country dacha that we find out that Christiane herself has been hiding a secret. She tells Alex and his sister that their father had been persecuted by the Stassi and had fled to the West expecting his wife and children to join him soon. At the last moment Christiane reneged on the deal fearful that she may lose her children if their plan was uncovered. The father that Alex thought had abandoned him had in reality been trying to contact him whilst his mother hid the letters. The revelation leads to a second heart attack for Christiane.

With his mother critically ill in hospital Alex sets out to find his father. He is stunned to see that as he hails a taxi it is being driven by his childhood hero, the cosmonaut Sigmund Jahn. He reflects on how under unification this great hero of East Germany has been reduced to scraping a living.  After meeting his father he decides to show his mother one last image of her beloved GDR before she dies. (“I’ll give it the send off it deserves.”) However, unbeknown to Alex, at the hospital his girlfriend Lara has already told Christiane the truth.

In a poignant scene, Alex recreates an elaborate news report showing Honecker being replaced as party leader by Sigmund Jahn who makes a rousing speech about how the socialist East has become a haven for the former enemies in the West. The script he prepares for Jahn is a rallying call for the socialism Alex desires rather than the authoritarianism of East Germany;

“Socialism isn’t about walling yourself in, it is about reaching out to others and living with them. It means not only dreaming about a better world but making it happen.”   As Alex, his sister and girlfriend sit glued to the fake footage, his mother looks at him instead, knowing the great lengths her son has gone to in order to protect her and her idealised vision of her country.

The film finishes with a return to the theme of space as Alex, family and friends watch as a home made rocket containing Christiane’s ashes explodes in the Berlin sky on the night Germany was officially re-unified. Alex believes that his subterfuge had worked and his mother was unaware of the reality till the end. Christiane never told him she knew the truth.

The film was incredibly popular on its release in Germany and won a number of awards. I think perhaps that it captures a popular mood where there is an understandable recognition that few want to return to the Stalinist and dictatorial regime of the past, but that there are aspects of politics and community that are mourned in East Germany’s passing. The journey Alex undertakes in the film reflects this. He starts of as a dissident protesting against the regime yet finds himself longing for the re-establishment of core socialist values in the face of the uber consumerism of the capitalist West.

Whilst of course the film is set against the backdrop of some of the most momentous events in modern history, the films charm remains that at its heart, this is a story about the love between a mother and son.

Watch it and laugh and cry - and be thankful that Christiane was spared the worst aspect of the fall of The Berlin Wall…David Hasselhoff singing “Looking for Freedom” at the Brandenburg Gate!