Goodbye Lenin

East Berlin is gray and industrial. Drab apartment complexes are sprinkled across the horizon. Surrounding Berlin is the sprawling German wilderness. A trabi is driven on a one-lane road that cuts through the forest to the Kerner’s family home. It is quiet here. This is a place where Alex’s nostalgia lives. The nostalgia conveyed in this movie is not as simple as the superiority of the East versus the West. Alex says, “This is a country that I will always associate with my mother.” East Berlin represents his childhood. The narrator is not impersonal and omniscient. The narrator is, instead, a regular person, and therefore subjective. To Alex the DDR is serenity; this is seen by the opening scene of grainy family videos of the Kerner’s playing in the countryside.
Transition is not easy. Random quotations from Alex can display this. Alex says things like, “you Wessie assholes,” or “…consumption, spiraling consumerism, the rat race isn’t for everyone”. But to Alex it is less about economics, and more about calmness, a more relaxed way of life that will never happen again. Though a lot of what he does is done in the name of protecting his mother, it is also about protecting himself. He wants to make for himself a better life. But in doing this he lies at times, when it isn’t necessary. His girlfriend’s father is now a doctor instead of a cook.
The reunification of East and West Berlin is magnificent. A giant festival occurs as the wall becomes obliterated. That subsides and the comrades are introduced to garish capitalism. Older men and women stand transfixed as a bleached blond on a TV set covers herself in whip cream. They look, not shocked or aroused, just bewildered. The process of reunification will be difficult.
Communism is not always great. Here is a condensed history of bad things that happen in the DDR: free speech marchers receive police beatings in the streets, lines are longs supplies are short, maternity clothes are clownish, banks are so terrible that money seems better put in the inside of walls, non party members are intimidated, there are mass arrests and imprisonments with, seemingly, no trial.
The young adjust quickest to capitalism. The children “pioneer” singers sell their songs of the communist fatherland for 20 marks. The burger sun visors are donned and another day for another deutschmark begins. It is harder for the older generation. An old neighbor of Alex exclaims, “to think we worked 40 years for this”. This era of people is left with nothing to do but get drunk and attend faux communist era birthday parties.
As Berlin becomes reunited the hammer and sickle is now a clever looking TV satellite design on the back of a communist red jump suit. Spreewald pickles? Forget it, now there are a billion brands, endless choice, and an overwhelming and incomprehensible amount of things to buy and sell. Alex childhood is crushed by this onslaught. His heroes have been destroyed, forced by circumstance to drive taxis, or sit dormant in sterile hospitals. The memories of past accomplishments have been forgotten and a new uncertain era begins.
Goodbye Lenin is Alex’s story of transition, but a transition that seems proper. In this world, his hero cosmonaut, Sigmund Jahn, becomes President of all of Germany, and the West embraces a slower paced life in the East. This movie is fueled by nostalgia. It is driven by a sense that things should unfold in ways that leave people dignified and purposeful. But in the end Alex admits that, “it is a country that never existed.” A bronze statue of Lenin getting lifted by a helicopter down the street exemplifies the great contrast between the two worlds of Germany. East Germany is gone forever. Alex’s elaborate scheme to calm the nerves of his mother is a farewell to this way of life, an ending that feels right.