Goodbye, Lenin!
Set during the era of German reunification (1989-90), the film follows the story of a young man who must protect his mother’s fragile health, after a coma, from the shock that East Germany has collapsed. The protagonist, Alexander Kerner (Daniel Brühl) always saw his mother as a passionate supporter of the former communist regime. She sleeps for eight months missing all of the changes that take shape in East Germany quickly after the fall of the Wall. Having fully embraced the changes that took place, Alexander and his friends and family feel compelled to turn the small apartment that he shares with his mother back to the way it was when she fell into her coma. Alexander goes to great lengths to create a completely separate reality for his mother. He makes fake news reels for her to watch on TV, he searches far and wide for the products that they used to buy in stores, and needs to keep the blinds closed to keep her eyes protected from a humungous Coca Cola billboard. In the end, it appears that the fantasy was more important to Alexander than it was for his mother.
It is the story of a son’s devotion and love for his mother and it has been lumped into a growing category for German art called “ostalgie” (nostalgia for the former GDR). The storyline and plot certainly leave ample room to explore the ways in which people felt about the GDR, living under its government. As it turns out, Alexander’s mother Christiane used her passion for the GDR as a false front for her mixed feelings about it and the collapse of her relationship with Alexander’s father. The illusion that Alexander creates provides a chance to reuse all of that former GDR memorabilia, characteristic of the ostalgie movement, but the film does not argue that life was better in the former GDR – only that it may have created many layers of pretense for many people.
There are many themes in Goodbye, Lenin! The most obvious is the contrast between the old times and the new and the question of nostalgia or embracing the past. As Jerome de Groot put it, “The film gently explores nostalgia, sentiment and family. “ The theme of keeping people living in a simulated reality raises questions about the lies that people tell to protect the ones that they love and how well we can really know someone through so many layers of lies, regardless of the amount of love.
More broadly, the film explores the layers of separation between East and West Germany and, in a sense, Alexander’s family can be read as a metaphor for a larger “German family” that was divided and needs to uncover the secrets of each other’s past. The film’s star, for example, has even expressed that there were many things that he did not know about the GDR before he worked on this film, like the astronaut Sigmund Jähn – “who,” Brühl says, “was a hero in East Germany. But in West Germany nobody knew him.” “They refused to report about him,” says Becker. “They were angry because it wasn't a West German who was the first German in outer space.”
The film really centres around the character Alexander. Becker lets Brühl do a lot of narration so that the audience hears much of his internal monologue and can understand what he is thinking. Brühl is also not the “movie star type” and presents a much more down-to-earth Alexander than another actor might, with an average appearance and a (mostly) “normal” life that people can relate to.