Goodbye Lenin! is the most successful film in Germany this year, measured by box office receipts and awards, and looks set to be one of the most successful ever. Both west and east Germans have at last done something together-poured into the cinemas to laugh and cry about unification. The film is charming, funny, sad and deeply flawed.
When the wall falls in 1989, Alex is 19, his sister Ariane is 16. They live in East Berlin with their mother Christiane, a schoolteacher. Christiane's husband has escaped to the west some years earlier. Abandoned, she gives all her passion to the socialist state.
Alex is a gormless, pleasant boy who is caught up in the excitement of the demonstrations at the end of 1989 and gets carted off by the police. His mother sees his arrest, collapses and is taken to hospital in a coma, which lasts until June 1990-weeks before unification.
The device of the coma works brilliantly. Director and co-writer Wolfgang Becker, and writer Bernd Lichtenberg (both west Germans) make full use of the Rip van Winkle premise: when Christiane awakens, the world has changed irrevocably. During those eight months the wall has fallen, the Honecker regime has disappeared, Coca-Cola has unfurled its banners over East Berlin and the uniforms of her beloved socialist system are being sold as relics in flea markets.
Alex, released from custody, has lost his job and Ariane abandons study to work at Burger King. The two of them have ripped the beige flock wallpaper from their apartment walls, removed the bulbous socialist light fittings, and turfed the furniture onto the street.
Alex and Ariane can bring their mother home but they are told she must not suffer any shock. If she discovered how much has changed in the last eight months it might kill her. So to prolong her life, Alex reconstructs the world his mother knew. He redecorates the apartment as far as she can see it from her sickbed, and rebottles jam and pickles into jars with old East German labels. He retrains children to sing the old socialist anthems for her. With the help of a friend from the satellite company where he works he makes his own, hilarious television news bulletins as if the socialist state were still broadcasting.
Goodbye Lenin! is a tragi-comic view of one of the most spectacular about-faces of recent history. It is set in the liminal time between the fall of the wall and unification in October 1990, when the shape of the future Germany was being hotly debated and it still seemed possible that the better features of East Germany might be kept.
The film deftly touches on the sense of disquiet East Germans felt at the speed with which everything they knew disappeared. Even Alex realises that in his broadcasts for his mother, he has created the GDR he wished had existed.
But there's the rub. The actual East Germany was an extreme surveillance state; the state security service, or Stasi, gathered information about its citizens on a huge scale. According to the CIA, one in 6.5 people was a Stasi officer or informer; more conservative official estimates have the number as at least one in 50. Someone was reporting on their neighbours and friends, their family and colleagues in every apartment building, factory, kindergarten and pub. It is unlikely that a family where the mother was a teacher and the father defected to the west would have been untouched by surveillance, and yet the film barely hints at any such thing. If a similar film were made about the end of the De Klerk regime in South Africa, it would be strange not to mention apartheid at all.
German history in the 20th century has provided many dilemmas about whether to remember or forget. When part of Hitler's bunker was uncovered in the early 1990s no one could decide what to do. To make it into a memorial might attract neo-Nazis; to destroy it would signal denial. So it was simply reburied.
It wasn't until 20 years after the end of the war in the west that the Holocaust began to be faced. A prominent German historian told me he thought it might be 2010 or 2020 before the injustices of the GDR-less terrible, but with many victims nevertheless-start to be dealt with. Over just 40 years the Stasi kept more records than in all of German history since the middle ages. The man in charge of the files told me that it will take 375 years to puzzle together these stolen biographies.
The former East Germans have invented a word for their own dream of the past: Ostalgie. Like Alex's news programmes, they are mostly longing for things-equality, liberty, safety-that did not exist there, but were supposed to. One woman I know, a former political prisoner, was asked recently by her boss at the radio station where she works to make a programme about Ostalgie. A former Stasi man himself, he wanted to believe that the regime had not been as bad as all that. She refused, but someone else made it anyway.
Is it healthier for an individual to remember or to forget a trauma? It is an old debate. But when a polity forgets its past and its victims, the issue is not one of health but of justice. There are too many people waiting to find out what happened to their loved ones from the Stasi files, or waiting for compensation for injuries suffered during detention for me to feel comfortable with a film that deals with everything about the GDR except its defining factor: the Stasi.
