[postlink]http://yoursoundtrackfilm.blogspot.com/2012/02/yann-tiersen-father-mother.html[/postlink]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DveYGhdaBBQendofvid
Review:
The charming social construction of history
I found this movie to be a charming film and very engaging on both a personal and a social level. The story is drawn from the lives of an East Berlin family struggling to cope with the changing world as their way of life is challenged. The father, having reportedly left the family for the West years before, is not present and the mother replaces her spousal needs with the love of her country and its way of life.
The premise of the film centers on the frail mother, who falls into a coma mere weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall. Eight months later, she regains consciousness, and her children are told not to excite her, lest she have another episode.
Bound by their love of their mother, the son and daughter seek to shield her from the changes in her culture. In their apartment, they recreate the conditions of the world she remembers, right down to the labels on the food they serve her. As the mother comes into contact with the inevitable disparities between her new world and the one she remembers, the son compounds the deception, eventually creating false newscasts to explain the phenomena she witnesses in a manner more consistent with her core assumptions of life.
The film is touching, tender, funny and dramatic. However, the elements that really drew me in were the historical construction and the plot device of deception.
The historical construction was the way in which the son, through his efforts to explain the increasingly Westernized elements of German society his mother observes, recreates East Germany as the country he could have faith in. As he recreates history to incorporate current events, he softens the harshness of the party rhetoric, reforming the socialistic ideal closer to the compassion for the masses and the acceptance of the 'enemy' capitalists. The film makes ample use of actual news footage in his narrative, footage that adds sharp contrast to Alex's version.
This contrast is a striking reminder about how much of our social conscience is constructed through the lenses we choose to observe reality and recall history. Alex had quickly come to give up his socialist devotion (though the film does make it clear form the beginning that the adult Alex was already disenchanted with it). But as Alex fabricates news reports and artifacts for the illusion he's providing his mother, he actually appears to be inventing a system of socialism that he can feel proud of. It's almost as if in trying to console his mother, he connects to her by reinterpreting her world into something he can interface with, building common ground.
How much of our own social history is constructed in this manner? We champion our own system of free market democracy as the 'city on the hill' for other nations. We raise up the virtues of our freedom and individuality (and there are indisputably many virtues), while ignoring some of the more sorted historical results it has yielded. We choose which portions of our history we celebrate, and which portions we condemn to academic obscurity.
Americans use history to construct our national mythology. Like Homer and Virgil before us, we compose idealized stories of virtue and create narratives that resound with the language of legendary epics. And because of this mythology building exercise, we often fail to see our own cultural reality for the flawed imperfect collection of group effort that it is. That's why we feel so betrayed when our leaders make simple human mistakes or we see representatives of our culture participating in a manner that runs counter to our values.
No where is this phenomenon so pronounced as when it comes to our national leaders. We look back on our founding fathers and through our myth building, elevate them to superhuman stature. Our high school students may not remember what wars Washington fought in or what political initiatives he took but they remember that he cut down a (fictional) cherry tree and refused to lie about it.
We remember the elegant words that our predecessors crafted without remembering the pain and suffering their efforts exacted from other people. We remember that Thomas Jefferson advocated 'Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political …' while conveniently forgetting that he was ambivalent at best to the degree that freedom extended to those in a state of slavery. We forget that founding father quarreled, that at times they misrepresented each other's interest to foreign leaders and that on occasion may have even tried to kill one another.
The founding fathers we remembered were well educated, civil and wise.
Against this tapestry of myth we watch contemporary politics play out, trying desperately to spin events into frameworks that reinforce our desires for justice and virtue.
We are all Alex, trying to reconstruct a new view of history that makes us more proud of where we come from. We invent and reinvent history to suit our needs and like Alex, do so in the name of providing a safe environment (or better way of life) for others. by J. Richard Stevens, Austin, TX
Explanation
Today there is no more die Deutsche Demokratische Republik, there's no People's Republic of Bulgaria, no Yugoslavia, no Czeskoslovenska Socialisticka Republika, no USSR... The entire "Progressive World", apparently having reached the final stage of political and social self-actualization, decided there's no more place for it to develop into the material existence, and went altogether into Nirvana. They left a political vacuum, a socio-economic crisis, wars, misery, and all else that many of you remember, while others have just seen on TV.
I am born during the last years of communism, but don't remember much of it. What I clearly remember was the downfall of the system. The crowds, the demonstrations, the blue flags, people crying, singing "Freedom! Freedom! Time is ours! 45 years is enough!". My grandmother took me into her hands, so that two polish photographers took a picture of us (she later on told me), and yes, the day after tomorrow we would live like in a wonderful Hollywood film. We didn't. And my entire generation passed its childhood into a lingering crisis, which broke down the society, the values, the morals, people fled the country, as if it was infected with plague.
Today in the place of die Deutsche Demokratische Republik is Ost-Deutschland. A country, where entire buildings are empty, people having moved to the West. Investors don't chose the Ost for their capitals, they'd rather invest into Czech or Poland, where the workers are as qualified and several times cheaper. Today Bulgaria is slowly improving, and maybe in the next 200 years it will catch up the economic standard of the EU. Yugoslavia was torn by war after war, the Soviet Union collapsed into different countries, which had never been independent, Slovakia broke off from the Czech Republc, in search of its own Moravian identity.
And a dream that came to replace the slavery of oppression and Nazism, and that was meant to continue for a thousand years at least, collapsed under its corruption.
But the memory was fresh. The evils of corruption and concentration camps for political prisoners faded away, and only romanticism remained. Memories of a past that never was, or never should have been, or was, and had to be. Red t-shirts with yellow CCCP written on them became fashionable, referring to communism became a sort of a common identity for Eastern European students in western universities, nostalgia filled the hearts of many, and this was also expressed into the arts.
It was a very sad film. I recommend it to all of you, who remember, and don't remember, who know, and don't know, or would like to know, or don't care about, or whatever. It is not a Hollywood high-budgeted blockbuster. It's far from that, but it's touching, true, amusing, and sad. by shmirgel, Montreal, Canada; Sofia, Bulgaria
Director:
“The film is a symbolic funeral in dignity to all that, I think. It hit a nerve.” [about "Good Bye Lenin!"]
WOLFGANG BECKER
Wolfgang Becker was born in 1954 in Hemer/Westphalia and studied German, History and American Studies at the Free University in Berlin. He followed this with a job at a sound studio in 1980 and then began studies at the German Film & Television Academy (dffb). He started working as a freelance cameraman in 1983 and graduated from the dffb in 1986 with “Butterflies” (“Schmetterlinge”), which won the Student Academy Award in 1988, the Golden Leopard at Locarno and the Saarland Prime-Minister’s Award at the 1988 Ophuels Festival Saarbruecken. He directed the "Tator"t-episode, “Blutwurstwalzer”, before making his second feature “Children’s Games” (“Kinderspiele”, 1992), the documentary “Celibidache” (1992), and the Berlinale competition features “Life is All You Get” (“Das Leben ist eine Baustelle”, 1997), and “Good Bye, Lenin!” (2003). He was a member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 2004.
*http://mubi.com/cast_members/54487
[endtext]
[starttext]
Goodbye Lenin!
(Berlin, Germany, 2003)
Storyline:
The film opens with old footage from summer 1978 at our old weekend cabin. A boy pushes a girl in a cart while the father films. The boy and girl play in the back yard and around the house.
The film opens with old footage from summer 1978 at our old weekend cabin. A boy pushes a girl in a cart while the father films. The boy and girl play in the back yard and around the house.
After the titles, a television reporter speaks about a space program while the boy and girl watch. The boy points an astronaut out to his sister. A voice-over says that an East German citizen, Sigmund Jähn, was the first German in space. After that day, their life started going downhill. Mrs. Kerner is questioned by officials about her marriage. They are concerned that her husband has visited a capitalist country three times. The officials leave after Mrs. Kerner gets angry. The voiceover explains that while Jähn was in space representing East Germany, his father was having an affair with his new enemy of the state girlfriend and that he never came back.
The voiceover explains that his mother was so depressed that she stopped talking. She is shown in a mental hospital, staring off into the distance while her son colors with crayons and her daughter plays a wind instrument. The son tries to get her to come back to them, saying that its boring at Mrs. Schäfers. He tells her he loves her and starts to cry but his mother is unmoved.
The boy looks upset as he watches television and the astronauts are on again talking about a cosmic marriage between two television characters.
The voiceover explains that eight weeks later Mrs. Kerner came back home and was back to normal. They surprise her when she comes back home. Alex is wearing a cardboard space ship and his sister has a painted sign that says, Hello Mama. Mrs. Kerner packs up her husbands clothes and sends them to Mozambique.
Old footage from spring 1979 shows the family at a train station and then on the train. The voiceover informs that they never mentioned their father again and that from then on their mother was married to their socialist fatherland. She is shown directing a choir of children and being involved with various youth activities. The voiceover says that she has become a social crusader and activist for the concerns of common people and tiny injustices.
The family watches television in their home and a news report about special government awards is on. Alex points out that his mother is on screen. Mrs. Kerner is shown receiving her award and shaking hands with the presenter.
More aged footage is shown, with a group of kids standing in front of a space ship in astronaut gear. The voiceover explains that after many hard days of work he would be the second German to venture into space. He is shown with other children riding on a bus labeled, Young Rocket Builders. He is then shown standing with a group of kids, all holding small air powered rockets. The voiceover explains that he had imagined exploring the secrets of space for the benefit of mankind. When he launches his rocket, it flies off into space.
Alex is shown ten years later, October 7th, 1989, sitting on a bench drinking a beer. The voiceover explains that it was the 40th anniversary of East Germany and he had the day off from his job at a TV repair firm. He says he feels at the height of his masculine allure as he burps and slouches on the bench. Flags and posters celebrating the anniversary are everywhere. At a parade soldiers march and tanks ceremoniously dive down the street. Inside his apartment, Alex sleeps on his bed fully dressed. A woman informs him theres a girl there to see him. The girl turns out to be the baby she is holding and the woman is revealed to be his sister. The baby begins to wail due to the vibrations the parade is causing in the apartment. Alex joins two other older women in an adjacent room, who are writing a complaint about womens clothing. Alex turns on the TV and sees news coverage of the ceremonies and voices his disapproval. One woman remarks that nothing will change is everyone emigrates.
In the evening, citizens march in the streets holding protest signs. The voiceover explains that they are marching for the right to take a walk without the Wall getting in their way. Alex walks with them, eating an apple and repeating Freedom of the press, at one point nearly choking on the apple. The East German military arrives and forms, with arms locked, a human wall around the protesters. A girl helps Alex spit out the piece of apple he was choking on. A man and a woman are shown driving and getting stopped by the cops. The man tells the woman that she might still make it if she takes the subway. Military vehicles with large metal plates on the front arrive and push the protesters back. Alex tries to get the girls name but she gets taken away before she can tell him. As some protesters break through the police line the police turn violent. The woman observes protesters being treated violently and beaten and then notices that Alex is being taken away by the police. She faints and Alex rushes to help her, revealing that the woman is his mother. The police regain control of him and take him away in a truck.
In a prison, the protesters stand in lines with their hands on their heads. One guard approaches Alex and removes him from the line. He hands him a piece of paper about his mother. Alex leaves and catches a train to the hospital. His sister is already there and explains that their mother had a heart attack. The doctor steps in and tells him shes in a coma and that they dont know if she will ever wake up again. Alex goes into her hospital room where she is hooked up to various machines that keep her alive. He tries to get her to wake up but the voiceover explains that she kept on sleeping.
At his TV repair job Alex watches the news as they discuss the resignation of Erich Honecker for health reasons. As Alex takes down a poster of Honecker and leaves it outside in the rain, the voiceover says that Mrs. Kerners sleep kept her in the dark during the resignation of Honecker, protests in West Germany (euphemistically called a classical concert), and the tearing down of the Wall (a recycling campaign).
With his mother still in a coma, Alex takes his first outing to the West. She misses the first free elections, her daughter Ariane quitting college and starting work at Burger King, Arianes manager and boyfriend moving in with her, the subsequent westernization of the apartment, the arrival of Lara, the girl who had kept Alex from choking at the protest (now a nurse at the hospital), the triumph of capitalism (a tiny group of guards is shown doing military maneuvers in front of a museum while a car branded with Coca-Cola drives by in the foreground and then a giant Coca Cola truck blocks them entirely from view), and Alexs regular visits to the hospital at strategic times made to coincide with Laras works shifts. As she sleeps, Alex talks to her about Lara. In her sleep she also misses working-class job loss, including the TV repair business Alex works at. Alex gets a job as whats described a part of a reunification crew selling satellite TV. With his new job occupying his time, he leaves a tape with his voice on it to talk to his mother. Believing that the doctors and Lara will not be there when it plays, he mentions his like of Lara, who is in the room tending to his mother. Soon he is dating Lara and they go to a club together. After, Lara remarks that its too bad Alexs mother is missing the transformation of Berlin. Alex doesnt think so because what she believed in had toppled in a moment. She asks about his father and Alex says that he was a doctor who escaped to the West and that they never heard from him again.
Alex and his partner Denis go door to door selling satellite TV. At one apartment complex, Alex and his partner leave having installed ten new satellites. Afterwards, they go back to his apartment, where Denis shows Alex his family and wedding film business videos. Explaining his ambition to one day make feature films, he shows Alex that he has edited a wedding video to match the famous bone and spaceship match-cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In a voiceover, Alex explains the by June 1990 the border separating East Germany was meaningless. One day while visiting his mother Alex and Lara begin to kiss. As they do, Alexs mother wakes up from her coma. The doctor explains that even though she has woken from her coma, her life is still in danger as she could have memory loss, amnesia, or other conditions. He tells Alex and Ariane that she may not survive the next weeks. They are not allowed to take her home because any sort of excitement could lead to another heart attack. Alex tells the doctor that he thinks the newspaper discussing German reunification would be too exciting to her.
Now awake, Mrs. Kerner is visited by her children. Ariane shows her mother her new granddaughter and Alex tells her that she had a heart attack because of a long line at the store on a hot day. As they leave the hospital Alex resolves to bring his mother home because of how easy it would be for her to find out about the fall of the Wall in the hospital.
Back at home he surveys whats too new at the apartment and has to be replaced with the old. Denis and Alex remodel the room, resetting it to a condition from before the fall of the Wall. Alex purposefully breaks the radio antenna off.
Alex returns to the hospital where a new doctor replaces the old doctor, who has moved to the West. On the ride home, Alex asks the ambulance drivers to turn down the radio because its talking about East Germans exchanging their currency for Western currency. They bring her in on a stretcher and Alex tries to avoid his mothers old friend, now Westernized in dress. Upon arrival, his mother remarks that it seems like nothing has changed. Alex offers tapes for her to listen to, saying that the radio is broken. His mother confides that she contemplated suicide after her husband left but didnt go through with it because Alex visited her every day in the hospital and talked to her about Sigmund Jähn and other things. As Alex leaves to go shopping, his mother requests some Spreewald pickles and Alex agrees to get some for her.
In voiceover, Alex explains that by July 1990, East German stores were emptied and real money was coming in from the West. The Deutschmark was double the rate of Eastern currency and the corner store no longer carried the traditional Eastern foods such as the pickles his mother had requested. Alex buys a different kind of pickle and pulls jars out of the garbage, disinfects them, and relabels them. He puts the new goods he bought into the old, relabeled jars.
In an effort to gain power of attorney, Alex and Ariane find out that their mother didnt keep her money in a bank. She hid it, but she cant remember where. She then lapses, remarking that her husband is running late in getting home. An upstairs neighbor, Ganske turns on his television and the sound carries down into the room. Their mother is surprised that he watches Western TV. Alex makes up a story about Ganske falling in love with a Western woman.
With everyone leaving for the West, Alex and Lara find it easy to secure an apartment. Lara is enthusiastic about the working phone the apartment has while Alex is happy to find the old East German foods hes been looking for. They spend the night and Alex leaves in the morning for work. He stops by his house first and his mother asks about TV again.
At work he asks Denis what to do about the TV situation. Denis suggests showing old news programs on video. Meanwhile, Germany enters the finals in soccer. In a voiceover, Alex says that soccer helped reunify the country. At a marketplace he buys a whole series of old East German newspapers.
Alex talks to neighbors and friends of his mother about her birthday party, inviting them but also explain that shes unaware of the fall of the Wall. Many of her teaching colleagues have retired. Alex talks to the principal, who explains why his mother was demoted. Alex reasons that with the demotion the principal owes her something. He hires someone to act as an East German dispatcher and buyer for a restaurant. Denis gets Alex many different video tapes of East German TV.
Alex hooks up a VCR to the TV and pretends to attach the TV to an antenna. Denis apparently has recorded over a tape and the first part of the tape talks about getting East Germans satellite TV and the effect of German soccer on reunification but soon returns to the intended East German programming, nearly ruining the illusion. His mother remarks that she would like to work from bed and write petitions but Alex says he doesnt want her to work too hard.
On his mothers birthday, Alex goes to retrieve the principal and finds him drunk. Alex gives him a quick shower and dresses him, then takes him to his apartment. At the apartment, everyone he has hired or invited is there and two children sing for her exactly as they used to. The principal presents her with a basket of old food items found in Alex and Laras new apartment. As Alex speaks to her about how much things havent changed and how much he loves her, she notices a giant Coca-Cola ad being rolled out on the building adjacent. As everyone tries to cover for the irregularity, the party starts to unravel. Lara is dissatisfied with how they are tricking Alexs mother and with Alex telling his mother that Laras father is a teacher when hes really a cook. The children stop singing and Lara leaves.
Alex and Denis go to the Coca-Cola Company to film a fake news report about the giant advertisement. They are hassled by a company employee. They are about to start but Denis suggests waiting for better light. Staring at the clouds, Alex realizes that faking his mothers reality is as easy as studying the old news tapes and feeding Deniss desire to be a director. At home, Alex and his mother watch the fake news segment about Coca-Cola. They construct the segment as a visit to a West Berlin factory and say that Coca-Cola is angry about losing a lawsuit because the formula for Coca-Cola was invented by East German workers. As they watch TV, his mother remembers that she stored her money in the chest of drawers Ariane threw out when her boyfriend Rainer moved in.
Alex finds the money in the drawers still outside and takes it to the bank to exchange it for Western currency. The banker informs him he is two days beyond the deadline and that they dont take cash anyways. Alex gets angry and tells him that the money was their money for forty years until the Western money came in. He is forced to leave the bank.
On the roof of his mothers apartment he throws all of her Eastern money into a Western-facing wind. Lara tells him to yell to let off some steam. When he does, fireworks go off as Germany wins the world soccer championship.
In her apartment, Alexs mother dictates another letter of complaint about womens clothes to Mrs. Schäfer. Two more former students show up unannounced and sing songs for her. Alex discreetly kicks them out as they explain that their friends told them they would get 20 marks for showing up and singing. Rainer and Ariane say they are tired of pretending they are still in the East. Ariane then tells Alex that she saw their father while at work. She sees him driving through Burger King with two kids in the back seat. In a voiceover, Alex says that he imagines his father as a fat man stuffing his face with cheeseburgers and that they live entirely separate lives.
At their apartment, Lara practices cast-wrapping on Alex and then expresses her desire for Alex to tell his mother the truth. In the house, Alex notices a jar labeled Spreewald pickles. He races home on his motorbike and in a voiceover notes that while life around his was accelerating, he could always go to his mothers to live in a slower time and sleep.
At her house, Alex sleeps while his mother eats her Spreewald pickles. Arianes daughter Paula notices a blimp that says West on it and begins to walk toward it. Alexs mother gets up out of bed to see what Paula is looking at but by the time she gets to the window the blimp is behind a building. She leaves the room, takes an elevator down (and notices a Nazi symbol and lewd graffiti on the wall), and leaves the building. A group of young Western men are moving in, perplexing her. She wanders further away from the building and notices IKEA branding and ads for bras and cars. A helicopter carries a statue of Lenin away. Alex wakes up and finds that shes gone and rushes out to find her. Alex and Ariane find her at the same time and rush her home. She asks them whats going on.
Denis has not build a sort of makeshift television studio and he and Alex work to create more explanatory fake news segments. They frame the situation as Hoenecker allowing West German refugees to enter the East as a token of generosity, promising 200 marks for every refugee entering the country. In a voiceover, Alex realizes that the GDR he is creating in his TV segments is the GDR he might have wished for. His mother suggests helping the Western refugees, offering the summer cabin.
Rainer reveals that he and Ariane are getting their own place and will soon be leaving because she is pregnant. Ariane again says that she is tired of pretending for her mother.
The whole family drives out to the cabin with the mother blindfolded to keep the new car and the cabin a surprise. As Alex is about to reveal that he has been lying to his mother, his mother reveals that she has been lying to him about his father. He wasnt in West Germany with a woman and he did write letters. He decided to leave because he wasnt in the Party and so they made his life miserable. There was a conference in West Berlin and he decided to stay. She was supposed to follow and bring her children but she feared getting her kids taken away from her so she stayed in East Germany. Now she regards it as the biggest mistake of her life. Alex gets upset and goes to sit by the lake.
That night his mothers condition gets worse and she is rushed back to the hospital. Ariane meanwhile finds all of the old letters from her father and cries as she reads them. The doctor says that shes had another heart attack and that they should expect the worst. Ariane gives Alex a letter from his father and says that she wont go out to his new address. In the morning, their mother wakes up and suggests that now they take in a Western refugee with her out of the house.
Alex leaves the hospital in a taxi driven by who he thinks is Sigmund Jähn, although the driver denies it is him. He asks the taxi driver to take him to Wansee where his father lives. At his fathers house there is a party and Alex is treated as an invited guest. He wanders into a room where two kids are watching the Sandman and he asks to join them. The little boy in the room says that the character on TV is an astronaut and Alex says that where hes from they say Cosmonaut. The little girl asks where hes from and he tells her hes from another country. The father of the children walks in and it is revealed that he is Robert Kerner, Alexs father. He has to give a speech and then returns to talk with Alex. He asks why Alex is there and Alex tells him that his mother wanted to see him one more time and that she is dying.
On the ride home, Alex asks the taxi driver what it was like in space. This time he doesnt deny being Jähn and says that it was beautiful but far from home.
Alex brings his father to the hospital and as hes walking to his mothers room Lara is explaining that Germany is reunified, although she stops before Alex can see this. While Robert is waiting outside, Ariane shows up but leaves when she sees her father there.
Alex decides to tell his mother the truth but first wants to celebrate East Germany one last time, giving it the send-off it deserves. At the library, they enlist the help of Jähn and record him addressing the GDR. Since his mother can hardly wait he moves the celebration from October 7th to October 2nd, the day before reunification. In the film they show to his mother at the hospital, Honecker resigns from all positions and Jähn becomes the new leader of East Germany. By now, only Alex is unaware of his mothers up-to-date understanding of Germany and his sister can barely conceal her laughter. Jähn states in the video that he has decided to reach out to West Germany to make it better and has opened up the borders. After the video, fireworks start.
Alexs mother dies three days later. Alex still believes that she never learned the truth and that this is a good thing because she died happy. She asked that her ashes be scattered in the wind, something prohibited in both East and West Germany. Alex puts her ashes into a rocket and shoots them into the sky, resulting in two fireworks.
In a voiceover laid over archival footage, Alex says that the country his mother left behind was one she believed in. He says he will always in his memory associate that country with his mother. by butler360
Review:
The charming social construction of history
I found this movie to be a charming film and very engaging on both a personal and a social level. The story is drawn from the lives of an East Berlin family struggling to cope with the changing world as their way of life is challenged. The father, having reportedly left the family for the West years before, is not present and the mother replaces her spousal needs with the love of her country and its way of life.
The premise of the film centers on the frail mother, who falls into a coma mere weeks before the fall of the Berlin wall. Eight months later, she regains consciousness, and her children are told not to excite her, lest she have another episode.
Bound by their love of their mother, the son and daughter seek to shield her from the changes in her culture. In their apartment, they recreate the conditions of the world she remembers, right down to the labels on the food they serve her. As the mother comes into contact with the inevitable disparities between her new world and the one she remembers, the son compounds the deception, eventually creating false newscasts to explain the phenomena she witnesses in a manner more consistent with her core assumptions of life.
The film is touching, tender, funny and dramatic. However, the elements that really drew me in were the historical construction and the plot device of deception.
The historical construction was the way in which the son, through his efforts to explain the increasingly Westernized elements of German society his mother observes, recreates East Germany as the country he could have faith in. As he recreates history to incorporate current events, he softens the harshness of the party rhetoric, reforming the socialistic ideal closer to the compassion for the masses and the acceptance of the 'enemy' capitalists. The film makes ample use of actual news footage in his narrative, footage that adds sharp contrast to Alex's version.
This contrast is a striking reminder about how much of our social conscience is constructed through the lenses we choose to observe reality and recall history. Alex had quickly come to give up his socialist devotion (though the film does make it clear form the beginning that the adult Alex was already disenchanted with it). But as Alex fabricates news reports and artifacts for the illusion he's providing his mother, he actually appears to be inventing a system of socialism that he can feel proud of. It's almost as if in trying to console his mother, he connects to her by reinterpreting her world into something he can interface with, building common ground.
How much of our own social history is constructed in this manner? We champion our own system of free market democracy as the 'city on the hill' for other nations. We raise up the virtues of our freedom and individuality (and there are indisputably many virtues), while ignoring some of the more sorted historical results it has yielded. We choose which portions of our history we celebrate, and which portions we condemn to academic obscurity.
Americans use history to construct our national mythology. Like Homer and Virgil before us, we compose idealized stories of virtue and create narratives that resound with the language of legendary epics. And because of this mythology building exercise, we often fail to see our own cultural reality for the flawed imperfect collection of group effort that it is. That's why we feel so betrayed when our leaders make simple human mistakes or we see representatives of our culture participating in a manner that runs counter to our values.
No where is this phenomenon so pronounced as when it comes to our national leaders. We look back on our founding fathers and through our myth building, elevate them to superhuman stature. Our high school students may not remember what wars Washington fought in or what political initiatives he took but they remember that he cut down a (fictional) cherry tree and refused to lie about it.
We remember the elegant words that our predecessors crafted without remembering the pain and suffering their efforts exacted from other people. We remember that Thomas Jefferson advocated 'Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political …' while conveniently forgetting that he was ambivalent at best to the degree that freedom extended to those in a state of slavery. We forget that founding father quarreled, that at times they misrepresented each other's interest to foreign leaders and that on occasion may have even tried to kill one another.
The founding fathers we remembered were well educated, civil and wise.
Against this tapestry of myth we watch contemporary politics play out, trying desperately to spin events into frameworks that reinforce our desires for justice and virtue.
We are all Alex, trying to reconstruct a new view of history that makes us more proud of where we come from. We invent and reinvent history to suit our needs and like Alex, do so in the name of providing a safe environment (or better way of life) for others. by J. Richard Stevens, Austin, TX
Explanation
Today there is no more die Deutsche Demokratische Republik, there's no People's Republic of Bulgaria, no Yugoslavia, no Czeskoslovenska Socialisticka Republika, no USSR... The entire "Progressive World", apparently having reached the final stage of political and social self-actualization, decided there's no more place for it to develop into the material existence, and went altogether into Nirvana. They left a political vacuum, a socio-economic crisis, wars, misery, and all else that many of you remember, while others have just seen on TV.
I am born during the last years of communism, but don't remember much of it. What I clearly remember was the downfall of the system. The crowds, the demonstrations, the blue flags, people crying, singing "Freedom! Freedom! Time is ours! 45 years is enough!". My grandmother took me into her hands, so that two polish photographers took a picture of us (she later on told me), and yes, the day after tomorrow we would live like in a wonderful Hollywood film. We didn't. And my entire generation passed its childhood into a lingering crisis, which broke down the society, the values, the morals, people fled the country, as if it was infected with plague.
Today in the place of die Deutsche Demokratische Republik is Ost-Deutschland. A country, where entire buildings are empty, people having moved to the West. Investors don't chose the Ost for their capitals, they'd rather invest into Czech or Poland, where the workers are as qualified and several times cheaper. Today Bulgaria is slowly improving, and maybe in the next 200 years it will catch up the economic standard of the EU. Yugoslavia was torn by war after war, the Soviet Union collapsed into different countries, which had never been independent, Slovakia broke off from the Czech Republc, in search of its own Moravian identity.
And a dream that came to replace the slavery of oppression and Nazism, and that was meant to continue for a thousand years at least, collapsed under its corruption.
But the memory was fresh. The evils of corruption and concentration camps for political prisoners faded away, and only romanticism remained. Memories of a past that never was, or never should have been, or was, and had to be. Red t-shirts with yellow CCCP written on them became fashionable, referring to communism became a sort of a common identity for Eastern European students in western universities, nostalgia filled the hearts of many, and this was also expressed into the arts.
It was a very sad film. I recommend it to all of you, who remember, and don't remember, who know, and don't know, or would like to know, or don't care about, or whatever. It is not a Hollywood high-budgeted blockbuster. It's far from that, but it's touching, true, amusing, and sad. by shmirgel, Montreal, Canada; Sofia, Bulgaria
Director:
“The film is a symbolic funeral in dignity to all that, I think. It hit a nerve.” [about "Good Bye Lenin!"]
WOLFGANG BECKER
Wolfgang Becker was born in 1954 in Hemer/Westphalia and studied German, History and American Studies at the Free University in Berlin. He followed this with a job at a sound studio in 1980 and then began studies at the German Film & Television Academy (dffb). He started working as a freelance cameraman in 1983 and graduated from the dffb in 1986 with “Butterflies” (“Schmetterlinge”), which won the Student Academy Award in 1988, the Golden Leopard at Locarno and the Saarland Prime-Minister’s Award at the 1988 Ophuels Festival Saarbruecken. He directed the "Tator"t-episode, “Blutwurstwalzer”, before making his second feature “Children’s Games” (“Kinderspiele”, 1992), the documentary “Celibidache” (1992), and the Berlinale competition features “Life is All You Get” (“Das Leben ist eine Baustelle”, 1997), and “Good Bye, Lenin!” (2003). He was a member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 2004.
*http://mubi.com/cast_members/54487
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