(Article from Labour & Trade Union Review, August 2003, No. 131)
Goodbye Lenin!
by Angela Clifford
Film
Review:
A couple of years after the East German Wall came down, I hired a car in West Germany and toured the East. Driving along, I was constantly overtaken by Trabants—the East German-made car: the two-stroke technology and plastic body had no trouble taking on the products of modern capitalism. The experience would have fitted into Goodbye, Lenin! The Trabant, of course, is no longer made.
Unusually, this film is enjoyable, instructive and quite funny in places. While not overtly ideological, the playing out of the story brings out the changes experienced by ordinary East Germans after the displacement of communism by capitalism..
Many years ago, a left-wing Californian theatre producer, Helena Stephens, explained to me that, in great art, one sees the character developing under the force of events. That certainly happens in this film: Alex develops from a simple-minded pro-democracy demonstrator into a more rounded person, aware of the importance of non-monetary qualities in life.
The change is brought about by guilt over a heart attack his mother—an enthusiastic teacher and social activist in East Germany—had seeing him on a demonstration. The film is not sentimental about East Germany—the demonstrators arrested are treated roughly by the police. His mother’s party position saves him from charges. Released, he rushes off to Hospital to find his mother in a coma—which lasts for 8 months, during which East Germany passes through a transition process and joins the West.
Many changes follow on the personal level. Alex has lost his skilled job and is instead installing television satellite dishes in the homes of the newly-free German workers. His sister has given up her studies and works in the American chain, Burger-King. Her Wessie boy-friend has moved in. The flat they all share has had the furnishings replaced by contemporary items. More generally, there is a slight air of dejection around the estate—and there is a dig at East German doctors moving West to avail of the higher rewards.
In the Hospital Alex is warned that his mother remains fragile and any shock could kill her. He knows that the biggest shock she could have is to find out that Capitalism has won out in East Germany. As she is bound to learn this in Hospital, he insists on bringing her home, over-riding his sister’s objections and over-coming all the obstacles. One room in the flat is rigged up for the mother—with him hunting out the old furnishings from scrap-heaps and storage cellars (why aren’t flat built with these here—surely they are an essential to comfortable living?).
And now the core of the film comes to the fore. As his mother recovers, Alex has to work ever harder to maintain the pretence that all is as before. Her favourite foods can no longer be bought—here there is explanatory footage of supermarket shelves being cleared overnight of goods of East German manufacture to be replaced by Western goods. Alex forages for old packs and containers in rubbish heaps and an abandoned flat (after the change many people moved on from their flats, to be replaced by homeless people of various kinds from the West). He refills them with the Western equivalents.
Then she is no longer content to listen to music: she wants to watch television, particularly the news. To get over this difficulty, Alex suborns his technology-freak friend to re-cycle old newsreels, mixing them with some fake reports they record.
She sees a coca cola advert—the ultimate symbol of American capitalism—out of the window: he concocts a news report that it is discovered that the drink was first developed by East German scientists and is now being reclaimed. Even the slogans of the old regime—and of Burger King—are re-cycled to produce ironic effects.
However, maintaining the illusion becomes ever more fraught and the crisis point is reached when his mother leaves the flat when he is asleep. And here the social effects of the change really hit home. She gets into the lift and is shocked at its state—with sex graffitti felt-tipped on the walls. She gets downstairs and there are heaps of rubbish and discarded East German furniture. Punky-looking young people pass her going in. There is plenty of traffic. And, most surreal of all, she encounters a huge bust of Lenin confronting her from the sky—a statue that is being helicoptered away.
Alex, who catches up with her, finds an explanation of it all with the final lying newsreel that night. President Honecker has stood down, saying that East Germany has accomplished its Socialist mission. The wall dividing Germany has been torn down, and the country is awash with people wanting to avail of East Germany’s superior social facilities and way of life. His mother, happy in the knowledge that the social system is safe, dies.
This low-budget film was made by 48-year old Wolfgang Becker, who comes from Westphalia in West Germany. He has no personal links to the East, but had been evolving the idea for the film in his mind for some years. His research was thorough, spending time talking to East Germans and watching countless videos. This is his fifth film, and he has made a documentary.
The film has won the top German awards—and nearly 6 million Germans have seen it since its release in February—with advertising being mainly word-of-mouth. It is not just in the east that it has been popular. Touring Southern Germany recently, I saw it advertised in Berchtesgaden (Bavaria).
Germany is currently under some social pressure, as a result of the neo-liberal course of the EU. The Social Democratic Government is having to liberalise features of the economy and pare back the superior social services—which is resented (though, of course, the absolute level remains vastly superior to that prevailing elsewhere). From a situation where economic emigration was unknown, there are now 150,000 Germans working around the EU. In the East many have realised—too late—that the price of consumerism and democracy has been the superior, caring, social system they had established for themselves—one in which unemployment was unknown. Referring to the favourable exchange rate between the two currencies, which was the agency of destruction of East German manufacture (1 West-Mark exchanged for 1 East-Mark), Alex says in the film: "The exchange rate was two to one, and Germany won, 1:0".
Goodbye, Lenin! has had a resonance both in the East and the West of Germany. It could be the sort of film that changes the direction of a society. Now it is making the rounds of other European countries. Get to see it if you can.
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