Good Bye Lenin!: Nostalgia Lite

Below is a copy of my most recent entry on cinekklesia. -KO

Right around Mother's Day is a good time to post a review of Good Bye Lenin! Wolfgang Becker's film of a young man who goes to great lengths to take care of his mom in highly unusual circumstances. The location is the former East Germany, and the year is 1989, right before the Berlin Wall collapses under the weight of an oppressed people seeking change. Alex (Daniel Brühl), the young man in question, actively resists the communist regime, despite his mother's staunch support of the status quo. Near the beginning of the movie, we see Alex getting arrested during a protest, and unfortunately, his mother (played by Katrin Saß) witnesses the arrest, has a heart attack, and goes into a coma for several months.

While she remains physically and mentally incapacitated in the hospital, the entire world changes. Not only does the Berlin Wall collapse, but the entire Soviet-dominated edifice of Eastern Europe is rent asunder, and both East and West Germany begin the process of reunification. When Alex's mother finally awakens, his doctor tells him that she cannot experience shock of any kind, as that could prove fatal. The biggest shock, of course, would be to tell her that her beloved East Germany—with its cradle-to-grave welfare system and all of its patriotic artifacts and symbols to which she had devoted her life—had vanished.

Thus, Alex concocts an elaborate scheme to keep his mother under permanent bed rest and to recreate the former East Germany in their Berlin apartment. He convinces her friends to pretend that they are still living under the leadership of Erich Honecker, and he scours store shelves to find remnants of old East German products. He even gets a friend, an aspiring filmmaker, to produce fake news stories so that his mother can maintain her pre-1989 consciousness.

On one level, we could debate whether Alex did the right thing. In ethical terms, he clearly was a consequentialist: he deceived his mother in order to protect her, believing that the end result of preserving her life was worth a big lie. A Kantian deontologist, however, would not have been amused, believing that the truth always must be told, regardless of (potential) consequences. However, this is not the most interesting question stemming from the movie.

What intrigued me most about Good Bye Lenin! was its examination of nostalgia. With the exception of Alex's mother, none of the main characters were sad to witness the demise of East Germany. However, Wolfgang Becker is smart enough to realize that in most instances, people are at least a little sentimental about past times, even if those times were, on the whole, bad. Alex, despite having worked against the communist regime, doesn't have a perfect life under the new capitalism. Whereas before, he had a steady, easy-going job in a television repair shop, he now is constantly running around Berlin, trying to sell satellite services to his former "comrades." He's exhausted. While in no way does he want to go back to the Bad Old Days, his new life presents him with new challenges; his circumstances may be relatively better under capitalism, but they're not easy.

What we also notice in Alex is his overriding concern for people over ideology. Despite his political disagreements with his mother, he puts those aside in order to help her. At the end, we hear him meditate about how his mother's identity was wrapped up inextricably with the East German experience; to know his mother was to know a bit about East Germany. In that sense, Alex cannot see the entirety of his past in negative terms: He loves his mom, his mom cared a lot about East Germany...thus, he never can escape his past entirely (and we get the sense that he doesn't want to).

As a libertarian, I occassionally have to remind myself that very few people view life in starkly ideological terms. Most care about "mundane" things: family, friends, work. The proper role of the state, the legitimacy of free markets...such questions do not enter most people's everyday conversations. If the ultimate goal of most libertarians is the eradication of formal politics, then could the eradication of ideology fall under that rubric as well?

For Christians, Good Bye Lenin's thesis is a bit trickier. People are not just people, after all: their ideas about God, sin, and salvation have eternal consequences. We ultimately cannot look at a person apart from his/her beliefs (ideologies?). However, as the Incarnation reminds us, we also cannot view people apart from their lived experience. Jesus came to earth, in part, to meet us in our corporeal selves: flesh and blood, bread and wine. Our encounters with others—believers or otherwise—must be mindful of the fact that everyone has a complex history, an embodied experience, and sentiments about days gone by. Good Bye Lenin! reminds of this reality in both funny and touching ways.