Goodbye Lenin

I first watched Good Bye, Lenin!, directed by Wolfgang Becker, in 2003. I watched it in a cinema in (the former) East Berlin, and was amazed that the audience stood and clapped as the end credits rolled; I had never seen a film have such an effect on its viewers. I bought the DVD as soon as it was released and have since watched it numerous times. I now believe the initial impact of the film lends itself to the images contained in the film, and the historical memory which these images transmit.

Good Bye, Lenin! was released in 2003, just fourteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the time that the film is set. The film, therefore, deals with events in our recent history - many people today will still have memories of this event from their own personal experiences. The film is set in East Berlin focuses on Alex and his mother, who became an ardent supporter of the GDR after her husband left the family in 1978 to flee to the West. Alex's mother has a heart attack and falls in to a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of Capitalism to East Germany. She awakes from her coma after eight months, and her family is warned that any shock to her could cause a fatal heart attack. Alex and his sister then try to create the illusion that the GDR is alive and well, if not even better than before.

Thomas Mann stated in his Essay On The Film that 'film [in general] possesses a technique of recollection, of psychological suggestion.' Indeed, the images used in Good Bye, Lenin!, such as newspaper headlines and television pictures, could indeed evoke recollections for the audience, but what kind of memories are these? Critical or nostalgic? And who has these memories?

The title sequence of Good Bye, Lenin! contains images of East Berlin from GDR postcards (see clip from 1min 10secs onwards).



Head of Artwork on the film, Darius Ghanai, stated that he intended to zoom in on the details in the postcards in order to show a different truth to what was actually presented - he wanted the viewer to see 'new' postcards, as buildings that appear in the postcards were demolished after the fall of the Wall (Toteberg p.145). By zooming in on certain features, Ghanai demfamiliarizes familiar images, which leads viewers from (former) East Berlin to remember buildings that were previously there and are not now, and viewers from West Berlin to realise the dramatic changes that occurred for the 'Ossis'.

The front pages of newspapers from several countries (Germany, France and U.S.A.) flash up on the screen in the middle of the narrative during Good Bye, Lenin! As the newspapers are from around the world, it shows that the fall of the Berlin Wall was an international event, or an event of international significance. The memories of this event would, therefore, also spread internationally. This is perhaps shown by the success of the film internationally. As these images interrupt the narrative, a kind of Verfremdungseffekt is created. Viewers become aware of the time setting of the film, the characters and themselves. They remember that they are watching a fictitious film and this encourages them to be analytical or critical. It could also influence the audience to consider what they were doing at this time and their own experiences. This is one of the questions that Good Bye, Lenin! poses - is memory nostalgic or critical? Is it defamiliarizing or does it remind us of the familiar?

There are many images from television throughout Good Bye, Lenin! I will firstly discuss the documentable images. The actual events of 1989-1990 structure the narrative chronologically. This was important to Becker who said 'you just can't deal arbitrarily with certain chronological developments determined by events such as the monetary union and the fall of the Wall.' All of the images we see are from actual news material from the time of the fall of the Wall. We see them happening on our screens as Alex watches them at the same time on his television, for example 40 Jahre DDR parade, Honecker's resignation, people climbing over the Berlin Wall, Germany's first free elections, the money exchange and the World Cup. All of this footage would evoke both positive and negative memories, memories of hope and fear for the future, for East and West Germans and also for the international viewer. Images from Das Sandmaennchen, an actual German children's programme, are also shown.



Actual footage of the first (East) German, Sigmund Jaehn, flying in to Space is also shown, evoking a personal memory for Alex - his father leaving. However, this would evoke proud memories for East German viewers - a collective, national pride and memory.

Actual archival news material from the GDR news programme Aktuelle Kamera is used in Good Bye, Lenin!, but in a different manner to the other images - to fool Alex's mother.



This news programme had the same structure and content every night, it wanted to show that the world of socialism was perfect. In a sense Aktuelle Kamera was Das Sandmaennchen for adults - its monotonous and never changing content had a sedative effect on its viewers. Images from this news programme would bring back memories of the show for East German viewers, however, the images have further implications. As Alex and Dennis manipulate and use the footage for their own gain it shows the viewer how easy it is to distort the truth. Wolfgang Becker states 'you can see how quickly you can fake things with pictures and a slightly altered commentary - which makes you doubt whether the pictures were already completely truthful in their original context, and how much truth is to be found in the pictures to begin with.' (www.sonyclassics.com/goodbye/flash.html)

What are the effects of using archival images in Good Bye, Lenin!? Does the use of existing archival material reflect on the film's own use of archival material? Does the film undermine its own historical veracity? Through the use of images and voiceover, the fake narratives of the Aktuelle Kamera news reports are put together in the same way as Alex's narrative in the film - so the viewer of the film is in the same situation as Alex's bed-ridden mother: are we to be seduced by the plausible but inauthentic reconstruction?

Also, the images shown in the film have been seen so many times before that '[they are] memorie[s] consisting largely of images that have by now become so conventionalised that they determine what is a "correct" representation of the period and what is not.' (Kaes p.196) When images like these are seen time and again they become the memories - they are not the actual memories. The images have been seen so many times before that perhaps the viewers' personal memories are being replaced with images that they have seen on television, therefore are personal memories being replaced with collective 'memories' and film narratives of the past?


References:

Good Bye, Lenin! Dir. Wolfgang Becker (Germany, 2003)

Boehn, Andreas, 'Memory, Musealization and Alternative History in Michael Kleeberg's Novel Ein Garten im Norden and Wolfgang Becker's Film Good Bye, Lenin!' in Memory Traces: 1989 and the question of German cultural identity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005) pp. 245-260.

Kaes, Anton, From Hitler to Heimat (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)

Toteberg, Michael, ed., Good Bye, Lenin! (Berlin: Schwarzkopf und Schwarzkopf, 2003)

www.sonyclassics.com/goodbye/flash.html (5/12/2009)