Sim City Socialism
The story of Goodbye Lenin! is straightforward: Christiane, a schoolteacher and apparent true believer in East Germany's communist path, sees her son Alex embroiled in a scuffle with police at a demonstration by the Wall. She has a heart attack and falls into a coma that lasts eight months. During that time, the Berlin Wall comes down, Alex's sister Ariane leaves school to work at Burger King and invites her new, West German boyfriend to move in with them, Alex takes a job installing satellite dishes, and starts a romance with Lara, his mother's nurse from the Soviet Union. When Christiane finally wakes up, the doctors warn her children that any shock to her system might be fatal. Roping in his unwilling sister, and with the help of his tech-savvy friend Denis, Alex recreates socialist East Germany within the confines of their apartment. They replace their new furniture with the older items that had put in storage, and Alex is on the constant hunt for some of his mother's favorite foods that are no longer sold. He and Denis even create fake news broadcasts that his mother watches on her TV and a hidden VCR.
When Christian regains some of her strength she leaves the apartment to discover foreign cars, advertising billboards, and even a statue of Lenin being towed off into the distance by a helicopter. Her children quickly concoct a new lie: West Germans, fed up with the predations of capitalism, are coming to the East in droves.
Not long before her death, Christiane reveals that she had been supposed to bring the family and rejoin their father in the West after his escape, but had changed her mind out of fear that the State might seize her children. She asks to see her former husband one last time, a brief reunion that Alex facilitates.
In anticipation of the upcoming reunification celebrations, Alex and Denis invent one last outrageous news story about the new East German leader's opening of the borders with the West. Unbeknownst to them, Lara has told her the truth about the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Christiane dies a few days later.
The challenges involved in recreating the socialism of a bygone era (even one that ended mere months ago) provide Goodbye, Lenin! with both comedy and pathos: Alex and Denis's film shoots for their fake news programs are delightfully absurd, even going as far as convincing a taxi driver who resembles East Germany's most famous cosmonaut to imitate his lookalike and pretend to be the nonexistent country's new head of state. All their efforts are ultimately doomed because this quixotic rescue mission is not merely out of step with the surroundings: it is anti-entropic. It requires the enforced, falsified order of a closed system (the apartment) that is nonetheless fatally vulnerable to the chaotic outside world. Even Lara's revelation of the truth to Christiane is not just a matter of ethics --it is the final proof that one cannot stop information from leaking or control all variables. Out of love for his mother, Alex is trying to create a self-contained world that cannot allow any contradictory information to seep in from the outside world. In doing so, he is not just recreating the material trappings of East Germany, but also mimicking its oppressive and restrictive structure. Their apartment is made of four Berlin Walls.
In physics, the idea of a struggle against entropy is senseless, since it would involve the movement of energy, which, by definition, increases entropy. But entropy is also a question of time: each moves in only one direction. Warmhearted as the film is, Goodbye, Lenin! reminds its viewers that nostalgia's fatal flaw is its unwillingness to reconcile with the passage of time. This is all the more poignant because the nostalgia in this case is second hand; Christiane does not know that she is living in a simulation, and Alex is only interested in preserving the illusion of a persistent East Germany to hang onto his childhood, and more important, to his mother. Once again, the attachment to the lost world is melancholic, although in Alex's case, it is an anticipatory melancholy about his mother's impending death. It is only through his mother's eyes that Alex can vicariously feel any sense of loss at East Germany's passing.
Yet, as I indicated in the beginning of this chapter, Christiane's static journey to the grave is counterbalanced by other instances of symbolic motion. First, there is her collapse at the protest that marks the beginning of her illness (she falls not long before both the Wall and her beloved regime do). Second is the movement back and forth across the no longer meaningful border between East and West Germany. In the fantasy world constructed by her son, the mad rush of East Germans into the West becomes its mirror opposite, a communist fairy tale of West German refugees from capitalism. This not only allows for the admission that the barrier between the two Germanies has fallen, but once again resembles watching a film as it rewinds. With the fall of the Wall, East Germany was like a water balloon that had sprung a leak, but Alex's fake broadcast would have Christiane believe that the water is flowing into the balloon rather than out.
Christiane's illness also ties into the film's most persistent vertical motif: the space program. As a boy, Alex is obsessed with Sigmund Jahn, the first German cosmonaut to fly into space as part of the Soviet Union's cooperative program with fellow socialist states. In his mind, Jahn's launch into space becomes mixed up with Alex's father's defection to the West, and it is Jahn's lookalike that Alex and Denis dress up for their final fake news broadcast. Christiane herself went nowhere when she was alive, declining to join her husband abroad, but after her death, Alex and his family launch her ashes on a toy rocket that he had built with his father long ago.
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But the most obviously significant contrast to the mostly bedridden Christiane is the bizarre spectacle to which she is exposed during her brief, unsupervised excursion from her apartment: the huge statue of Vladimir Lenin, carried aloft and away by a helicopter. Lenin's outstretched arm, a common feature of communist iconography, is no longer the commanding gesture of a leader addressing a crowd, but the odd farewell salute that gives the film its title. If we ignore the helicopter (as the camera does at key moments), the ascent of this ponderously heavy monument appears to defy gravity, in keeping with the Stalinist utopian emphasis on flight as a symbol of communist trajectory.
But it is also a striking contrast with what we know about the fate of such statues in the wake of the Warsaw Pact: they are torn down rather than elevated. Moreover, there is the matter of Lenin himself, whose body, like that of the sick and dying elders in Goodbye, Lenin!, The Farewell Party, and The Man Who Couldn't Die, lies still in the mausoleum that had long been the symbolic center of Soviet power. What could be a more ironic end for one of the twentieth century's most famous materialists than his ascension into heaven?