Ethelred Unraed's Journal: Ethelred At The Movies

The wife and I finally got around to seeing Goodbye, Lenin! this weekend.

We really wanted to see it when it was in the cinema, but for various reasons never got around to it. Which, considering it had an immensely long run in cinemas in Germany, is pretty incredible. Sad but true.

The premise of the movie is that a German boy, growing up in the old GDR, loses his father, who flees to West Germany. His mother then plunges into being the ideal pure Communist woman -- possibly out of spite at what her husband did, possibly to protect herself and her children from the prying eyes of the Stasi (secret police). He grows up admiring Sigmund Jähn, the first (and only) East German cosmonaut, and wanting to be a cosmonaut, too. But later he becomes disillusioned with the GDR and the SED (the Social Unity Party, the name of the East German Communists) and joins the pro-reform protests in late 1989.

His mother, ever the true-believer SED party member, sees him and others getting beaten at a demonstration and collapses in disbelief, suffering a heart attack and ending up in a coma. She sleeps through the fall of the GDR and the reunification of Germany. Then she awakens, but is still very weak and unstable. Her son, in a desperate attempt to protect her from the shock, tries to re-create the GDR in their old apartment, with bizarre results...

Anyway, now that we rented the DVD, the movie lived up to its excellent reputation -- though, I have to say, it wasn't as funny as I had heard. Which isn't to say it wasn't funny (or a good movie), it was. But it wasn't a drop-dead funny, rip-roaring comedy like One, Two, Three (which as it happens also revolves around a Berlin in transition, but in 1961 -- and is another excellent movie). Instead, it was rather more poignant. Very much worth it.

Only caveat: many of the jokes will be lost on non-Germans, as a lot of the humor is specific to (East) German jargon or (East) German brand names. One example: the main character is desperately looking for a jar of (East German) Spreewald pickles for his mother, which are no longer to be found in the post-Wall East Germany -- there are only (West German) Kühne pickles now (with the added twist that he finds Kühne "Moscow Style Pickles", which -- as the woman at the store tells him sniffily -- are made in Holland).

Another bit that will probably be lost on non-Germans: the main character's sister's boyfriend is a Wessi (West German), whom they try to train in East German jargon so as to fool their mother, and he blows it repeatedly. Or the mother's bewildered reaction when she hears the neighbor's TV through the thin walls of their apartment blaring the theme music to Tagesschau -- the evening news show on the (West) German state-owned TV channel.

One thing that has to be said, though (WARNING! Semi-spoiler ahead) is that the movie blessedly does not go the contrived Hollywood "happy ending" route and has a much more realistic, yet satisfying, ending. Hollywood would no doubt have had the mother and father reunite and they all lived happily ever after in the reunited capitalist Germany. Instead, the movie goes in a much more realistic (but moving) direction.

And the charge of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the old GDR) doesn't stick -- the movie pulls no punches on the brutality and contradictions of the old regime. But it does do the people that lived under that regime justice, and justice to the crazed and by no means painless transition that they had to make.

So, if you've got a spare evening in front of the boob tube, and want to get to know 20th century Germany a little, may I suggest a double matinée -- One, Two, Three followed by Goodbye, Lenin!. Maybe with a Wings of Desire chaser, just for Smoochy-Bear. *g*