media consumption

Goodbye Lenin

A poignant and enchanting film by German director Wolfgang Becker, Good Bye Lenin is the story of Alexander, a young East German man coming of age during the social turmoil of 1989. His mother, whose life had been devoted to service of the Socialist cause, lapses into a coma just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall after suffering a heart attack while watching Alexander being beaten and arrested by police during a demonstration. She awakes after eight months during which time, unbeknowst to her, East Germany has been transformed into a de facto Western capitalist state.

Following doctors orders that his mother not be subject to over-stimulation, Alexander hides the fact of this societal transformation, concealing the world outside his mother's drably decorated bedroom. Meanwhile, he works as a satellite TV intaller (just in time for Germany's 1990 World cup triumph) and his sister works at the drive-thru window of a Burger King. There is valuable comedic ore to be mined here as Alexander enlists the helps of neighbors and friends to help maintain the fiction. Perhaps surprising to a Wetern audience, the film also provides insight to the allure of socialism as Alexander creates for his mother an idealized vision of East Germany--the country as his mother had taught him it should be.

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