Hi, everyone. I am Rebecca and I am a junior student at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, majoring in Film and TV Production. I am a movie buff, so I am very glad to share my film reviews with you guys on Jianshu. Now I'd like to share a film called Good Bye, Lenin!.
It is common knowledge that Lenin is the great leader who led Russia to socialism (Garrard, 2018), so before I watched the movie Good Bye Lenin (Arndt & Becker, 2003), I thought it was a film with intense political complexion about Lenin. However, this is not a political film. It draws the audience into a utopia with the collective memory of East Germany built by the director after the reunification of Germany, and it combines the spirit of the Democratic Republic of Germany with the material of the Federal Republic of Germany. It can be said that the director adds a glamorized filter to East Germany. This is what Cook (2007) called selective recall, which provides a selective view of the past in a form of nostalgic memory.
When a period of history is gone, people often forget its problems and beautify the whole memory. Memories of Murder(Cha & Bong, 2003), for example, also glamorized the period of the military government ruled by Chun Doo-hwan. In the 1980s, to continue its autocratic rule, the military government of South Korea used various bloody methods to suppress the people, and police officers used torture for interrogation (Wu, 2018). However, in the film, the torture is not attributed to the entire autocratic system, but one of the bad policemen, so it can be said that the director also erased some of the system problems at that time to some extent.
However, why do we say that what is presented in the film is a glorified version of East Germany history, we can compare it from two aspects.
First, it can be seen from the material aspect. After World War II, East Germany was forced to accept the Soviet model and pursue a highly centralized planned economic system (Hu, 2008). Although this system once played a positive role, it gradually became rigid in the late years of East Germany. For instance, it excluded the market and restricted the development of productivity (Hu, 2008). Manufacturers of the daily products that survived were nationalized, and this unified production mode centralized the supply of food and basic household goods (Jiang & Yu, 1995). In the film, the food and goods in the room Alex builds for his mother are not produced uniformly by the planned economy of East Germany. For example, cucumbers imported from the Netherlands are poured into the empty East German-made Spreewald jars, West German-made coffee is placed in a Mocca-Fix bag, and videotapes recording East Germany are watched on a satellite television produced in West Germany. Therefore, what the audience sees is the “vacant shell” of East Germany, and the objects are essentially products of capitalism. If it were in East Germany at that time, it would have been impossible to have such a wealth of imported goods. Alex has produced a mirror image of imaginative identification with East Germany (Gao, 2013), beautifying East German objects to some extent.
Second, what the film presents can only be said to be some of the better spiritual worlds in early East Germany. East Germany is a socialist country, so people in that era shared the same socialist beliefs, reading The Communist Manifesto, and speaking in the socialist model. In the film, Alex’s mother believes in these most essential socialist ideas. She enjoys listening to the singing of East German children who wear blue scarves, receiving congratulations from her socialist superiors, and providing suggestions to the party according to her ideas. However, the reality of East Germany is not so idealistic. In the period of revolutions of 1989, the Cold War and the pressure from the Soviet Union distorted the development of Eastern Europe, the political and economic system was rigid, and the ideological control was strengthened (Wang, 2005). However, the forces that demanded reform were unable to act due to the opposition of conservative forces, which also shook the belief of the people in the Eastern European countries in socialism (Wang, 2005). Just as the background of the horrific period in East Germany was described in the film The Lives of Others (Berg & Donnersmarck, 2006) (1.1), the socialism that people originally believed in is no longer what it was in the beginning. Society is trapped in the cage of totalitarianism, and everyone feels dangerous. However, Alex’s mother chooses to believe that the people of West Germany abandon capitalism and flee to East Germany to embrace socialism, indicating that East Germany is wonderful in this space dominated by her beliefs (1.2).
Why does the movie glamorize East Germany?
I think it can be understood in two aspects. First, I think the film is to make people re-examine disappeared East Germany and arouse people’s pursuit of certain beliefs and feelings. Besides, in the 1990s, people had a feeling of nostalgia for the lifestyle and material culture of the communist period, which led to the prosperity of the nostalgic industry (Berdahl, 2010). A nostalgic company sells 60,000 East German T-shirts with a portrait of Marx each year, and the shelves are full of cola and coffee from East German, which have not been seen for many years (Sha, 2004). Hence, I think the film in a way also caters to the nostalgia industry or the nostalgia industry inspires the film.
Second, I think this film may not be just praising East Germany as we have seen, it may be implicitly suggesting that West Germany is better than East Germany. In terms of material, in the film, to achieve the ideal image of East Germany, it must be filled with West German products to forge it (2.1). In terms of spirit, the East German portrayed in the movie is so beautiful and harmonious, but it has become past tense, and it has been merged into West Germany. It further shows that this is an illusion of East Germany and an escape from reality. Both of these aspects are ironic. It is like the Americans making films to praise and miss the Soviet Union, ostensibly nostalgic, but saying that the US authorities have won. Because no matter how beautiful it is in memory, it has already been lost in reality. Therefore, the director may also be reminding the audience to learn the historical lessons of East Germany’s failure.
The little East German world that Alex built for his mother in the movie is beautiful. However, I hope that by comparing it with the real East Germany in history and explaining the purpose of the film to beautify East Germany, readers can recognize the difference between reality and fantasy, and guide readers to re-examine the era.
References (APA)
Berdahl, D. (2010). On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Arndt, S. (Producer), & Becker, W. (Co-screenwriter/ Director). (2003). Good Bye Lenin! [Motion Picture]. Germany: Westdeutscher Rundfunk.
Cha, S. J. (Producer), & Bong, J. H. (Screenwriter/ Director). (2003). Memories of Murder [Motion Picture]. Korea: CJ Entertainment.
Cook, R. F. (2007). Good Bye, Lenin!: Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 43(2), pp.206-219.
Berg, Q. (Producer), & Donnersmarck, F. H. V. (Screenwriter/ Director). (2006). The Lives of Others [Motion Picture]. Germany: Buena Vista International (Germany) GmbH.
Garrard, G. (2018). Lenin: The Machiavellian Marxist. History Today, 68(11), pp.60-65.
Gao, X. Q. (2013). 《再见，列宁》：成长故事背后的历史政治寓言 [Good Bye Lenin: A Historical and Political Allegory Behind the Story of Developing]. Movie Literature, (18), pp.67-69.
Hu, S. H. (2008). 德国的分裂与统一 [Division and Unification of Germany]. Taiwan Working Newsletter, (5), pp.31-34.
Jiang, Q., & Yu, J. J. (1995). 论战后东西德经济之差异 [The economic differences between East and West Germany after the war]. Russian Studies, (3), pp.1-6.
Sha, H. (2004). 答案在风中飘——德国电影《再见，列宁》观后 [The Answer is Blowing in the Wind: After Watching the German Film Good Bye Lenin!]. Frontiers, (3), pp.21-29.
Wang, Y. M. (2005). 战后东欧民族主义与东欧剧变 [Eastern European Nationalism and Eastern European Upheaval after the War]. Socialism Studies, 162(4), pp.124-127.
Wu, S. T. (2018). 权力与规训——《杀人回忆》中的批判性隐喻研究 [Power and Discipline: A Study of Critical Metaphor in Memories of Murder]. Northern Literature, (3), pp.253.