The Pros and Cons of Life in Communist East Germany in...
On the whole, does Goodbye, Lenin paint a positive or negative picture of life in communist East
Germany?
East Germany, its demise relayed through the mass media of recent history, has in popular
consciousness been posited as negative, a corrupt bulwark of the last dying days of Communism in
Eastern Europe, barren and silent. The other Germany to its West, its citizens free, was striding
confidently ahead into the millennium. Recent cinema has sought to examine re unification, the
Wolfgang Becker film Goodbye Lenin! (2003) a recent example of such an investigation into the past
through cinema. In this essay I will look at the film and the narrative techniques it uses, probing
whether it portrays the East German nation as positive or ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...
Goodbye Lenin! (2003) appropriates the individual as bound to his environment, threaded, through
strong cultural codes, to his neighbour. Regardless of the system, communist or capitalist, and though
our goals may deviate, we are all pursuing happiness and comfort, the tools used to attain this products
of that society. That said, it is immediately legible whereabouts Becker wishes us to view the East
German state as wholly negative, and he does this through several key scenes.
At the film s opening, we learn of the first East German shot into space, surely an apotheosis of what a
state can achieve, its grasp extending to the stars. But behind the curtain of this vast achievement we
can see how it is brought about through the utter bending of citizens to the states will. Alex s mother
Christiane, who we first assume the innocent of the piece, is interrogated by the Stasi for her husband
has fled the country. We learn he was unable to live with a state he detested, the ordeal of the
interrogation so testing for Christiane it sends her into a coma. Her husband and the children?s father
absent, she finds a kinship with the state, now one of its most vociferous supporters. The absence of
the father is particularly imbued with purpose. Later, Becker seeks to equate the death of communism
with the return of the father for the two are so inextricably connected. Only when the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) is laid to rest can this dark chapter
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