20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall/Good Bye Lenin

This past Saturday I was wandering through Blockbuster video when I came across a charming film which was very timely. Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Good Bye Lenin is a German film which looks at that event from the East German side. On the one hand, it is a story about a son's love for his mother which causes him to go to great lengths to protect her. However, it also is a fable about the ability to re-write history.

In the movie, a teenage boy joins several thousand East Berliners who just want to take an evening stroll without the Berlin Wall getting in their way. As he is being arrested, he sees his mother, who is a devoted disciple of the DDR, collapse. When he is released, he learns that she has suffered a heart attack and is in a coma. She is unconscious for eight months, during which time Erich Honecker resigns and the Berlin Wall comes down.

When she re-awakens, the world has moved on. Her daughter has dropped out of college and now works for Burger King. Her son has lost his job at a TV repair facility and now sells satellite TV dishes. However, Alex the son is concerned that loss of the DDR will cause his mother to suffer another heart attack. As a result, he hides the truth from her, insisting that the family dress in drab East German clothes and pretend that everything is the same. He goes so far as to manufacture fake news programs for his mother to watch showing the progress of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

When his mother revives enough to go for a walk outside and notices "Wessies" (that is West Berliners) in the neighborhood, he concocts a story about West Germans seeking asylum in the East. Ultimately, he creates a video reality in which the West surrenders to the East. His mother suffers a second heart attack and passes away without ever realizing that the East has fallen.

The illusion that he creates is overwhelming. He takes footage of jubilant East Germans streaming into the West and turns it into a scene of West Germans fleeing the ravages of capitalism and neo-Nazis. In his version, the wall comes down when East Germany opens its borders to the West in a display of compassion. East Germany becomes a haven rather than a police state.

This is a bittersweet story. The children of East Berlin are ready to move on. While Alex is motivated by love for his mother, there is an undercurrent of guilt that his mother suffered a heart attack while he was protesting. What we in the West would regard as progress is loss for the older generation. Alex is able to triumph by creating an East German reality which never existed. While turning history on its head, he allowed his mother to believe that socialism had prevailed. In his words, he creates an East Germany which lived up to its highest ideals. The beauty of the story is that Alex creates an alternate reality which allows his mother to die blissfully unaware of the changes history has imposed. It is an object lesson that progress often come at the expense of someone else's dreams. It also shows just how tempting it would be to re-write history so that governments do not disappoint, but inspire.