Good Bye Lenin!

Programme Notes

Dir. Wolfgang Becker
2003 Germany 2hrs 1min

East Germany, the year 1989: A young man protests against the regime. His mother watches the police arresting him and suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. Some months later, the GDR does not exist anymore and the mother awakes. Since she has to avoid every excitement, the son tries to set up the GDR again for her in their flat. But the world has changed a lot...

"Die DDR lebt weiter -- auf 79 qm!" (The German Democratic Republic lives on -- in 79 square meters!)

A version of Rip Van Winkle set in the old East Germany is much funnier than it sounds

There is an insular arrogance in the confident British claim that the Germans don't have a sense of humour. What about the films of Ernst Lubitsch, the plays of Bertolt Brecht or the books of Erich Kästner? And has Britain produced a movie comedy these last few years that compares with Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin!? Set in Berlin in the late 1980s and early 90s, it's an inventive satire on German reunification that cleverly updates Washington Irving's seminal story of amnesia and social sleep walking, Rip Van Winkle.

In Irving's 1820 fable, Rip Van Winkle downs a flagon of Dutch gin in the Catskills, falls asleep a subject of George III and awakens 20 years later to discover he's missed the American Revolution and is now a free citizen of the United States. In Becker's movie, an idealistic communist, Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass, a former East German film star) has a heart attack while watching a demonstration in East Berlin in 1989 and goes into a coma, waking up eight months later after the Wall has come down, Honecker has resigned, capitalism has invaded the East and Germany is on the point of reunification.

While she's comatose in hospital, her grown-up son and daughter have thrown out their old furniture and got new jobs - Alex (Daniel Brühl) has switched from being a TV repair man to selling satellite dishes, Ariane (Maria Simon) has abandoned her studies to work for a fast-food chain. But when Christiane suddenly regains consciousness, the doctor tells Alex that in her fragile state, any small shock could kill her. He thus realises that it would be fatal for her to confront the social and political transformation of the past year.

So Becker and his co-screenwriter, Bernd Lichtenberg, add to the traditional Rip Van Winkle story the ingenious plot device found in George Seaton's film 36 Hours (inspired by a wartime story by Roald Dahl) and Emir Kusturica's Underground. This involves a vast deception by which a false world is created to deceive an innocent person - for malign purposes in 36 Hours and Underground, for beneficent ones here. Alex rapidly restores the family's flat to its GDR dinginess, installs his bedridden mother at home and pretends that all is still for the best in the best of all communist worlds.

This scheme involves him in constant improvisation of a frequently hilarious kind. He hunts in dustbins for old pickle jars and coffee packs of East German brands no longer manufactured. He involves elderly neighbours in his schemes, several of them only too eager to revert to a more certain past, and he bribes kids to dress as Young Pioneers to serenade his mother on her birthday. A workmate with ambitions to be a movie director concocts phoney videos to be shown between old tapes on her TV set.

He delights her by acquiring a Trabant ('After only three years' wait,' she says in wonder) for an outing to the countryside, and when she sees West Berliners in their smart cars in East Berlin, he convinces her they're fugitives from the consumer society. Gradually, the movie takes on a larger dimension as Alex comes to create an alternative history of Germany in which the West is cracking up and the generous East opens its arms to share the idealism which his mother represents.

In this version, there is no brutal triumphalism in which capitalism prevails over an evil empire, but a more just society is created. This is linked, both thematically and dramatically, to the children discovering that their father, a doctor who left for the West in the 1970s because he was persecuted for refusing to join the Communist Party, is living in Wannsee and has remarried. Alex's sister first notices him when he and his family buy a drive-through takeaway at her fast-food place. 'What did you say to Father?' Alex asks. 'Enjoy your meal and thank you for choosing Burger King,' she replies, a line that's funny, sad and deeply moving. This is a remarkable film that makes you laugh and leaves you thinking. It's the work of people who have a great sense of humour. Washington Irving would have liked it.

Daniel Brühl .... Alexander Kerner
Katrin Saß .... Christiane Kerner (mother) (as Kathrin Sass)
Maria Simon .... Ariane Kerner
Chulpan Khamatova .... Lara
Florian Lukas .... Denis
Alexander Beyer .... Rainer
Burghart Klaußner .... Robert Kerner (father)
Michael Gwisdek .... Direktor Klapprath

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