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Before her coma overtook her, Christiane was devoted to a country whose politics she idealized. She worked as a teacher, training children to be good citizens. In grainy footage at the opening, a youthful, glowing Christiane shepherds a group of lively children wearing the kerchiefs of the Party, leading them in a patriotic song. She clearly loves them, and they her. In her eyes, her country is like the children, purely benevolent. The well being of humanity is its only goal. We only discover the extent to which she has given her life to this belief later in the film. She reveals to her family how much her patriotism shaped personal decisions she made, that changed all their lives irrevocably. Director Wolfgang Becker shows Christiane's pre-coma, Berlin Wall-era life as a home movie, not simply as part of the movie we're seeing. In doing so, he lays down the first of the many layers of perspective. This is how Becker makes this comedy provocative, as it becomes an examination of the interplay between the personal and the political. The footage of Christiane with her choir reminded me of the feeling life had in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was a child. There was a sheen on things then, a comforting sense of orderliness, reflected in Norman Rockwell paintings and TV shows like “Leave it To Beaver,” a show I loved because it was so reassuring. That show, like so much of the culture of the time, encouraged us to maintain an idealized view of America. It helped us ignore the racism, poverty, sexism, Mc Carthyism and the other ills, that caused so much suffering, many of which are still very much with us in evolved forms today. In a scene at the film's beginning, light filtering through a huge GDR flag hanging outside the window tints the family's apartment red. At the same time, a chest-thumpingly patriotic military parade booms by in the street below. Its rhythms and marching feet even cause teacups in the apartment twenty floors up to quiver. This rose-tinting and rattling china is visual poetry, conveying how the coloring of people's perceptions reached all the way into their cupboards and their emotions. We know from our vantage point that Christiane's romanticized impression of the sweetness of socialist life was largely a creation of government propaganda. Like the world of “Leave It To Beaver,” the lovely images Christiane believed in were a cover for more grim realities. The socialist vision explodes as young people, including Alex, stage massive protest demonstrations against the regime. Police respond predictably, with “excessive force.” The country's underlying repressiveness, on which the surface tranquility rests, is revealed. Christiane witnesses the violence, and the film implies that it is this revelation, as much as it is seeing her son hurt by police, that causes her heart attack. Her coma becomes a physical enactment of an emotional, spiritual refusal to face frightening political facts—and as such, it expresses a phenomenon that wasn't limited to the GDR in the 1990's. I recognize it as much like a psycho-political defense mechanism that is quite contemporary and quite American. It's what leads some to create campaign ads of recent days, begging Americans to “wake up” and see what they believe are dangerous and disturbing developments in politics today. When Christiane wakes up in the midst of East Berlin's capitalist rebirth, and Alex seeks to recreate for her the socialist world to which she was so devoted, he borrows strategies for perpetuating illusion that he learned well from the old regime. He collects all the discarded leftovers he can, from the trash, the dump, and flea markets—the jars of old pickles his mother adored, which he fills with new pickles, old drab unflattering clothing which he convinces his recalcitrant sister to wear in their mother's presence. His creativity even extends to the literal development of propaganda. He works in the new capitalism as a salesman (how appropriate!). He meets a fellow worker, an immigrant from West Germany who aspires to filmmaking. He plays on his new friend's ambitions and enlists him in developing fake newsreels he shows his mom, that report events Alex fabricates to keep alive the culture that is now gone forever. At a certain point we have to wonder why Alex is going to all this trouble. His motivation, we realize, is nothing but his deep love for his mother. A young man in his early twenties whose life revolves around his mother to this extent—well, he'll seem like a pathetic cliché of a momma's boy to many American viewers. And this makes the film even more provocative for us. Alex creates a world of political propaganda, to protect the mother he loves. As much as is the fallen socialism, his devotion to his mother is a relic of pre-capitalism. In our individualistic, market-driven society, we certainly don't have time for such shenanigans. We're too busy earning money, to have time to devote so much energy to family relationships. In socialism, on the other hand, such care for parents was the norm. Alex's painstaking recreation is political, and it is also intimate and personal. Few relationships are deeper and more complex than those we have with our parents. These relationships constitute us; from them, we form our most personal selves. Out of his love for his mother, Alex perpetuates a false false version of a real false world. It unfolds in the midst of the larger “real” world of new capitalism. The new world is the world of the free market. Coke ads and Burger Kings proliferate. The new world reshapes Alex's and his family's personalities and relationships, as his sister gets a job at Burger King and Alex sells formerly forbidden satellite dishes door to door. The new world provides a heady rush to Alex, his sister, and Laura, the girlfriend Alex hooks up with. But as Americans, we know it to rest on a different kind of falseness. The ad images of sexy girls and happy Coke-drinkers that suddenly burgeon as if out of nowhere are no more “true” than the old GDR images Alex is perpetuating in his mother's bedroom. From our 2004 USA vantage point, we know these characters' futures; we know about the chaos that happens next. And as Americans, we've already gone after the fulfillment that slick, alluring consumerism promises, and have found it to be empty. We can see that the East Berliners' exuberant embrace of a market-driven society contains its own guarantee of betrayal, no less disappointing than the one they overthrew. In the midst of their ill-fated, innocent hopefulness, Alex's personal life—his love for his mother and his girlfriend, his family and friends' love for him and each other—unfolds. So do the dual politics, the inexorable one of free market capitalism, and the anachronistic one of the fake world Alex maintains for his mom. As the film progresses we are finally no longer able to discern the difference. Our personal lives seem to us to be our own. They seem to us, just as Christiane's seemed to her before the Wall's fall, to be a matter of our own free will and choice. But Goodbye Lenin! shows us how arbitrary and fleeting the particulars of life in any given time are. One system disappears, with its prescribed slogans and feelings, and a new one arises instantly in its place. Christiane's medical condition is what makes her fragile, but we realize her life is like every life lived through cherished illusions, and it makes us wonder if there is any other kind.
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