Ostalgie (reprint)

Ostalgie on film

Yacowar, Maurice. Queen's Quarterly; Kingston Vol. 110, Iss. 4,  (Winter 2003)

Trying to keep a loved one shielded from a painful truth - a reality that is considered too immense to bear - is one of the oldest family games there is. In the world of cinema, such deceptions have been explored for touching comic effect in numerous guises - Life Is Beautiful, Truman, La Cage aux Folles, to name only a few. But beyond the comedy, of course, are the larger social issues, with the central question of why anything should be so unacceptable. Germany's Good Bye Lenin! explores the final collapse of a world into which untold millions had invested more than just their lives, and which - despite its own best efforts - was unable to crush entirely its people's bitter-sweet affection for it. 

THIS ECCENTRIC FAMILY DRAMA explores the mixed blessing of East Germany's post-Wall world. Wolfgang Becker's two-hour serio-comedy has been hailed as a symptom of the new Germany's Ostalgie, a sweeping nostalgia for the dismal products of the old German Democratic Republic. With the pull of old roots and dissatisfaction with the storied glories of the West, apparently many Germans yearn for the old system - or at least for part of the dingy charm they carved out within it. 

It is East Germany, 1989, and the devoutly communist Christiane Kerner (Katrin Sass) suffers a heart attack when her son Alex (Daniel Bruhl) is brutally arrested at a political demonstration on the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. When she awakens from a coma eight months later, of course, the unimaginable has come to pass. Alex finds himself protecting his mother and her weak heart from the potentially fatal disappointment of learning that her world is gone and unlamented. The Berlin Wall is down, her socialist dream is dead, and the Germanys are reunited. But Alex carries on as if East Germany is not just surviving but thriving. He is begrudgingly aided in this increasingly elaborate subterfuge by his sister Ariane (Maria Simon) and her new West German lover Rainer (Alexander Beyer). 

The film's exclamatory title is ironic, as if inviting the punch line Hello, Dolly! West German Becker even questions at times whether East Germany is the better for its absorption into the wide world of capitalism and rampant consumerism. In one scene at a bank, the Western bureaucracy of power proves as heartless as that of the old totalitarianism. The East's "working class heroes" begin to suffer unemployment in the social upheaval; Alex loses his job but in a draw wins a new one hustling satellite dishes. The fixer of old television sets now peddles the latest in high-tech, wide open communication - for better or worse. His first "cultural discovery" is a buxom stripper in onanistic lather (while ballet is no longer televised). The West is represented by surreal icons like a Big Bird strolling the supermarket aisles and a profusion of tantalizing car dealerships, billboards, and banners. Though "our drab corner store had turned into a gaudy shopper's paradise" in which "the customer is king," it somehow is unable to provide the Ossies' traditional needs. 

Christiane comes to personify the socialist ideal. And that ideal remains at least a theoretical alternative to capitalism's avarice, selfishness, and consumerism - what the GDR used to disdain as Konsumterror. For even now, the trouble with socialism is what G.K. Chesterton famously remarked is the trouble with Christianity: it has never been tried. 

To protect his mother's cherished sense of idealism, Alex wages a war between sign systems, between stories. He scrounges to obtain jars of the obsolete Spreewald pickles she craves, the inferior Mocca Fix coffee, and old GDR jam jars into which he pours the sundry jams of the West. Assured by the old familiar labels, she doesn't notice the improvement, especially in the coffee and the Dutch gherkins. The family's brand-new furniture is dumped, and their discarded old Eastern Bloc furnishings retrieved (when Christiane's old bed supplants Rainer's tanning machine, one false appearance replaces another). 

While Alex's satellites beam in the outside world, he labours to keep it from his mother. To sate her craving for current TV broadcasting, he replays tapes of old news programs. Whenever Christiane catches so much as a glimpse of the new reality, Alex and his colleague Denis (Florian Lukas) quickly counter with fake TV transmissions. To explain away a large banner advertising Coca-Cola, Denis reports that East Germany has proved that it, in fact, invented the soft drink. With its own injunction ("Trink"), the red Coke banner has replaced the scarlet communist banners that festooned the early scenes of the film. When Christiane glimpses the bustling crowds and new material wealth outside her apartment, a fake newscast explains that the GDR has granted asylum to hordes of refugees from the West who have realized that they prefer East German values. Reflecting on his tiny media empire, Alex notes that his version of events is more generous than that of the old regime: "The GDR I created for her increasingly became the one I might have wished for." 

In her delusion, Christiane seems frozen against a changing world and within a growing family. Alex begins an affair with Lara (Chulpan Khamatova), Christiane's Russian student nurse in the hospital. The grandchild Paula grows. And gradually, with their Russian and West German lovers, Christiane's children come to represent another dissolution of old borders. 

But Christiane has been harbouring her own family lie, and she will suffer a second heart attack when she unburdens herself. She has long claimed that her husband abandoned his family and nation for another woman. In reality, she had promised to follow him to the West, but did not because of her fear for her children and her dedication to communism. And for years she has been keeping from them his many letters. Revealing this sustaining lie sinks her. When she asks to see the love of her life one last time before she dies, Alex seeks out his father Robert (Burghart Klaussner) - now a successful Wessie with a new family - and brings him to Christiane's bedside. And Christiane realizes at last that she should have endured Robert's Western life to preserve her family. 

It is also worth noting that Alex finds his father in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where Hitler's top officials formalized their Final Solution for the Jews. As a national emblem of guilt, this unassuming place symbolizes the nation's and the family's need to confront their past, especially their betrayals and lies. The allusion asserts the need to acknowledge history, to confront the mythopoeia by which nations - and families - sustain themselves. 

In the film's climactic irony, Lara - who has long argued that Alex's campaign of deception is "creepy" and profoundly dishonest - tells Christiane the truth just before Robert arrives, girded to maintain her delusion. 

When Alex enters, Christiane looks between him and Lara, as if trying to decide which one to believe. When Alex plays his last bogus newscast, proclaiming the East's triumphant absorption of the West, Christiane watches her son's face more than the tape. Realizing that Alex's Big Lie has been a manifestation of the deep love he feels for her - and even for the ideal of socialism that existed within her, if not within her beloved GDR - she performs her own act of love and deceit, rewarding all his efforts by pretending to believe the broadcast. Her exclamation "wow" is directed less at the news than at the scope of her son's labour to reassure and protect her. As Lara does not reveal what she said to Christiane, her son will always believe that his mother died comforted by his elaborate ruse. He wrongly declares, "My mother outlived her GDR by three days." But in fact she knew it was gone. He, in turn, is comforted by the fantasy that she passed away surrounded by a tiny part of the country in which she believed. Lara and Christiane serve Alex as he served Christiane. 

Part of this film's charm is found in the camera strategies that cleverly represent the power of subjectivity. Becker plays with time when he speeds up the frantic action of Alex and Denis restoring Christiane's room and when he turns East Berlin's new motor traffic into an dazzling abstraction of lights. Alex's detention scene opens with the prisoners appearing to be lying down, their arms comfy above their heads. A 45-degree rotation reveals the harsher reality: they are forced to stand that way. 

Becker's parable of domestic sacrifice and loss, of painful truth and salutary deception, encapsulates the new Germany's ambivalent progress. Old divisions persist. "You East Germans are never satisfied. Always whining and complaining," Rainer charges Alex. As Becker's fiction includes old newspaper headlines and TV and documentary footage, this family represents the reunited country in all its questionable advance. 

Clearly this film strikes different chords wherever it plays. Its ambivalence finds in Germany the same bittersweet that Russian Premier Putin has expressed of his transformed nation: "Anyone who doesn't regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who wants it restored has no brain." When Lara saves Alex from choking on an apple we're reminded that we Westerners are not living in any Eden. The divided and the reunited Germanys are both flawed attempts at social organization, heavily dependent on myths to brighten the real conditions of living. And so for all of us. 

THE FRACTURES, generosity and love in this family reflect well beyond Europe, as does the film's sense of the myths that nations, families, even individuals, contrive to sustain themselves. We've had this lesson often before - from Big Daddy's unwitting crutch of "mendacity" to Jack Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth!" But rarely with such compassion.