The hottest ticket of the cold-war craze is probably Wolfgang Becker’s “Goodbye Lenin,” winner of the 2003 Berlin Film Festival’s award for best European picture. The hit comedy tells the story of a freedom-loving Easterner’s love for his mother, a devout communist. On seeing her son beaten by GDR police at a protest rally in late 1989, she collapses into a coma, awakening only after the wall has come down and East Germany is history. Fearing she might die of shock at the new political reality, the son sets out to create the illusion that nothing has changed. Inside the walls of her home, the GDR lives again. Each evening the son’s lies are confirmed on “Aktuelle Kamera,” a bogus TV news show he concocts with the help of a friend and some old photos.
The fakery gets more and more elaborate. When Mama looks out a window and wonders why there are more Opels in the street than Trabants (the GDR’s No. 1 car), the young man tells her that East Germany has opened its borders to Westerners fleeing the failure of capitalism. Soon the wall comes down in their fictitious universe–toppled by the collapse of the West.
How deep is Germany’s nostalgia? Fewer than 10 percent of Easterners truly miss the vanished regime, surveys say, and among Westerners the number is virtually zero. A return of the red old days is the last thing they want. Germans are simply enjoying another kind of liberation–the freedom that comes as painful memories fade.
