Imagine you wake up one day to find that the world as you knew it has turned upside down…. That which was profane is suddenly sacred, that which was fiendish is suddenly saintly, that which was adored has now been cast aside… What would you do? This is what happened to Christiane Kerner, when she awoke from her 8 month long coma in an East Berlin Hospital in the autumn of 1989… She was a proud, socialist citizen of the German Democratic Republic, but within these 8 months, her Socialist homeland, the paradise of workers and farmers had ceased to exist.. except in her head… 'Goodbye Lenin!' is an amazing description of the travails of the Kerner family and the emotional roller coaster that the family embarks on to preserve the now-dead Socialist fatherland for the sake of Christiane.
It is easy for us, 20 years later, to say that the wretched communist system was bound to fail before the burgeoning power of the Capitalist West. But for those who lived it, It was the only life they knew. State subsidized education, State sponsored welfare, long queues for foodstuffs, cars, whose deliveries took decades… so on and so forth… May be they hated it, may be they loved it… What is important is, they lived it… They got used to a style of living, where life proceeded at its leisurely pace… There was none of this madness about time and advertising and marketing…Even our parents' generation, used to a semi-socialist Nehruvian lifestyle are today at times amazed at how "easily" we get things and how there are maddening choices and cut throat competition for everything!
This life suddenly met its full stop in the revolutions that engulfed East Europe in 1989-90. A whole lifestyle came to an abrupt end. And with this end, an entire generation that had breathed and lived this lifestyle, found itself struggling to comprehend the enormity of change that had overcome them… Most of them stayed afloat, armed with the skills that their previous lifestyle had provided them… A few went down under… Christiane Kerner was one of them… She lived for her Socialist homeland, and even though she personally detested it, she remained loyal and committed to it till the end came… Both for her and her Socialist fatherland.
Goodbye Lenin! along with Das Leben der anderen and Der Baader-Meinhoff Komplex are some of the best movies to watch on a country whose very existence was an aberration but which lived its life, sometimes reaching for the stars and at other times convulsed in epileptic seizures… And while we are still on the subject of the German Democratic Republic, I strongly recommend a reading of Stasiland by Anna Funder to understand better the strange but enrapturing world of the German Socialist Fatherland!
Here is to the GDR!
"Alles mit dem Volk
Alles durch das Volk
Alles für das Volk! "
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