Good bye Lenin!

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
Original title Good bye Lenin!
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 2003
length 121 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
JMK 6
Rod
Director Wolfgang Becker
script Bernd Lichtenberg
Wolfgang Becker
production Stefan Arndt
Katja De Bock
Andreas Schreitmüller
music Yann Tiersen
camera Martin Kukula
cut Peter R. Adam
occupation

Good bye Lenin! is a German feature film by Wolfgang Becker from 2003. Combining family and contemporary history, it tells of a woman who “slept through” the turnaround in a coma , and her son, who, in order to protect her, pretends to wake up , she still lives in the "old" GDR .

The tragic comedy with Daniel Brühl and Katrin Sass in the leading roles was premiered at the Berlinale 2003 and was extremely successful at home and abroad, both with audiences and critics. Good bye Lenin! received numerous prizes, including the Felix and the French César , both in the “Best European Film” category.

action

Spreewald pickles : one of Christiane's favorite dishes
Sigmund Jähn : GDR - cosmonaut , first German in
space and Alex's idol since childhood
Lenin Monument in East Berlin ; stood there until autumn 1991

The Kerner family of four from East Berlin led an intact, apparently happy life - until the summer of 1978 when their father left for the West . His wife Christiane reacts with severe depression . After eight weeks of psychiatry , however, she returns “like transformed” to her children Ariane (13) and Alexander (Alex, 10). From then on she takes on her role as a mother and elementary school teacher - and not least as a socialist , by tirelessly trying to do good in everyday life. On October 7, 1989, as a “meritorious personality”, she accepted an invitation to the ceremony on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the GDR in the Palace of the Republic . At the same time, Alex joins a demonstration for more freedom, which the People's Police brutally dismantle. By chance, Christiane sees Alex being arrested and he sees her collapse . Released from the clutches of the Stasi , Alex learns that his mother has suffered a heart attack and is in a coma - with a completely uncertain prognosis.

The fact that the Wall falls soon afterwards , that the old party squad abdicates and that capitalism is finding its way into East Berlin is something that she learns just as little about the changes in her children's lives. Ariane, herself a mother, gives up her studies in favor of a job at Burger King and falls in love with her boss Rainer, who moves in with the Kerners. Alex's PGH is being wound up; As a trained television fitter, he is taken over by a company that sells satellite dishes and draws its employees together to form east / west pairs. Alex firmly believes in his mother's recovery. The fact that he visits her almost every day is also due to the young Russian nurse Lara, with whom he falls in love. When they first kissed, in June 1990, Christiane wakes up unexpectedly. Doctors warn that even the slightest excitement can be fatal for them. To protect her, Alex whispers that she collapsed while shopping on a hot October day. And when she wants to go home, he spontaneously promises to fulfill her wish - convinced that he will be able to shield her better there from reality, which he believes she would not be able to cope with.

The illusion he creates begins with the fact that he is restoring a room in their already westernized prefabricated apartment for his bedridden mother so precisely that she realizes that “nothing has changed”. GDR products that she loves - especially Spreewald gherkins - that have disappeared from the range of goods are faked by fishing old packaging and glasses out of rubbish bins, cleaning them and filling them with western content. He realizes your wish to watch TV with the help of his new colleague Denis, an ambitious amateur filmmaker, who gets him videos of old GDR programs - especially the current camera - as well as a player. However, there are major complications. Once Christiane saw a huge Coca-Cola banner unfurling on the opposite wall of the house , another time she dared to venture out onto the street on her own initiative and met not only cars but also newcomers from the west. As a result, Alex and Denis shoot fake news programs in which they reinterpret reality more and more boldly. Ariane and Lara urge Alex to finally pour the mother some pure wine.

A trip to the family dacha offers a good opportunity to do this, but Christiane anticipates them by confessing her own life lie: her father's flight from the republic was discussed with her; she should comply with the children legally, by means of an exit application ; But then she was afraid of the repression that was to be expected, especially of the fact that her children could be taken away from her. Her ardent wish to see her "dear Robert" again is fulfilled: Ariane finds the letters from him with his West Berlin address; Alex looks for him there and encourages him to come, especially since Christiane is dying after a second heart attack. Alex escapes the fact that Lara previously informed her about the changed political situation. So he staged a last big coup for his mother and made another fake with Denis , in which he resigned Erich Honecker as chairman of the State Council and replaced him with Sigmund Jähn , his personal idol since childhood. For this role he wins the taxi driver who drove him to West Berlin and who looks so confusingly similar to Jähn. His inaugural speech culminates in the declaration that the GDR has opened its borders, followed by pictures of the actual fall of the Berlin Wall, which are cut to fit the comment that the German citizens are now pushing into the GDR. Alex also considered the real fireworks at midnight, which celebrated the reunification of the two German states on October 3, 1990, by manipulating the tear-off calendar beforehand: It shows October 7, the 41st anniversary of the GDR.

Christiane dies three days later. In the presence of a small group of mourners, Alex shoots her ashes in an old toy rocket from the roof of the house into the night sky - convinced that he has maintained the illusion for his mother until the end of a country "in which she had believed" and which is nevertheless "in." Reality never existed like this ”.

Emergence

For director Wolfgang Becker, work on Good Bye, Lenin! in summer 1999, for scriptwriter Bernd Lichtenberg almost a decade earlier. The turning point , which Lichtenberg experienced as a New West Berliner and as young as his protagonist Alex, he shaped into a story that already contained much of the later film, but ended up “in the drawer” for a few years: “I had the feeling that the time is simply not yet ripe. ”This only changed when he saw Becker's Das Leben ist ein construction site . Particularly taken with the mixture of the sad and the funny, which he himself had in mind, he believed he had found the right addressee for his idea. He was not mistaken. "Suddenly there was this energy," recalls producer Stefan Arndt , as he recorded the 5-page synopsis together with Becker , "and we knew exactly that we could tell everything we absolutely wanted to tell."

It wasn't an easy path to the finished script. It is said to have gone through no fewer than six versions plus a few interim versions. Lichtenberg wrote the first on his own, after extensive discussions and in close contact with Becker, who did not spare criticism, especially when it came to the characters. Here they were arguing about something that was equally important to them, as both wanted to tell the story “from the characters”. The most radical change was experienced by Denis, who is changing from a main character to a helper character - from an overweight young Turk who is about to be married off against his will to a hobby filmmaker who is as boldly imaginative as it is practical. After completing the script , the final stretch of which the scriptwriter and director mastered together, their collaboration was not over; During the shoot, Lichtenberg was "heavily involved" whenever Becker wanted further changes.

Casting

In the case of the main male characters, it is noticeable that they were consistently cast “crosswise”: “ Ossi ” plays “Wessi” and vice versa. Especially for the protagonist Alex this was by no means planned; he should at least be a Berliner , but Becker couldn't find a suitable candidate. When he then cast Daniel Brühl , he immediately recognized his great advantage: He was unreservedly believed that he was committed to his mother as Alex in the script does. A language coach taught him the lack of dialectic coloring. The fact that the nomination of the protagonist was dragging on was also the reason why his “partner” had to wait so long for Becker's final yes, even though she had been chosen as Alex's mother much earlier: Katrin Sass . Becker wanted to know beforehand whether the “chemistry” between the two was right. A good team, he notes in this context, is fundamentally more important to him than the “ideal cast” of one or the other individual role.

Becker is also committed to working with children. You just have to find “the right ones”; He is correspondingly thorough when casting. Casting Ariane's very young daughter Paula was, however, a particular challenge. If she only performed briefly as a baby, she is naturally often involved as a toddler. In terms of labor law alone (more than four hours “in a row” are not allowed for children), this poses problems. So the decision to cast Paula with twins who could take turns was a wise solution. In addition, the “amiable” nature of both girls lifted the mood on the set. The casting of the taxi driver "Sigmund Jähn" was not easy either. Becker would have loved to win the “ original ” personally for it, but he got nothing more than its approval to double it. When a suitable actor was finally found in the Swiss Stefan Walz , you had to adjust your face even further with a full mask and speak your text with a voice imitator who spoke the Vogtland dialect.

Filming and post-production

The shooting, scheduled for August 2001, was not a good one. Two weeks delay, caused by the serious illness of a leading actress, resulted in two difficulties that made the work a permanent act of strength and balance: the ensemble, which was often decimated by contractual blocking periods, and the exceptionally bad September weather. The lament about rainy days and cold nights runs like a red thread through the memories of those involved. Again and again the filming had to be broken off or canceled entirely. Key scenes were not spared. Filming at the dacha was prevented once by rain, another time by a pack of wild boars that had destroyed the natural wildness of the garden. The disaster was even bigger than the eponymous scene. At the first appointment there was a storm in addition to the rain, at the second the helicopter did not start! This time a third attempt was not possible for financial reasons alone; for this, the Karl-Marx-Allee , one of the main traffic arteries, would have had to be completely closed again and freed of anachronisms in painstaking detail work.

Becker is almost unanimously described as demanding and “perfectionist”. He confesses himself to it and justifies it. Consistency in all external appearances (clothing, interior and exterior) is important to him so that the narrative illusion is not disturbed. No effort or expense was spared to achieve this. For example, labels of GDR products were reprinted; Among other things, the honeycomb façade of the " Tacheles ", which opened outwards in the shape of a honeycomb, was elaborately reproduced, a hot spot in the year of the fall. Katrin Sass also expressly praises Becker's knowledge of the GDR: "He had taken in things that I had long forgotten myself - and I remembered them again just because of him." Nevertheless, like Daniel Brühl, she felt the shooting as "very, very exhausting "and describes Becker as follows:" [He] is always 100% involved, follows his line, concrete and precise, obsessed with his work and his vision. He wants to make the best possible film. That went to the core: As an actor, you have to be part of it, whether you can still do it or not. I prefer such directors a thousand times to those who always find everything wonderful, but in the end a film comes out that is immensely disappointing. "

After 58 days, on November 30, 2001, shooting was finished - for the time being. In the following year, a lot had to be re-shot. Apart from that, Becker had three problems that were particularly troublesome. The first was the digital creation of the missing title scene. Becker definitely didn't want her to appear artificial or even ridiculous. Strangely enough, it was particularly not possible to make Lenin look like Lenin ! This difficulty was overcome only after four months. The next one was that the first cut version of the film was 164 minutes, also in Becker's own assessment, "far too long". He decided to bring in a third party - his friend, the director Tom Tykwer - and left the field himself for three days. The narrative main lines emphasizing and consciously gaps letting created Tykwer and Becker's film editor Peter Adam a shortened by about 60 minutes version, which came very close to the final. The last hurdle taken late was the film music. When Becker finally found an artist in Yann Tiersen who suited him, he didn't let anyone hear from him for months (he was on tour) and, while he was composing, nobody got close to him. It was not until Christmas 2002 that the director was able to get an idea of ​​the result of the work during the recording in the Paris studio. The music was done on point and exactly as he wanted it to be!

Plot and film locations

The film leaves Berlin only once - for the trip to the dacha. Otherwise, despite the frequently changing locations, the action takes place within a radius of just a few kilometers. Its centerpiece is the Kerners' 79 sqm prefabricated apartment. Originally it was supposed to be on Leninplatz , opposite the monumental monument of the same name , and the film was supposed to end with the terminally ill Christiane seeing it from the window as it was being dismantled - hence the title. But since this only happened in autumn 1991, it did not fit into the ultimately immovable period of action, and it was decided  to move the apartment to Berolinastraße 21 and the title scene to Karl-Marx-Allee .

The episode on the Datsche was shot in Finsterwalde , the interior shots in Kerner's apartment in the studio. Most of the other scenes were shot at the original locations. In addition to Karl-Marx-Allee and "Alex", these were places like the former Coca-Cola headquarters in Lichterfelde , which appeared in Billy Wilder's film One, Two, Three , the Wuhlheide leisure and recreation center , the underground club " Bucket " or the flea market at the Nordbahnhof . In the 12 years since the fall of the Wall, many had changed a lot. Undoing or concealing this for at least one day of shooting (graffiti, western cars, etc.) required a lot of effort, patience and concentration. Some things could be retouched digitally afterwards , sometimes you had to evade, as for the demo on October 7, 1989 or for Christiane's hospital stay at the Charité .

Shape and style

The opening credits of the film are economical. Eight postcards, pale, typical of the time, through which the camera slowly “drives”, set the mood for the center of the action, the area around “ Alex ” in socialist East Berlin , and a few pseudo-amateur shots by hand camera of the protagonist of the same name . They convey the impression of a carefree, happy childhood in a somewhat established (“Our Datsche , Summer '78”) and nonetheless system-compliant family (Alex's cosmonaut T-shirt with the imprint CCCP / DDR ).

In the following 5-minute prologue , which spans about a year, Becker takes the viewer seamlessly on the “emotional rollercoaster ride” he intended. The shock: Exactly at the moment when Alex's happiness seems complete with Sigmund Jähn's start into space , the family idyll is suddenly destroyed by the loss of the father who fled the republic (supposedly out of pure selfishness), and not enough: Alex and Ariane also have to to cope with the loss of their (supposedly only out of grief) completely silent mother. The resolution eight weeks later: transformed as if by magic, but also visibly through the love of her children, she returns to life and does everything to create a new idyll, not by retreating into private life, but on the contrary through social (and at the same time system-stabilizing) commitment.

The main part of the film, which began ten years later after a radical cut, first of all shows two modes of representation with which the end of the GDR could have been shown: the satirical and the realistic . The opening picture on the morning of October 7, 1989 is satirical: Alex is drunk on a bench after an apparently boisterous night - in front of the background of red banners with hollow phrases and the pompous military parade for the 40th anniversary of the GDR. The contrast between the hero and his homeland, between the staged external presentation and the actual attitude towards life could hardly be greater. The film could continue in this style, but the plot (which requires Alex to reflect and identify instead of further distancing) and the basic attitude of the director personally (“The form of satirical know-it-all does not interest me”).

The sequence in which the Berlin demonstration on the evening of October 7th is shown is committed to realism . “That's how it was!”, According to Becker's wish, those involved at the time should be able to say. Some of them also acted as extras themselves, following a radio call . "The Stasi had done a great job," said Becker when he looked in vain for archive material that documented the demo. So he felt compelled to recreate them at great expense. The only film available to him was that of a French camera team. The result is a comparatively long and very authentic-looking sequence. She alone, according to the audio commentary by three leading actors, already refute the judgment of some critics that the film is "transfigured" and " nostalgic " because the brutality with which the emergency services act against the peaceful demonstrators is "clearly visible" in it.

After Alex's mother fell into a coma , the film quickly approaches “ Plot Point One” (which Becker believes will be reached in Good Bye, Lenin! Much later than usual in American narrative cinema). This is the moment when the hero is faced with a decision-making conflict. For Alex, it's how he deals with the doctor's threat that “any excitement, even the danger of excitement” could endanger his reawakened mother's life. His decision to protect you personally by shielding you and lying to you comes spontaneously and without considering the consequences of this. It quickly becomes clear that these have a lot of comic potential, so Good Bye, Lenin! from here on at the latest it is clearly recognizable as a tragic comedy . Some stylistic devices also contribute to the character of the film.

Voiceover

The voiceover was a discovery for screenwriter  Bernd Lichtenberg . Suddenly, accompanying the first picture (Sigmund Jähn in the space capsule), the sentence “In 1978 the GDR was world-class and our family went down the drain”, and it was immediately clear to him, “what an additional tone this stylistic device made “Could get into the movie. It was particularly important for the narrative of what happened historically in the eight months in which Christiane was in a coma. Since this is a lot, but the actual film does not begin until afterwards, the voiceover helped a lot to tell the historical and family upheavals of the time of change “more erratically and quickly”, “in a kind of laconic time-lapse”.

Alex's 50 or so voiceovers serve as explanation and transition as well as ironic distancing and understatement . In connection with the demo on October 7th, he speaks of an “evening stroll” and when the Wall came down of a “collection of old materials”, whereby one of the phrases from the GDR ( propaganda ) language use that Alex often uses also flows in here. In some cases it alludes to more topical issues from the time of the fall of the Wall (“Satellite dishes made our landscapes bloom”), in some to both. So in the "While many were already loudly mistaking themselves for the masters of tomorrow [...]", both the fair of the masters of tomorrow (the GDR counterpart to the West German " Jugend forscht ") and Franz Beckenbauer's (false) prognosis, the German national football team for men will be “unbeatable” for years after reunification .

irony

Irony is probably the most frequently used stylistic device in film. It is increased and refined until the end. Alex's sense of humor is inherited from his mother, who mainly acts it out in her input . The film presents three of them, the last in detail, which Christiane dictates from her bedside - according to Becker, one of the audience's favorite scenes. That may have been due to particularly sharp-tongued formulations (“In any case, there are no such small and square people living in the capital”), but certainly also to the fact that the scene is coded twice : while the spokeswoman believes it is again a GDR product , the listener (and with her the viewer) knows that this time the criticism hits an article from the West. Another example of double coding is the congratulations that Christiane's party comrade Ganske has ready for her birthday: “And that everything will be the way it used to be.” She relates it to her state of health, the viewer to the GDR nostalgia of the Well-wishers, who represents the type (or at least a variety of it) of a "staunch comrade" that quite a few wanted to see in Christiane.

The film does not stop at "simple" double coding. He reached the peak of multiple ironic breaks on the eve of German reunification in Christiane's hospital room, when the fake new GDR head of state gave his fake inaugural speech in a fake news program. At that moment, the viewer also knows that even the pseudo-real person promoted to this office, “Sigmund Jähn”, is forged. For her part, Christiane now knows that she should be deceived, but does not let Alex know. (Becker re-shot the scene especially to show the viewer her double game.) In any case, the one who believes he is holding all the strings in his hand - Alex - is ultimately the one who decides on true success what he really wanted to achieve is wrong; the deceiver thus becomes deceived himself.

Archival material

For director Becker, screenwriter Lichtenberg and cameraman Martin Kukula , a large part of the preparatory work consisted of viewing documentary archive material . As “ Wessis ” they felt obliged to do so, but wanted to use a lot for the film anyway. Everything that was highlighted was particularly welcome in order to keep the pace of the narration high. Archive material and voiceover complemented each other functionally. In terms of content, there was often an attractive tension. In at least one case, the archive images were also able to put a question mark behind Alex's statements. What is meant are photos of Prenzlauer Berg from the late GDR that appear to the viewer as if they were "from 1930"; they run parallel to Alex's closing remarks and counteract possible nostalgia ("The country my mother left was a country she believed in").

The archive material has in Good Bye Lenin! but not only the function of countering the subjective comments with “objective” images. It also shows how pictures are made and how the truth can be turned upside down. In the fakes , in which Denis and Alex mix fact and fiction, documentary and self-staged film material, the viewer is shown how images can lie, precisely where they least expect it: in news programs. Becker himself avowedly made use of the fact that images can be manipulated in his film: in order to make the west-east direction of the flow of visitors claimed in the fakes appear credible, he only selected archive material in which people move from left to right .

Film music

The film music is the third stylistic device that essentially directs the narrative speed of the film. Noticeable, for example, is the acceleration in the sequence that leads to the faked inaugural address of “Sigmund Jähn” or the crescendo that Christiane accompanies when she secretly steals from the apartment and meets the “flying Lenin ”. It goes without saying that the film music controls the moods and feelings of the audience. Becker carefully decided in favor of Yann Tiersen , the composer of the film music for The fabulous world of Amélie , and describes his style as follows: He could write “wonderfully melancholy music”, who have “nothing burdensome, nothing depressing”, you can still see “a piece of blue sky”.

Leitmotif

Bernd Lichtenberg came across Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space, while researching the archive material. From this developed, little by little, the leitmotif of the film: space travel - or, further abstracted, flying in general, rising from the ground, standing up for ideals.

As a film character, Jähn functions as a double “bracket”: He marks the cinematic narrative arc and becomes a father substitute and childhood idol for Alex - a thoroughly believable one, as Jähn was one of the few people in public life in the GDR who achieved real popularity. The grown-up Alex then chooses a Jähns doppelganger who happens to be the taxi driver who will bring him, the prodigal son , back to the prodigal father. Alex's commentary on the geographically short route within Berlin ("How through the vastness of the cosmos [...] we landed in Wannsee ") illustrates the "galactic" dimension of their separation and also suggests that Robert Kerner's escape from the republic is also a kind of "space flight" was with which he preserved his ideals.

For Christiane Kerner, the GDR spaceman, in the form of the Sigmund-Jähn double, is no less important. According to Alex, she had chosen “our socialist fatherland” as a “substitute”, and as a substitute satisfaction, advocating the ideals of everyday human coexistence. When she hears words from the mouth of the new GDR head of state presented by Alex like “Socialism, that means approaching the other, living with the other”, that corresponds exactly to her wishes, and from her spontaneous comments (“Isn't that wonderful ”,“ madness ”) speaks both of gratitude to Alex and her explicit commitment to these ideals.

With Jähn's flight into space, historically guaranteed, the little sandman also comes into play - an identification figure from the cultural heritage of the GDR like no other. Each of his three short appearances is related to space travel. As a “young rocket builder”, Alex, following his idol, lets the sandman rise into the sky in his home-made rocket; his love affair with the Soviet student sister Lara reflects the cosmic wedding of the sandman with "Mascha" staged by Jähn in the space capsule; and finally it is a television appearance of the little sandman as a cosmonaut, who for Alex literally becomes a “door opener” to his still childish half-siblings and thus to the new world of his father in West Berlin.

Fireworks from various occasions and in particular the “flying Lenin”, which seems like a heavenly phenomenon to Christiane, enrich the leitmotif additionally. In addition, there is the way in which certain events are presented: The lovers Alex / Lara are noticeably often on top of buildings or high up in them, and in Alex's imagination, his comatose mother “circles” like a satellite human activity on our small planet and in our even smaller republic ”. In the final scene everything runs together again in picture - the pioneer rocket with Christiane's ashes rising from the roof of the Kerner skyscraper into the night sky - and the word: “Somewhere up there it is now floating and maybe looking down at us. And sees us as tiny dots on our little earth. Just like Sigmund Jähn back then. "

Movie quotes

The ones in good bye, Lenin! The movie quotes contained therein   are worth mentioning simply because earlier script versions had even more of them. In favor of concentrating on the main narrative thread, the ones that show the video tinkerer Denis as a visionary film were dispensed with . In these scenes he “cites” films that did not even exist at the time and those with Good Bye, Lenin! have the idea of ​​manipulated reality perception in common, like Truman Show or Matrix . What is left of this in the finished film is the T-shirt alluding to the Matrix that Denis wears when he explains a quote he created to Alex - from the famous cut from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , which turns a primeval bone into a utopian one Transformed spaceship. Denis' version is not quite as bold; he turns a bridal bouquet into a wedding cake.

Good bye Lenin! quotes Kubrick's cut once before, when - when jumping from the prologue to the main part, which spans 10 years - the pioneer rocket in Alex's hands mutates into a beer bottle. The reference to a second Kubrick film is even clearer: when Alex, with Denis' help, prepares his mother's room to the way it used to be, this corresponds in style ( time lapse ) and accompanying music (overture from the opera Guillaume Tell by Gioachino Rossini ) exactly a bed scene from a clockwork orange . Becker himself mentions another film quote ( François Truffaut's The Man Who Loved Women ) at the moment when Alex's eyes are fixed on the beautiful legs of the nurses, and in the scene when his hero sees a human-sized chick walking through a department store, Becker quotes his own previous film Life is a construction site . Two key scenes from Good Bye Lenin! deserve special attention due to the intertextual references.

One of these scenes concerns Alex's first news falsification, which is necessary because his most elaborate falsification of reality, his mother's birthday party, ends in a fiasco. Ironically, on the only facade that Christiane can see from her bed, a huge advertising banner for Coca-Cola is unfurled. To make this plausible for her, the two “counterfeiters” Alex and Denis are shooting a scene in a location that movie buffs recognize as the main location of Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three : the former West Berlin headquarters of the US beverage company. Becker not only cites the location (including perspective and almost identical framing ), but also the content of Wilder's comedy : the German-German division that is particularly evident in Berlin, absurdly comical confusion in this city and Coca-Cola as a symbolic product of capitalism (which both manipulators declare in their fake as originally socialist invention).

The second key scene is the film's title. What initially meant a multiple failure of the cinematic plans (the actual Lenin monument was only dismantled later, the helicopter flight with a Lenin head made of paper mache had to be canceled twice), ultimately turned out to be an advantage in terms of greater artistic freedom: with Karl-Marx-Allee A symbolic location in East Berlin was chosen and the statue of Lenin could be modeled on the computer as desired. Last but not least, the allusion to Federico Fellini's The Sweet Life became even clearer. Specifically quoted is the figure of Christ hanging on a helicopter , which flies with outspread arms over the catholic but morally “rotten” Rome . Applied to Becker's film, this means nothing other than that, along with Lenin, the leading figure of socialism (and with it the idea and social order?) Now abdicates. The computer-generated gesture of the statue is interpreted in different ways: as if Lenin extends his hand to Christiane, who looks up at him in disbelief, to say goodbye (Good Bye), or as if he is pointing in the direction history has now taken (West).

reception

Premiered Good Bye, Lenin! at the Berlinale 2003 . It ran in the competition for the Golden Bear , but only won the Blue Angel , which was awarded for the best European film. In German cinemas started Good Bye, Lenin! just four days later, on February 13, 2003, in other European countries almost without exception in the same year, overseas mostly in the following year. The first broadcast on free German television took place on March 6, 2006 on Arte .

National

The German feature section featuring the world premiere of Good Bye, Lenin! at the Berlinale, initially judged mostly reserved. This is borne out by the scores collected on filmspiegel.de through reputable papers such as FAZ and ZEIT : two times “worth seeing”, six times “ambiguous”, one time “uninteresting”. The verbal judgments by critics “from the East” were even more negative: “The GDR is an object of speculation” ( Jana Hensel ), “thoroughly messed up” ( Renate Holland-Moritz ), “poor”, “monkey theater” and “public messing” (Anke Westphal). One of the few praising voices came from Gunnar Decker ( Neues Deutschland ): “Wolfgang Becker, the Westerner, is making a multi-layered film about the psychology of the East. About our misconceptions and real dreams. I am grateful for this film because it is full of unsentimental accuracy. Only then does poetry become possible. Finally an all-German East film that breathes freely. "

The film reviewers had Good Bye Lenin! at least not thanks to its impressive start in German cinemas: on the first weekend 375,474 viewers and third place, seven days later 502,201 visitors and thus first place - a position that the film defended in the following four weeks. After going to the cinema, viewers stated that they had gone into the film with wrong ideas; They had expected a "teenage movie to laugh at" and instead saw a touching film that reconciled the generations and addressed East and West equally. (Compared to Sonnenallee , which was much more popular in the east than in the west, the number of visitors for Good Bye, Lenin! Was equally good everywhere.) Politicians also reacted: At the invitation of State Minister for Culture Christina Weiss , around 250 members of the Bundestag (across all Parties) to show the film together on April 2, 2003 at the East Berlin Kino International - a unique process up to that point. In its year of publication, Good Bye Lenin! in Germany alone more than 6 million visitors, which meant first place among the domestic productions; In the overall balance since the beginning of the audience count in 1968, it is among the ten most successful German films.

With the success with the audience, the tenor of the film criticism also changed. Thus, at the end of February, the Welt's Feuilleton editorial team decided to visit the fully occupied Berlin cinemas to get a (second) picture. Instead of constant laughter, one registered being affected and moved, one saw a "rather sad, fairly general film about the bursting of life plans", a "film about a common German history" and even trusted it to have the power of solidarity between Germany East and West: "It promotes a sense of togetherness when you can meet in the middle, some suffering from the loss of their socialist utopia , others from the erosion of their economic boom." Thomas Brussig , author of Heroes Like Us , one of the first successful turnaround novels, said the film hit a nerve by filling a blank space: “A farewell to the GDR, just like saying goodbye to a person, a mourning - that simply didn't happen in the autumn of 90. It was such a restless, forward-rushing time, there was no more room for anything like sentimentality. "Nevertheless, the reservations that the film had encountered at the beginning came to light again and again when it was defended against them:" Good Bye Lenin! is not a homesick retro film ", explained Claudia Rusch , who, like Brussig, had processed her GDR origins as a writer ( My Free German Youth )," but a subtle and loving piece about people in an exceptional situation. If anything, it tells of what this state has left behind in the lives of its citizens. "

International

Good bye Lenin! was sold in a total of 64 countries. He was commercially successful almost everywhere (under very different conditions), received numerous prizes and also broke one or the other record. In Great Britain, for example, Good Bye, Lenin! as the first German film a gross profit of over a million pounds. “The funniest film from Germany in a century,” said the Times in a country where a lack of humor is one of the media's standard prejudices against Germans, and the Sunday Times added : “ Good Bye, Lenin! is the best British film that has not been made by the British since Billy Elliot . ”In Spain, Good Bye, Lenin! around half a million visitors, in France even one and a half; there the film stayed in the top ten for eleven weeks and ran in some cinemas for 32 consecutive weeks. Skepticism on the part of the critics had to be good bye, Lenin! not overcome in France; Instead, the film was widely praised for "the subtle complexity and historical intelligence" ( Jorge Semprún ), as "happy and melancholy, sometimes bitter" ( Le Monde ) and as "a sarcastic but not nostalgic comedy about the failures of German reunification " ( Liberation ). Good bye Lenin! said that in our neighboring country a special “state of mind” was encountered and understood as a piece of “mourning work” about the demise of the socialist alternative, to which many in France also believed - this is another reason for the extraordinary response.

This phenomenon is viewed in a similar way by critics from the former " Eastern Bloc ". Western audiences have long believed in the myth of socialist happiness, said Tadeusz Sobolewski ( Gazeta Wyborcza ) and criticized the film for granting viewers the “right to nostalgic self-deception”. At the Russian premiere of Good Bye Lenin! , which took place at the Moscow Film Festival in the Pushkinsky , the largest cinema in the city, the title scene, in which the statue of Lenin hovers over the screen on the rope of the helicopter , is said to be a "sigh" in which 1500 people are full occupied hall. The partly euphoric reviews that followed also brought the film a considerable success at the box office. In countries that were still ruled by communists , the film could at best be shown at festivals: in Hanoi , even that was not possible, which is why the Goethe-Institut there stepped in with an in-house screening; in Shanghai only with the condition that the title be changed to “Bianqian” (“change”); There were riots in Havana because a good thousand visitors were still crowding into the fully occupied hall.

In the US, Good Bye Lenin! made success particularly difficult. The authorities classified the film as "politically and morally questionable"; the rating R for “ Restricted ” meant that minors under 17 years of age were only allowed to see it when accompanied by an adult. It contained “communist violence”, it said in the explanatory memorandum, and “post-communist nudity”. The reviewers, too, felt compelled to subject the film to a political test of conscience. Only a few thought it was artistically successful; several times people wanted Billy Wilder as a director. Star critic Roger Ebert said, Good Bye, Lenin! is full of "allusions that we do not understand properly". David Denby ( The New Yorker ), on the other hand, understood the "community" that Alex gathered around him to preserve his lie as exemplary of the "communal humanism that the system should actually have generated on a national level". As in Germany, the theatrical release in the USA was not given precedent praises in the columns. Still, Good Bye, Lenin! at the box office on the first weekend ($ 57,968) and ranks 6th overall among the most successful German films in the USA.

Later reviews

Are there reasons to be taken seriously for the discomfort that speaks from the initial reception by German film reviews? Kerstin Cornils answered this question in 2008, five years after the publication of Good bye, Lenin! , in her essay "The Comedy of Lost Time". She first points out that the film takes place in that "forgotten year" ( Stefan Arndt ) between the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification, when the resistance of the German left against the "no alternative" path to the reunified German state was strongest later repressed the “left objection” by letting Alex create the “temporal relaxation room” that the left longed for with the staging of his “private GDR”. The initial discomfort of the German feuilleton critics about Good bye, Lenin! According to Cornils' thesis, there is a good reason: Although the film offers a left-wing utopia, it stops halfway. From her point of view, the comedy should have dominated until the end. The fact that the German feature pages did not articulate this just as clearly is evident to her from the skepticism that it has especially towards German comedy films. This leads to a misunderstanding of the potential inherent in the genre in general: it focuses on “the excluded, the other, the system alternative”. This is also the point at which Cornils attaches her criticism of Becker. He had missed the chance to depict Christiane “consistently as the representative of a utopian GDR”; by making the end of her life dependent on the end of the GDR, the comedy is displaced by the tragedy in his final tableau.

In 2010 the Deutsche Welle ranked Good bye, Lenin! among the 25 classics of German film history. In the explanation it says: “With good bye, Lenin! director Wolfgang Becker created perhaps the ultimate film about the turnaround in Germany. In contrast to other films, it does not mock the East and it does not make fun of the GDR residents, who are backwoods from the western point of view, in a cynical way. Rather, Good bye, Lenin, is beaming! a loving warmth and humanity that was particularly well received by the audience at the time - in the west as in the east. Good bye, Lenin! is also an extraordinary comedy about a son's love for his mother. Daniel Brühl and Katrin Sass are ravishingly funny in their roles, then again touching, even tragic. Wolfgang Becker's film shows, in a very cheerful and melancholy way, that the GDR, although it was a socialist dictatorship, was a home for tens of thousands of people that was suddenly taken from them when the Berlin Wall came down. "

The critic Karen Krizanovich sees this film as more than “excellent slapstick and wonderful satire”: While the film does not claim for a second that life was good in the GDR, it shows what is in the “Welle of capitalism "has been lost. For the protection of the mother from reality by Alex, the critic suggests that Alex's wish to protect himself from unpleasant truths (that his father fled from the East) is responsible.

Gross profit

The commercial success of Good Bye Lenin! is out of the question. The estimated production cost of 4.8 million euros is offset by a total profit of 79.3 million US dollars. Of this, 41.5 million, or a good half, went to German cinemas. In comparison, Das Leben der Andere (2006) achieved around a quarter at the German box office, with a similarly good overall result worldwide (77.4 million). The success of Sonnenallee (1999), Good Bye, Lenin! in terms of topic and genre is closer, largely limited to Germany.

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
Metacritic
critic
audience
IMDb
country Population
in millions
Box office income
in USD million
Entrances
in millions
Germany 83 41.45 6.57
Austria 9 0.96 0.14
Switzerland 8th 2.29 0.24
Netherlands 17th 1.88 0.24
France 67 8.65 1.54
Spain 47 2.91 0.51
United Kingdom 66 2.02 0.21
Italy 60 1.74 0.42
Rest of Europe 4.0
European Union as a whole 10.63
United States 330 4.06 0.65
rest of the world 9.36

Awards

In 2003, it was Good Bye, Lenin! the big winner of both the German and European Film Awards with eight and six awards respectively. The following year he received the most prestigious film awards in France and Spain with a César and a Goya . Also in 2004 was Good Bye, Lenin! at the Golden Globes as Best Foreign Language Film nomination and went as the official German contribution to the "International Academy" into the race, but was not considered by the jury. Below is a selection of important national and international awards and nominations.

National

International

interpretation

Family and contemporary history

"I seem to be interested in family topics, that runs through all of my films," states Wolfgang Becker, who became known for children's games and Life is a construction site , in which he also brings the audience closer to the historical circumstances in which they play. Good bye Lenin! links family and contemporary history even more closely through the beginning and end of the main plot. It is about the protagonist's year of death , which runs parallel to that of the GDR - for both of them beginning on October 7, 1989 and ending almost one year later to the day.

If the end of the GDR is precisely fixed, the "beginning of the end" is located differently by historians; it is not uncommon for them to go beyond the fall of the year (for example when Biermann was expelled from citizenship in 1976). Good bye Lenin! begins with such a turning point years ago: the father's flight from the republic. Christiane's confession reveals his real motivation: a conflict of loyalty, as was expected of many GDR citizens. His professional advancement as a doctor he was supposed to cheat by joining the party . He chose to be true to himself. The consequence he drew was illegal flight; the price he paid for it, loss of family. (Not negligent; he had every reason to believe in his wife's loyalty and love; he waited and hoped for several years, wrote letters that Christiane hid unopened.) The film also shows him 12 years later: with a new family, a large circle of friends , obviously professionally successful, that is, “arrived” completely in the West. People like him, with his intellectual capacity and moral integrity, the GDR has lost and expelled in large numbers. In sum, this bloodletting can also be seen as the “beginning of the end of the GDR”.

Christiane is in no way inferior to her husband in terms of moral integrity, the film leaves no doubt about that. Nonetheless, the prehistory told in the prologue raises questions that cannot be fully understood. At first sight, her motive for not applying to leave the country and staying with the children in the GDR seems clear : Left to her own devices, her fears of the threat of massive resistance (as a non-celebrity, as a teacher) and reprisals (including child abduction) won out ) the upper hand. She even contemplated suicide during her eight-week depression , as she later confesses to the adult Alex. But why then your “flight forward”, your alliance with the “socialist fatherland”? The film tells nothing about their past. Is it your nature that calls for activity? Does she believe that this is the best way to protect herself and the children? Is she playing something for them and the public? Is she fooling herself with her submissions that raise her self-esteem, but which the state also exploits through awards (which she neither rejects nor seems to find pleasant)? Whatever motivates Christiane's commitment - it is not morally questionable.

Nevertheless, it ultimately pays a high price for it. On the one hand it is the long-repressed burden of the culpable separation from her husband that strikes back at some point, on the other hand the partial reality blindness into which she has maneuvered herself through her niche existence. The latter catches up with them first. When she got into the counter-demonstration on the evening of October 7 on the way to the official state act, it was apparently not just the shock at Alex's arrest that led to her collapse, but the horror at the brutality in general with which the emergency services The name of the state power that celebrates itself a few meters away and wants to be courted by it, too. The second and fatal heart attack overtook Christiane a year later, after she finally talked her big life lie from her soul. Of course, there is no turning back for her, only the consolation of a last reunion with her husband.

Her children Ariane and Alex, at the beginning of the fall of the 20th century, most likely represent the middle of GDR society at that time. Ariane is studying and is already a mother, Alex works in a PGH . Your attitude is more of a wait and see; They neither follow the defiant commitment of their mother nor the constantly growing entourage to the west. With the fall of the Berlin Wall at the latest , the siblings will develop a little further apart. Ariane shakes off her GDR past, including studies, and takes the first job that comes with her in order to be able to live well. She reluctantly joins Alex's elaborately staged retro tour. In the final part of the film, when the father reappears and the real reason for his flight from the republic comes to light, what is hidden and repressed is revealed: some impressive scenes give an idea of ​​how deep her fatherly love must have been and how deep the injury her loss - a loss that the realization that it was based on error cannot bring back.

Alex is a “completely normal guy”, says Daniel Brühl, who “in this phase of his life doesn't really know what to do with himself”. Even after the fall of the wall, it still looks like this at first. It's up to two women - his mother, whom he looks after, and Lara, with whom he experiences his first love - that he doesn't quite go with the flow. This is not based on a political conviction, just like his later coup to want to save his mother by "saving" the GDR. Apart from that, Alex is also making a mistake: He sees in his mother a “firm comrade”, one who faithfully follows the party line. That is by no means, emphasize Wolfgang Becker and Katrin Sass unanimously, who frequently encountered this misunderstanding in film reviews and audience discussions.

Alex only realizes what his mother is really about when his coup threatens to fail and he empathizes with her more and more. Ultimately, he then invents a GDR with an intellectual climate that it would have wished for (and so did he) - a country that reflects on the ideals with which it once started and the Christiane in their “niche”, so well it went, tried to live. As the creator and narrator of the story, he manages to preserve these ideals. However, he fails to save his mother from death, which means that the film retains its tragic foundation until the end. But also the ironic tone, since it is Alex himself of all people who misses what he actually succeeded in doing: he thinks she died happily because she failed to see through his lie .

Family and media lies

“A fictional film,” Becker quotes a well-known bon mot , “is actually nothing more than lies 24 times per second.” Therefore, “the forgery within a forgery” is once again “something very special”. Good bye Lenin! is essentially about forgeries, deceptions and lies, both open and hidden. Family and contemporary history are also intertwined here, as it is the external circumstances that make liars of people of moral integrity. Alex starts out with a casual lie (he tells his mother that she collapsed while standing in line in front of a department store ). Because it works, he builds a whole building of lies, and because it is constantly threatening to collapse, he has to keep inventing new lies and make all the people involved his accomplices. Over time this becomes independent and becomes a kind of “sport” (“You have to overcome yourself once”, he tells his father, “after that it's very easy”). Since Alex acts with humane intent, he has the sympathy of the viewer and ultimately even of the lied to himself: When Christiane sees through him, she plays along with him and allows him the joy of savoring his "success". "Lies as a medium of love" - ​​that was what attracted Becker to the story. Does that include Christiane's life lie?

Unlike Alex, Christiane basically only lies once. She shies away from the confession of truth promised to her husband ( application to leave the country ) out of well-founded fear of the greatest possible evil (child deprivation). However, there is only one alternative left for her to dissuade her teenage children from discovering the truth. Her lie must rule out any doubt, so she tells them Robert stayed in the West because of another woman. The desired effect occurs (“We never spoke of Father again”). But also the accepted price. Christiane's lie cuts both the external and the internal ties that bind her children with their father; by making him a liar, it takes away their fatherly love. The long-term consequences for them are even more serious. It is no coincidence that she begins her confession with the apparent exaggeration "I have lied to you all along". It must have felt that way to her. First the complete silence during the 8 weeks of severe depression , then the years of temptation from the letters that she did not open and yet knew behind the kitchen cupboard. She now sees her decision as her “greatest mistake”, albeit in anticipation of death. Her lie ends tragically , whereas Alex's lie seems mostly funny .

But both family lies have something in common. On the one hand, the liar constructs an illusory world and ensures that nothing penetrates from the outside that could endanger them; on the other hand, he builds on the fact that the liar cannot check its truth content himself - be it through a wall , an illness, or (what in both cases) due to actual or consciously forced immaturity. This also characterizes the media lies, the Good Bye, Lenin! demonstrates. Alex comments on its emergence from the off as follows: “Truth is a dubious matter that I could easily adapt to my mother's usual perception. I just had to study the language of the 'current camera' and spur Denis' ambition as a film director. ”The GDR news program (the“ sandman for adult GDR citizens ”), which, in Becker's assessment, is primarily due to the fading out of the important things and the fluff was shaped by insignificant things, the two media manipulators Alex and Denis soon only served as a foil. Your own productions are bold, but anything but boring. Not unlike the submissions that Christiane writes, they create a “cheerful poetic realm” for themselves . The downside is that it also plays down the original.

Memory and Ostalgie

In the summer of 2003, the wave of Ostalgie on German television reached its peak. With broadcast formats such as "Meyer and Schulz - the ultimate East Show" ( Sat.1 ), "Ein Kessel DDR" ( MDR ) or "DDR Show" ( ZDF ), private and public television companies vied for the favor of supposedly GDR - nostalgic viewers . That the makers of these shows made the success of Good Bye Lenin! wanted to stabilize is obvious. It is questionable whether they did justice to the film itself. The marketing concept that the distribution company of Good Bye, Lenin! followed in the previews , but provided the "Ostalgie suspicion" already strongly encouraged. The cinema foyers have been transformed into a "GDR panopticon", decorated with GDR flags and utensils from everyday life; Under the motto “Good Bite, Lenin!”, Spreewald cucumbers (Christiane's favorite dish?) were distributed as “The cucumber for the film”; In the CineStar Jena you could pay with GDR marks, in Görlitz you could go to the cinema for free if you wore an FDJ blue shirt or NVA uniform, in Braunschweig you walked through a barrier at the entrance and a paper mache wall .

The secondary texts also contributed to Good Bye Lenin! got into a questionable light from the start. This is suggested by a study specifically aimed at the ostalgia discourse, which Petra Bernhardt presented in 2009 under the title “Play it again, Erich?”. She comes to the conclusion that hardly any of the 40 text contributions that she analyzed deals adequately with the film plot and the protagonist . Instead, prejudices are often placed on the characters - Alex as a “typical Ossi ”, somewhat dreamy and with a lack of self-confidence, Christiane as “a figure who is true to the line up to the point of neurosis ”. On the one hand, what is actually at stake, the family history, is out of focus, and on the other hand, what is only the background comes into focus. Hardly any text can do without the use of the term Ostalgie or nostalgia , and almost everywhere, especially in the contributions from non-German-speaking countries, would be “short-circuited” to “Remembrance of the GDR” as a thematic focus, whereby the interpretations, as the film does, there was a long gap between an “evocation of the old system” and its “entombment”. In summary, after evaluating the texts, Bernhardt sees her thesis confirmed that the FRG tends in the historical discourse about the GDR to the “ hegemonic reflex” of “ dismissing memories aside from the dictatorship of historical experience”.

Of course, there can be no talk of a film narrative “apart from experience of dictatorship history” - on the contrary. Because it is clearly the political conditions in the GDR that lead to the GDR family at the center of it being irretrievably torn apart. In addition to this argument, that alone is good bye, Lenin! relieved of the "suspicion of Ostalgie", it should be pointed out that the film basically only touches on life in the real socialism of the GDR. By far the largest part of the plot takes place in the turning point of 1989/90, in other words, in a time of transition, and what is happening in Christiane Kerner's room in the way of "GDR life" is staging. Only the first quarter of an hour shows something that can be described as GDR reality, and more than half of it belongs to October 7th with the dramatic upheavals within the family, which are triggered again by those outside (suppression of the demo, Alex ' Arrest and stay in the Stasi prison, Christiane's heart attack and coma ).

What opposes this and perhaps triggers feelings that glorify memories of the GDR seems rather vague in comparison, depends heavily on the viewer and could only be determined more precisely through a broad audience survey. Two arguments should also be mentioned here. First: The few opening minutes, which highlight a clearly beautiful GDR childhood world, all belong in the area of ​​meaningfully spent leisure time in community ( dacha , pioneer railway , young rocket builders, Neptune festival , choir singing), whereby the film avoids the moral index finger (Caution: not free of ideology). As a result, it can very well be that the little that is beautiful adheres more strongly because it connects with what has been experienced or also desired. Second: The no less beautiful, catchy film music already sets a mood in the opening credits (not broken by any counter- motive ) that arouses melancholy, and in the epilogue possibly superimposes the sober look at the images that show the reality of a dilapidated country. There are also familiar melodies. The Sandman's evening greeting sounds once , and three times “ Our Home ”, a pioneer song that all GDR children of elementary school age got to know - always presented in the film without the tendentious closing lines (which in one case is visible Christiane's decision ) and also melodious at least twice. The “heart” of the film is this song, according to the audio commentary of three leading actors, and - Wolfgang Becker said that during the casting , many mothers cried when they listened to their children auditioning “Our Home”.

background

  • The Russian writer Olga Slawnikowa published a novel with a similar plot (“The Immortal”) in October 2001. After the publication of Good Bye, Lenin! she considered plagiarism charges , but dropped them. By the time her novel was published, the script was already finished and filming was in full swing.
  • The basic idea of ​​the film - a terminally ill person is largely isolated from the environment and only supplied with filtered news to keep excitement away from her - also brings to mind the last two years of Lenin's life , who was or was tied to bed under comparable conditions. The motives of his “protector”, Josef Stalin , only outwardly resembled those of Alex.
  • Chulpan Khamatova, who played the Soviet student sister Lara, was the first to be committed. A serious illness of hers delayed the start of shooting; the progression of her pregnancy was not easy to hide at the latest when the filming was due. Since her German was not good enough to be able to improvise, she learned her part by heart - with the disadvantage that it was only colored by her accent and seemed too “correct”. Becker therefore decided to first translate her text into Russian and then, word for word, back into German, with typical syntax and other grammatical errors.
  • Jürgen Vogel has the only double role in the film , although that was not planned in one case (he stood in for a missing extra and is in the forefront of those imprisoned at the demo on October 7th) and in the other not absolutely “necessary “(Disguised as a giant chick who, like in Beckers Life is a construction site , walks through a department store).

Film bug

In order not to disturb the narrative illusion, Becker was very careful to avoid even the smallest film mistakes . That was no small challenge, considering that reconstructing a largely lost world of things and at the same time was of elementary importance for the plot. Expertly supported by an experienced crew - above all set designer Lothar Holler - it was nevertheless largely mastered. In the case of the relatively few that were recognized as inconsistent, a distinction must be made between a) errors named by the authors themselves, b) errors not named themselves, c) intentional and d) supposed errors.

  • a) Daniel Brühl is left-handed, but the actor, who plays Alex as a child, paints right-handed. - One of her father's letters that Ariane finds behind the kitchen cupboard is addressed to Christine Kerner instead of Christiane. - Alex and Denis' colleague, who uncorked the champagne bottle after winning the German semi-final at the 1990 World Cup, wears a shirt from the 1994 World Cup. - The nightly view from Kerner's apartment is anachronistic ; At the time there was neither the modern GT6N train shown there nor a tram route at all.
  • b) The "fake" Sigmund Jähn wears the uniform of a colonel when he takes office as Chairman of the State Council , the real one was already Major General at the time . - Even though Christiane was ventilated with a tracheostomy during her long coma , she has no scar on her neck when she wakes up. - When Alex chauffeurs ex-director Klapprath to his mother's birthday party, a Mazda6 , which was only built from 2002, can be seen for a brief moment in the roundabout between other vehicles . - Miscellaneous that did not exist at all or not in this form at the time of the action: Red wine from the Blanchet brand ; Packaging bags from “ Jacobs Krönung”; Shopping bag from the Berlin supermarket chain Reichelt ; the " Bankgesellschaft Berlin " on the Berolinahaus .
  • c) Among the newspapers shown, which reported the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 10, 1989 , there was a deliberately forged one from the French Liberation ; that day, a Friday, she did not show up because of a strike.
  • d) The "Digital Rain" -style T-shirt that Denis wears once is based on the film Matrix and is explained by the original intention of the script to show him as a cinematic visionary; In a scene that fell victim to the cut, he explains to Alex one of his film ideas (“The Planet of the Forgotten”) with a plot similar to that of Matrix .

literature

Books

  • Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-3-89602-431-2 (with complete script, interviews and texts, film photos and making-of).

Scientific contributions

  • Seán Allan: 'Good Bye, Lenin!' Ostalgia and identity in the reunited Germany. In: German as a foreign language Journal. No. 1, 2006, pp. 46-59.
  • Malte Behrmann: The success of 'Good Bye Lenin!' in France . In: Cinema and Games . ibidem, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-89821-469-9 , pp. 72-129 .
  • Petra Bernhardt: Play it again, Erich? A hegemony-oriented reading of 'Good Bye, Lenin!' as a contribution to the ostalgia discourse. In: Wolfgang Bergem, Reinhard Wesel (Hrsg.): Germany fictitious. German unity, division and unification as reflected in literature and film. Lit, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-9713-0 , pp. 89-130.
  • Kerstin Cornils: The comedy of lost time . Utopia and patriotism in Wolfgang Becker's 'Good Bye Lenin!' In: Jörn Glasenapp , Claudia Lillge (ed.): Die Filmkomödie der Gegenwart (=  UTB . No. 2979 ). Fink, Paderborn 2008, ISBN 978-3-7705-4495-0 , p. 252-272 .
  • Matthias Dell: The cinematic east. The image of the GDR in German cinema. In: DEFA Foundation (ed.): Apropos: Film 2005. The 6th year book of the DEFA Foundation, Bertz + Fischer Verlag Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-86505-165-3 , pp. 140–151.
  • Jennifer M. Kapczynski: Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in “Berlin is in Germany” and “Good Bye, Lenin!”. In: The Germanic Review. Volume 82, No. 1, 2007, pp. 78-100 (English).
  • Kathrin Lange: Postmodern Discourse and “Ostalgie” in the cinema - study on the films “Sonnenallee” and “Good Bye, Lenin!” In: Kulturation 1/2005.
  • Michael Töteberg: Welcome, Lenin! The international career of Wolfgang Becker's 'Good Bye, Lenin!' In: DEFA Foundation (ed.): Apropos: Film 2005. The 6th yearbook of the DEFA Foundation. Bertz + Fischer Verlag Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-86505-165-3 , pp. 173-187.

conversations

  • Dominik Kamalzadeh: involuntarily weird! The GDR as a hit with the public: Wolfgang Becker's turning comedy 'Good Bye, Lenin!' Interview with Wolfgang Becker, director of 'Good Bye, Lenin!' In: Der Standard , May 9, 2003.
  • Ralph Geisenhanslüke: Film construction east. Interview with Lothar Holler, set designer for 'Good Bye, Lenin!' In: Die Zeit , December 22, 2003.

Reviews

Articles relevant to the film

Teaching materials

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release for Good Bye, Lenin! Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , January 2003 (PDF; test number: 92 694 K).
  2. Age rating for Good Bye, Lenin! Youth Media Commission .
  3. Dieter Wunderlich: Book Tips & Film Tips , accessed on October 22, 2017.
  4. Quotations from: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  5. a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Good Bye, Lenin! Audio commentary by Wolfgang Becker. DVD, X Edition, 2003.
  6. a b c d Bernd Lichtenberg: A family story. In: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  7. Stefan Arndt: The forgotten year. In: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  8. a b c d e "The pain goes, the film stays - the making of". Good bye Lenin! , Exquisit Edition, 3 DVDs, 2004.
  9. a b "Lenin learns to fly - a documentation about the creation of digital effects". Good bye Lenin! , Exquisit Edition, 3 DVDs, 2004.
  10. a b c d "That's exactly how it was - a documentation about the extensive research work on the script and film". Good bye Lenin! , Exquisit Edition, 3 DVDs, 2004.
  11. a b c Katrin Sass: A tightrope walk. In: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  12. ^ "Deleted Scenes - Conversation between Wolfgang Becker and Tom Tykwer about cinematic narration and the problems of shortening". Good bye Lenin! , Exquisit Edition, 3 DVDs, 2004.
  13. a b "J'adore le cinema - the making of about the recording of the film music with the composer Yann Tiersen". Good bye Lenin! , Exquisit Edition, 3 DVDs, 2004.
  14. a b Krizanovich, Karen: Good Bye Lenin! (2003) . In: Schneider, Steven Jay, Ueberle-Pfaff, Maja (ed.): 1001 films that you should see before life is over. Selected and presented by 77 international film critics. Twelfth, updated new edition. Edition Olms, Oetwil am See 2017, ISBN 978-3-283-01243-4 , p. 901 .
  15. Book Release: Tacheles by Stefan Schilling , Urban Spree website , accessed on August 15, 2019.
  16. a b c Michael Töteberg: Life is a construction site. In: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  17. a b c Good Bye, Lenin! Audio commentary by Daniel Brühl, Florian Lukas and Katrin Sass. DVD, X Edition, 2003.
  18. ^ Klaus Hoeltzenbein: Beatable for years. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , July 16, 2014, accessed on August 11, 2019.
  19. a b c d e f Kathrin Lange: Postmodern Discourse and "Ostalgie" in the cinema - study on the films 'Sonnenallee' and 'Good Bye, Lenin!' In: Kulturation 1/2005, accessed on October 15, 2019.
  20. a b c d Petra Bernhardt: Play it again, Erich? A reading of “Good Bye, Lenin!” Based on hegemony theory as a contribution to the Ostalgiediskourse. In: Wolfgang Bergem, Reinhard Wesel (Hrsg.): Germany fictitious. German unity, division and unification as reflected in literature and film. Lit, Berlin 2009, pp. 89-130.
  21. Jana Hensel: The GDR becomes an object of speculation. In: Welt am Sonntag, February 9, 2003, accessed September 30, 2019.
  22. a b c d e f g h i j Michael Töteberg: Welcome, Lenin! The international career of Wolfgang Becker's 'Good Bye, Lenin!' In: apropos: Film 2005. The 6th yearbook of the DEFA Foundation. Bertz + Fischer Verlag Berlin, 2005, pp. 173-187.
  23. ^ Gunnar Decker: Change of place, change of time, change of world. In: Neues Deutschland , February 11, 2003, accessed on September 30, 2019.
  24. s. also Tagesspiegel from April 4, 2003, accessed on September 1, 2019.
  25. Eckhard Fuhr, Elmar Krekeler, Michael Pilz, Hanns-Georg Rodek: Only in wrong there is truth. In: Die Welt , February 26, 2003, accessed September 30, 2019.
  26. Maike Schiller: Unity and the offside trap. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , May 5, 2003, accessed on September 30, 2019.
  27. Claudia Rusch: Right feelings in the wrong state: memories of the GDR. In: Die Welt , October 2, 2004, accessed on September 30, 2019.
  28. Jürg Altwegg: Winner: “Good Bye, Lenin!” In France. In: FAZ , September 13, 2003, accessed on September 30, 2019.
  29. Roger Ebert: Good Bye, Lenin! , March 26, 2004, accessed on September 30, 2019.
  30. David Denby: Women and the system. In: The New Yorker , February 29, 2004, accessed September 30, 2019.
  31. a b Kerstin Cornils: The comedy of the lost time. Utopia and patriotism in Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin! In: Jörn Glasenapp, Claudia Lillge (Hrsg.): The film comedy of the present. Fink, Paderborn 2008, pp. 252-272.
  32. ^ "Good Bye Lenin!" , Deutsche Welle , August 26, 2010, accessed on October 4, 2013.
  33. Figures here and in the table taken from: Lumière, database on film visitor numbers , IMDb database for box office results and Box Office Mojo , accessed on September 1, 2019.
  34. a b lives at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed September 1, 2019
  35. a b [1] at Metacritic , accessed on September 1, 2019
  36. Good Bye, Lenin! in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  37. According to imdb , the screenplay was awarded the prize “for its potential”, although the film production was not yet completed at that time.
  38. Holger Witzel: The fairy tale of the Ostalgie. In: Der Stern , September 2, 2003, accessed on August 24, 2019.
  39. Daniel Brühl: A completely normal boy. In: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  40. Becker quotes Michael Haneke , who for his part ironically reversed Jean-Luc Godard's saying that film is “24 times truth per second”. See: "Lies 24 times per second". In: ray Filmmagazin, 10/2012, accessed on September 16, 2019.
  41. Alex lies out of love for his mother, and this out of love for her children, it says in several secondary texts, for example in Seán Allen: "Good Bye, Lenin !: Ostalgie and identity in the reunified Germany".
  42. Film booklet of the Federal Agency for Civic Education
  43. ^ Michael Töteberg: Adieu, GDR. In: Michael Töteberg (Ed.): Good Bye, Lenin! Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003.
  44. a b c IMDb.com
  45. a b c Good Bye, Lenin! "Inter / Kosmodus": background information etc. DVD, X Edition, 2003.