It must be great to love and care for your mother as much as
Alex Kerner does in her remaining months following a heart attack. The main
part of this wonderfully heartfelt film is set in East Berlin and covers the period
before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the German reunification a year
later. As well as his mother Christine (Katrin SaB) the twenty two year old Alex
also shares their flat with his sister Ariane (Maria Simon) her baby daughter
and the baby’s father Rainer. Alex’s father fled to the capitalist side of the
wall in 1978, abandoning his wife and children. Following this traumatic family
upheaval Christine, working for the betterment of the GDR, joined the Socialist
Unity Party of Germany and dedicated her spare time to improve the lives of her
fellow socialists. But things were
beginning to gradually change and when she sees her son take part in an
anti-government street demonstration, were he gets arrested, she has a near
fatal heart attack and collapses in the road. After being in a coma for eight
months she is finally allowed home. Unbeknown to her the borders between East
and West Germany have crumpled and with the doctor warning Alex that any sudden
shock could kill his mother he decides to deceive her into believing that
nothing of importance has happened in the last eight months! With the help of his family and friends they
manage to recreate the old East Germany in her bedroom. As many of Christine’s old friends still
retain a nostalgia for a time and a country they preferred it was not difficult
to persuade them to help, Pioneer Scouts sing socialist songs to her on her
birthday, attempts are made to procure foodstuffs that existed under the old
regime including mothers favourite ‘Spreewald gherkins’ and Alex’s friend and
workmate Denis (Florian Lukas) cobbles together mothers favourite news programme
Aktuelle Kamera, some authentic and some forged, with the help of a video
player for her to watch on the TV. As
Alex explains to the viewer ‘The GDR that I have created for my mother
increasingly became the one I myself had always wished for”
 |
| Does Christine say Good Buy Lenin? |
Co-written and directed by Wolfgang Becker the award winning
Good
Buy Lenin! (2003) stars Daniel Bruhl who we have seen recently
portraying WikiLeaks former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg in 2013’s
The
Fifth Estate and the same year he played Niki Lauda in
Rush.
But it was his role of Alex that not only garnered him the European Film Award
and the German Film Award for Best Actor but gained him a lot of international
recognition.
 |
| The Pioneer Scouts help Christine celebrate her birthday. |
The film itself captures the popular imagination about East
Germany and fanned a wave of nostalgia for the former German Democratic
Republic with books and memento’s being freely available as well as a
collection of DEFA’s
films archived in a library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This is
the only study centre outside of Europe devoted to the study of a broad
spectrum of filmmaking by East German filmmakers or related to East Germany
from 1946 to the present.
 |
| The Socialist dream. |
Unlike other films that portray the socialist living
experience Becker’s film does give a more humorous look at the state run GDR
and has become the most successful Ostalgie
comedy to date.
As Daniela Berghahn
explained ‘
Good Buy Lenin! marks a
breakthrough in the establishment of a unified German film culture. It is one
of a small number of films originating in the West that look eastwards and that
speak to audiences in both the new and old federal states’
. It
was shown in more than sixty other countries and has become one of the most successful
of Germanys international cinematic exports.
 |
| Nostalgia for the past. |
Ostalgie is a German term
referring to nostalgia for aspects of life in East
Germany. It is derived from the German words Ost (east) and Nostalgie(nostalgia).
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