What Happened When the Wall Fell?

Good Bye, Lenin!, a snappy comedy and a highlight at this year's Berlinale, revives memories of an eventful year and offers an alternative history

It all happened so fast. Less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the two Germanys were one. "We talked to a lot of people in the east who said they felt like they'd been flattened by tanks. It was like a hostile invasion to them," says director Wolfgang Becker. He's talking about the research behind his latest film, Good Bye, Lenin!, which opens this week in Germany and has just nabbed distribution deals for France and Italy, Great Britain and the US.

The Good Bye, Lenin! team takes questions at the Berlinale

The comedy shot through with deep melancholic strains is also a contender in the Competition at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, the 53rd Berlinale. The story, briefly: Alex Kerner, played by Daniel Brüel, Germany's "Shooting Star" (no, really; he's just won an award by that name), is an aimless young man who joins demonstrators in the streets of East Berlin in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic. His mother (Katrin Sass) has dedicated her life to the socialist cause ever since her husband left her and the kids years ago for the West. She sees Alex get arrested and collapses. Heart attack. Coma. For eight months.

When she wakes, German reunification is all but a done deal. But the doctors say she won't stand another shock to her system, so Alex arranges to have her moved back to their old apartment - which he's turned into a sort of mini-museum of the GDR that no longer exists. Because he believes she just couldn't stand hearing that the socialist dream has ended, he frantically blocks out all news from the outside while the GDR lives on in this single room. That's the comedy part and it crackles. The darker passages, just as effective, have to do with another sort of reunification - that of the Kerner family.

But perhaps what's most interesting about all this is how much of that extraordinarily eventful year has been forgotten. "At some point evidently, a sort of stress factor set in that had the effect of people simply not being able to take in anything anymore," says producer Stefan Arndt. "You just went on living your life normally and took care of the things that had to do with you. But what really happened when? When was which election? When did monetary union set in exactly? No one remembers."

Making Good Bye, Lenin! turned into a history lesson not only for the younger actors, such as Brüel who was only 15 in 1990, but for those who actually thought they'd remembered living through the end of the Cold War as well. As Alex realizes that hints of major changes are seeping into his mother's awareness despite all his efforts to the contrary, he begins to tell an alternative history to explain the influx of westerners and their ways into the streets below their apartment: They're looking to escape the harsh conditions of capitalism and they've come to a GDR that's doing away with its walls and restrictions - a GDR that never existed in the first place, but the one Alex realizes he's always wanted.

Elsewhere

I've been covering this year's Berlinale at GreenCine, beginning with a brief history of the festival and then adding short reviews of the opening film, Chicago, and Michael Winterbottom's In This World, The Life of David Gale and Zhang Yimou's Hero and a report on Peter Greenaway's presentation of his Tulse Luper project at the transmdiale. Much more to come, too, all the way through next weekend.

The focal point of the conflict between the warmongers and the peacemongers this week has been the Security Conference in Munich. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew in just as Der Spiegel leaked news that the Germans and the French were quietly working on one more plan to avert war in Iraq.

Though the plan to beef up UN inspections isn't to be formally presented until Hans Blix unveils his report on Friday, the US has already rejected it outright. Meanwhile, out in the snow, thousands of demonstrators are trying to get their message across, the gist of which, according to the New York Times, is "Oppose War, Not US."

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/14/14147/1.html