Lie as a lifesaver - review of the film "Goodbye Lenin!"

Michaela Karasová

S1421417

Elective: Censorship and Social Transformation

Dr. Ksenia Robbe

Word count: 1051

Lie as a lifesaver

            Withholding the truth – three words which undoubtedly arouse negative connotations at first sight. Why do people lie if a situation eventually turns out to be different than they claim it to be and why do they undermine others’ trust? Understandably we shun any confrontation with manipulation, dishonesty and limitation of independent thinking whenever it is possible. However, in certain situations a lie might be regarded as justifiable and necessary in order to prevent a danger. The danger presented in the German movie “Goodbye Lenin!”, is a fatal heart attack of the main character’s (Alex) mother (Christiane). After Christiane woke up from a coma, Alex did not want to expose her to an unbearable shock, and therefore he never told her about the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. In addition, eventually Christiane’s lie about Alex’s father emerged too. While analyzing the mutual suppression of truth, the question arises: was the creation of “imagined world” by the family a right decision?

The situation after the Second World War was immensely challenging for many countries in Europe, including Germany which was divided into Federal Republic of Germany (West) and German Democratic Republic (East). Alex’s family lived in Berlin and was raised in East Germany, in one of the satellite countries of the Soviet Union. The clash between democracy with capitalism and communism with socialism contributed to a significant crisis of the nation sharing the same history and language, which was consequently separated into “two different worlds”. Difficult circumstances in the GDR also forced the father to leave when Alex and his sister Ariane were still little children, and they did not exactly understand what their country had been experiencing since the year of the division of Germany.

            After Robert’s abandonment Christiane’s life changed so dramatically that she could barely manage to continue it without her husband. She was suffering from a long-lasting mental breakdown; therefore she had significant difficulties with raising Alex and Ariane, and other relatives and friends had to help take care of her children. When she recovered and came back home, the first evidence of creating her “imagined world” is encountered in the movie. Christiane knows the reason for fleeing East Germany by her husband, but she does not reveal it to Alex and Ariane until they leave Berlin to their dacha. Both of her children were living for many years assured that Robert fled the GDR because he did not love them anymore, but in reality their family was separated due to political circumstances and Robert being blackmailed by the state officials. Christiane came to terms with the situation over time and continued her life with children under the illusion that her husband decided to live with another woman; despite the fact that Christiane was hiding the truth designedly, she got used to maintaining her version of the situation, and eventually it seemed to her as natural as for both Alex and Ariane.

            Undoubtedly, learning the truth about his father was difficult for Alex to handle. However, can we imagine a scene in which he tells Christiane about the fall of the Berlin Wall? A probability that she would manage the shock would be very low. She worked as a teacher respecting and supporting the authorities of the GDR, and the fact of the West and East having become united would be inconceivable and too overwhelming for her. At the very beginning Alex clearly expressed compunctions about deceiving his mother. In the years of 1989 and 1990 Germany experienced significant changes about which Christiane never had a chance to know. In the meantime both Ariane and Alex were arranging everything as it had been before her coma. She stayed in her room lying in bed and had no access to the reality; she could not even suppose what might have been happening outside the flat. Over time she wanted to watch television, and this was the culminating point when the creation of “the imagined world” by Alex began. Since then the whole family started living in a mythical country – neither in the GDR, nor in the FRG.

            Hiding the truth was not simple, and eventually Alex had to confront a resistance from both Ariane and his girlfriend Lara. Undoubtedly all of them felt guilty for deceiving Christiane, but both girls wanted to finally quit “the circle of lies”; they were aware that the more they would lie, the more challenging the whole situation would become. On Christiane’s birthday the first evidences of German reunification arose (Coca-Cola advertisement on the neighboring block), making her confused and suspicious. Therefore Alex – together with his friend Denis – modified old reports and also recorded his own which he was later broadcasting for his mother at home, not admitting that the economy of East Germany transferred from socialism to capitalism. He had continued on editing news until Christiane passed away, even though she had numerous chances to ascertain what had happened during her coma.

            After having analyzed the film, one might reach a conclusion that the whole life of Alex’s family was a lie. However, can we perceive it as adverse? Does “the creation of the imagined world” remind us of censorship discussed in the course? Generally the words “censorship”, “self-censorship” or “manipulation” are associated rather negatively; they are indeed present in “Goodbye Lenin!”. Christiane, Ariane and Alex had good intentions, but all of them learned changed versions of the events; children did not know the true reason for their father leaving Berlin, and mother was not aware of living in another country when she woke up from a coma. Taking the key terms discussed within the Censorship course into consideration, one can infer that the family “creates the myth through which it censors itself” (Robbe); thus “falls a victim” of self-censorship. At the end of the film Alex admitted that all the lies had made him realize that the family had imagined the world in which it had wanted to live, and he had not regretted that his mother had never learned the truth. She passed away happy in “a country she believed in (…), [and] that never existed in that form” (“Goodbye Lenin!”). Eventually all the lies proved to be “a lifesaver” for the whole family which could stay in its own reality, exactly as it wanted.

Works cited and consulted:

Good Bye Lenin! Dr. Wolfgang Becker. Perf. Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß, Maria Simon, and Chulpan Khamatova. X Verleih AG, 2003. Film.

Robbe, Ksenia. “Resisting Censorship. Polemic and Ironic Modes.” Leiden University Campus Den Haag, The Hague. 9 Feb 2015. Lecture.