Censorship in Good Bye
Lenin !
The German tragicomedy
Good Bye Lenin, released in 2003, is a movie about censorship. The storyline is
based around a family in the GDR part of Berlin around the fall of the Soviet
Union and the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Censorship can be defined as the
suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be
considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically inconvenient as
determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or
institutions.
Not only is censorship
restrictive but Butler argues that censorship is a
productive form of power: it is not merely privative, but formative as well. I
want to distinguish this position from the one that would claim that speech is
incidental to the aims of censorship. Censorship seeks to produce subjects
according explicit and implicit norms, and this production of the subject had
everything to do with the regulation of speech. By the latter, I do not mean to
imply that the subject is narrowly liked to the regulation of that subject's
speech, but rather to the regulation of the social domain of speakable
discourse.
The first notion of
censorship in the movie starts with the prologue, where the oldest son Alex follows
how the first German, Sigmund Jähn enters into space. Especially in the context
of Cold War and competition between the West and the East, or the USA and the
USSR, technology to enter space was an important aspect of censorship by both
parties. More than the weapon or economic race, both powers used space missions
and the race to be the first on the moon as an important part of their propaganda of who was best. The race to be the first on the moon and the
adjusted discourse and information towards the people produced a feeling of
unity and superiority. At the beginning and the end of the movie, this
identification with Socialism and therefore USSR for the main character, Alex,
was mainly based on the discourse around entering space.
But after the prologue
a different side of the Communist regime is showed in a scene where the father
of Max has fled to the West, leaving the mother depressed. When she recovers
and comes home she devote herself to the ideology of Socialism. Here comes
another notion of censorship as a productive form of power, as the mother
called Christiane becomes part of the formative form of censorship in her role
as teacher and member of the Socialist club, therefore becoming an intermediary
between the Censors (socialist regime) and the Censored (children).
In the scene where the
actual story starts, groups of people protesting people walk among the streets
for free press, which is an repressive and direct form of censorship. Alex is
among them and meets his future girlfriend Lara. This call to stop the direct censorship is violently stopped by the police, the political instrument to
enforce law and order by the institution in power. While Alex is being arrested,
his mother sees this and gets a heart attack. When Alex is released she is in
coma and the doctor doesn’t know if she will come back.
While the mother is in
coma the USSR implodes, the wall falls and Germany is reunited. The main
discourse is that the free liberal west now comes into the conservative and suppressed east to modernize Berlin. After all these event, around eight months,
the mother wake up from her coma. After initial happiness, the doctors tells
Alex and his sister Ariane that the mother is still very weak and the situation
dangerous. She could suffer another fatal heart attack after another shock.
Alex realized that the discovery of current events of unification of Germany
would lead to her death, and therefore comes up with a plan to censor his mother
to protect her.
He creates a scene
where all the flows of information misled the mother that she still live in the
GDR, the conservative socialist regime without capitalist take over from the
West. While successful for a long time through various scenes, the deception is
becoming more difficult after the mother recovers and slowly starts to explore
more than her room. The interesting part of the main part of the movie is the
inception of Max his ideas and connection with Socialism, resulting into the censoring
of the GDR as Max would see it. In this case Max self-censored his information
about the GDR towards his mother. The initial notion of censorship used by the
Socialist regime, that off space flights and the race about the moon is
reflected through the censored GDR of Max. He meets Sigmund Jähn who is now a
taxi driver and in his last reflection of the GDR before his mother dies is how
Sigmund Jähn becomes the new leader of the USSR, based on his perspective of
somebody who went to space. In the last scene, where the mother had died happy
and deceived, they send her ashes into space with a self-made rocket.
In the movie Good Bye
Lenin, several forms of censorship were used. The most common use of
censorship, restrictive censorship was seen at the police arrests and the
restricted flow of information Max allowed his mother to be seen. The productive
form of censorship was seen in how the USSR used space technology as a
discourse as a regulation of speakable discourse, and how this influenced the
perspective of the main character Max. The film starts with how Max is inspired
by this entering of space, and it also ends with the ashes of the mother being
send to space. Throughout the movie an evolution of this self-censoring around
space missions and Sigmund Jähn as the new supreme leader of Socialism.
Müller, Beate. „Censorship and Cultural Regulation:
Mapping the Territory.“ Critical Studies. Censorship and Cultural
Regulation in the Modern Age. Ed. By Beate Müller. Amsterdam & New
York: Rodopi, 2004, 1-31.
Bernays, Edward. Propaganda ig publishing Brooklyn New York 1928
p.159
Eisman, Gene. and Hardesty,
Von Epic Rivalry The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race
National Geographic Washington DC 2007 p.xxv
Image : http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/space_prop016.jpg
