Space Propaganda in Good Bye, Lenin !

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

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