Review of Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) by Patrick M — 18 Nov 2010

This is what political satire should be all about. Funny but has a serious side about what life was like living under socialism in the German Democratic Republic. Alexander Kerner joined a political rally for a free press.

Beaten up and arrested by police thugs, his socialist mother sees all of this happening right before her eyes and has a heart attack in the middle of the street. For eight month, she is in a coma. Her doctor has given her a bleak diagnosis.

During those eight months, the Berlin wall fell. Capitalism triumphed and the Leninist-Bolshevik perversion of socialism finally fell into the scrap heap while she was in a coma. When she finally wakes up, her doctor, Dr.

Wagner, sits Alex and his sister Ariane down for a talk, telling them that any level of excitement could cause her to have another coma and possibly even death. Knowledge of her beloved socialism failing and capitalist triumph in Germany would surely cause her to have another heart attack.

Alex rushes his mother back to their apartment and tears down anything which has to do with capitalism and only puts stuff up which is socialist in nature: portraits of Che Guevara hang on the wall. Books authored by Lenin are on the bookshelf.

And he uses deception on a grand and comedic scale, hiring his tech savvy X-TV co-worker Dennis Domasckhu to creat fake news broadcasts for her to watch on the TV. He would take the labels off the capitalist products and proceed to tape over it with vestiges of the socialist ones, such as Spreewald Pickles, Mocha Fix, and Globus Green peas.

But two funny and very memorable scense stick out to mind. One scene is where the mother Christiane gets out of bed to play with her granddaughter Paula and proceeds to leave the apartment. She walks onto the streets to find merchandise which are clearly symbols of capitalism.

Hot pink lamps. Cars being sold on the car lot. And a helicopter taking away a recently broken statue of Vladimir Lenin. That scene was hilarious! Another memorable scene was the final and fake newscast which was Alexander and Dennis's finest hour.

In this newscast, Erich Honecker had resigned as General Secretary of the Communist Party and was to be replaced by Cosmonaut Sigmnund Jahn. Jahn was a highly decorated cosmonaut in Socialst Germany but under capitalism, he was reduced to driving a cab.

So in an ingenious move, Alexander hires Jahn for one final news deception. He gives a speech as he is promoted to the post of General Secretary and promises to make life better for all Germans under Socialism.