German film is known for its tradition of serious criticism and reflection on history and politics. This tendency that comes as no surprise to Germans who have survived the upheavals of the two world wars with a calm and critical personality. Although German films have undergone some changes in the past decades, they still do not deviate from this tradition and continue to this day. Recording reality and paying attention to history are still the creative gist of the new generation of German filmmakers. Therefore, Goodbye, Lenin! should have been a natural occurrence. Throughout the film tradition of Germany, good filmmakers always look back at history with their own perspective and way. Thompson (2018) stated that Goodbye, Lenin! is in a kind of corrective to the official (capitalist) account of that historical moment, returns those fundamental wishes from the unconscious of history to the spectator’s present consciousness through the mother-son relationship. The valuable innovation of director Wolfgang Beck lies in that he does not simply describe history, but reflects the impact of historical changes on personal life. Other words, he does not describe big historical facts, but only describes the experience of ordinary people, and turns the serious subject matter into the humanized small family subject matter. By telling the story of ordinary family affection and personal growth, it moves the audience with the true feelings between mother and son, and at the same time triggers the audience to think deeply about the historical and political issues that lead to the family tragicomedy. It makes people see a German film with life and philosophy.
In commercial films, the narrative of nostalgia is usually to give a certain object reminiscability by concretizing the life experience of an individual, and then to further generalize it into the emotional structure of a certain group. The mother in Goodbye, Lenin! represents nostalgia, while the son, as the connection between reality and fiction. It highlights the contradiction of the great changes of The Times. Of course, this nostalgic ideological effect of the mother is undoubtedly an escape from reality in a sense, transferring the contradictions in reality. Film attempts to discuss the " O stalgia" is "the post-cold war era" former socialist countries will be to politicize the nostalgia of political politicization of a kind of social cultural symptom. It also is the post-communist countries rapidly occurring in the process of capitalistic a critical reflection of violence and exploitation, and at the same time, in another sense bear the new identity construction. For nostalgia for socialism is not a universal phenomenon in the former socialist countries. Different political stances and specific political and social modes of the countries in which they live will lead to different attitudes towards the history of socialism. Goodbye, Lenin! demonstrates an outstanding ability to empathetically grasp the trauma of the GDR. (Kenworthy, 2003). Historical events are the common memory of the whole people, and the film reproduces and processes the historical events dramatically, and presents a kind of absurd and comedy effect. Uecker (2007) stated that the undoubted comic effect of frantic attempts to faking, salvaging or restoring the material facade of the GDR is thus undermined by more serious concerns about the past and the present. This makes the audience, especially the people of the same ethnic group, feel more strongly offended, but at the same time have a deeper enlightenment.
Movies are "depoliticized" and "purify" the nostalgic nature of history through nostalgic narration, materializing memory into a group of concrete and universal objects that can be nostalgic at the same time. "August 26, 1978 was the day in our human society when GDR citizen Singum Jahn became the first German in space, and my own family was divided......". Under the background of the grand historical narrative personal daily narrative serious from the past history of political pattern, the historical political onto the back of the ordinary people in daily life. In the light of human nature has covered the strong ideological color, the audience attention shifted to changes to the social changes impact on their personal lives. The film skillfully integrates history and family, and connects the destiny of the country and the destiny of the family, and even inlaid historical figures and family figures together. In other words, by confining great history to personal experience and processing it into a kind of historical film, it is told in a way that makes it harmless content that is permissible, or at least not incompatible with the prevailing ideology. This deftly sidesteps sensitive historical issues and walks in a grey area and also is the advantage of films, but also the value of historical films.
Goodbye Lenin! longing for the past has the function of creating a shared national identity as a model for resisting Western takeovers and triumphalist rewriting of East Germany's future (Kenworthy, 2003). In fact, after the euphoria of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the social problems of the reunification policy, in the form of a West German takeover of the East, gradually became apparent. The results of a series of political and economic policies made East German residents realize the gap between reality and ideal, and began to miss East Germany. That also is a nostalgia for East Germany's high employment rate, low poverty rate, harmonious community atmosphere and socialist culture. "Goodbye Lenin!" is considered to be the concentrated embodiment of O stalgia. Kenworthy (2003) mentioned that “Goodbye, Lenin!” turns into a rewriting of history itself because it readjustment of reality to incorporate the isolated symbols whose otherness is thus tamed. In the film, the son explains the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and other important historical events in a completely opposite way in order to make the mother, who has been in a coma for eight months and missed the major historical moment of German reunification, no longer be stimulated. In the end, in the son's "TV news", East Germany lasted in an ideal socialist state until the mother's last moment. The film's use of East German symbols and "fake news" is mostly comic, but also explicitly nostalgic, with a bogus new presidential inaugural address at the end that is both sensational and thought-provoking.
The film allows the audience to understand the reasons why people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union yearn for the socialist era. The film "Goodbye Lenin!" allows people to look at history dialectically from the perspective of God and reflect on it objectively.
Kenworthy, O. (2003). Deconstructing Ostalgia: The national past between commodity and simulacrum in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin!. Journal of European Studies, 41(2), 161-177. doi: 1177/0047244111399717
Thompson, S. (2018). Benjamin, Badiou, Becker: Messianic Time and the Event in Goodbye Lenin and Madison. Minnesota Review, 91(1), pp. 92-110.
Uecker, M. (2007). Fractured families – united countries? Family, nostalgia and nation-building in Das Wunder von Bern and Goodbye Lenin!. Journal of Contemporary Film. 5(3), doi: 0.1386/ncin.5.3.189/1
