With "Goodbye Lenin," director Wolfgang Becker tells the story of German reunification and the liberation of the penned-in citizens of the East as tragic-comedy patterned after Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle, the man who falls asleep in an English colony and wakes up in a whole new country. By turns funny, instructive, and sad, "Goodbye Lenin!" does an admirable job at breathing life into a tumultuous time in the country's history.
The German Rip van Winkle is Christiane Kerne (Katrin Sass), an East Berlin single mother and commited socialist who falls into a coma on the eve of the demonstration that, causes the corrupt regime to change without a shot being fired. Unconscious, Christiane misses the fall of the Wall, the celebrations of her liberated comrades, and the arrival of capitalism in the form of new money and (in a nod to Billy Wilder's "One, Two, Three,") Coca-Cola trucks. Her daughter Ariane (Maria Simon) takes a job at Burger King and son Alex (Daniel Bruhl) falls in love with mother's beautiful Russian nurse, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova.)
When Chirstiane wakes from her coma and doctors warn that the shock of the GDR's demise might kill her, Alex and Ariane decide to keep the reunification from her: old clothes and furniture are procured, Ariane puts her baby daughter into the plastic diapers common under the old system, and Alex races to procure newly hard-to find brands of pickles and coffee. As they try to shield Christiane from cigarette commercials and the sound of the neighbor's brand new satellite TV, they become the producers of an increasingly complex fake world surrounding their sick mother's bed.
