Ostalgie and Spreewaldgurken
Much of the humor in "Goodbye, Lenin!" relies on "Ostalgie," the paradoxical nostalgia for life under the socialist system, and requires some memory of the events or detail involved. Alex's frantic search for Spreewaldgurken will be funnier to anyone who's ever eaten one. Part of this particularity made "Goodbye, Lenin!" a big financial success in Europe, where it won the Berlin Film Festival and the German Film Awards. If you remember cheering at Rudi Völler during the 1990 soccer World Cup, you are a shoo-in for this film, but if you remember the Trabant only as the weird car U2 hung from the stage during their "Achtung, Baby!" tour, you're bound to miss some of the jokes.
The good news is that this might not matter: only about a third of "Goodbye, Lenin!" is a comedy. As funny as some of the set pieces are, the film also attempts to work out what the German Democratic Republic meant to its citizens, a question that was all but ignored in the rush to reunification. "Ossis," as the former citizens of the GDR are called, were simply supposed to be happy about their annexation, their freedoms, their Westmark. "Ostalgie" is the voice that says, wait a minute. Yes, we lived under an opressive system--but that life was the only kind we've ever known. It was ours, and now it's gone.
The fake socialist republic Alex builds to protect his mother is, in many ways, the ideal Germany many Ossies might have dreamed of. Letting go of it to join the rigors of the free marketplace amounts to losing the heroes of childhood. To Alex, this does not mean Lenin, but Sigmund Jähn, the first East German in space whom the reunification reduced to the obscurity of a taxi cab. "Goodbye, Lenin!" explores these issues while telling a story that's both funny and emotionally involving.
