GOOD BYE, LENIN! AUFWIEDERSEHEN GDR On the Social Life of Socialism

GOOD BYE, LENIN! AUFWIEDERSEHEN GDR On the Social Life of Socialism

In the seventeen years since its collapse, socialism has become the object of significant historical curiosity, memory making, and contestation. In addition to more public sites like the Museum of Communism in Prague (next to a McDonald's) or the Budapest Statue Park and House of Terror (to name just a few examples), the cultural landscape of post-Socialist memory also includes private exhibitions of Socialist material culture or Communist kitsch (depending on the context and the eye of the be- holder), published personal memoirs, mass-mediated images in film or television, commemo- rations, silences, and an ongoing dynamic between individual biogra- phies and collective histories-between personal narratives and public re-presentations. Of course socialism was being remade into memory from the very beginnings of its end, as new histories were created out of unsanctioned memories of the past, in emergent na- tionalizing projects, and in symbolic acts of legitimizing new states. In the realm of memory, then, socialism has had a complex and often unpredictable social life.

My aim in this chapter is to reflect upon the social life of socialism by focusing on memory and the present in a context with which I am most familiar: post-Wall Germany. In his work on commodities in cultural perspective, Appadurai has shown that the social life of things is sub- ject to longer-term shifts in value and demand. I am arguing that the same processual approach is relevant for understand- ing the production and circulation of historical memory: the social life of socialism has been, and continues to be, a process informed by large- scale political shifts, economic developments, and cultural dynamics.

My use of the concept of memory refers to practices, performances, representations, and other modes of shaping images of the past. Mem- ory, although it may be a "reservoir" of history, is not the same as history. Instead, history may be viewed as a particular configuration of historical representation-usually in written or narrative form, including "official histories" of the Socialist states-that itself is open to questions of interpretation and interpretive authority. Memory, on the other hand, is a more infinitely malleable, contest- able, interactive, and social phenomenon. Produced and constructed on a variety of fronts, memory can be personal as well as public, individ- ual as well as collective. Museums, commemorations, and monuments give an important physicality to memory, but they are not necessarily separate from history; indeed such representations may also entail in a dynamic relationship between both memory and history, between pub- lic and private.

I attempt to address these and other questions through a reading of the wildly successful German film, Good Bye, Lenin!, released in two thousand three. I am an anthropologist with admittedly no training in film theory, so I ask for readers' patience as I make my way through this analysis. But, I should add, as an anthropologist, this film is a kind of "in your face" ethnographic object that cannot be ignored. Its production and recep- tion in a post-Wall Germany still fraught with East-West tensions both reflect and constitute historically specific negotiations, discourses, and debates about the meanings of memory, nostalgia, and the politics of the present. The film also represents the apex of the post-Socialist cul- tural phenomenon known in Germany as Ostalgie, to which I shall re- turn later.

Virtually Existing Socialism

Good Bye, Lenin! is the story of an East German family during the tu- multuous year of the Wende ("turning point," the term used in refer- ring to the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall). The mother, Christiane, is a devout and active party loyalist who has been deeply committed to the Socialist state since the departure of her husband for West Germany in nineteen seventy-eight. Eleven years later, in October nineteen eighty-nine, she is on her way to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GDR with party digni- taries and observes her young adult son, Alex, clash with police during a prodemocracy protest march. The trauma of seeing her son among the demonstrators, combined with the shock of witnessing the brutal- ity of the regime, causes her to have a heart attack and sends her into a coma for the next eight months. While she is sleeping, the Berlin Wall falls, Eastern Germans embrace Western capitalism and consumerism, and Germany is catapulted toward reunification. Alex loses his job in the state-owned television repair service and begins selling satellite dishes, while his sister starts sleeping with a Wessi (West German) and abandons her studies in order to work at Burger King. When Christiane emerges from her coma, doctors warn her children that any unexpected shock could complicate her recovery and potentially prove fatal. Her son Alex thus resolves to recreate the GDR in her bedroom, concealing from his mother all the changes of the past eight months. Western-style Ikea furniture is hastily replaced with East German particleboard, Vene- tian blinds are pulled down and polyester curtains are put up, and the Socialist iconographic hero Che Guevara goes back up on the mustard- colored floral wallpaper. Within this seventy-nine-square-meter apart- ment, then, the GDR lives on.

Alex's efforts to make time stand still grow increasingly complicated as his bed-ridden mother's health improves. With East German prod- ucts gone from the store shelves following the currency union in July of nineteen ninety when West German companies took over distribution networks, he frantically searches for familiar goods, repackaging foodstuffs and refilling pickle jars from the recycling bin with Dutch imports to sat- isfy his mother's craving for Spreewald gherkins. He enlists friends and family members to participate in the lie: demanding that visitors wear Eastern German clothing, paying former pupils to perform pioneer songs for her birthday, and encouraging a neighbor to take dictations of Eingaben (legally sanctioned complaints) to state authorities, for which she had been well known before her illness. With the help of an aspir- ing West German filmmaker friend from his new job, Alex fabricates GDR newscasts for his mother to view on a TV that is linked to a VCR machine in an adjacent room .

The dizzying pace of change and a few puzzling encounters make it progressively challenging to continue his fantasy, but whenever his mother comes close to figuring out the truth, Alex invents a plausible explanation. The unfurling of a Coca-Cola banner on a nearby building that had been draped in a Communist Party red banner just months be- fore- a powerful visual metaphor embodying the cultural and political upheaval-is explained in the next day's fake news bulletin as being a result of a recent discovery that the formula for Coke was actually an East German invention. The presence of Westerners in East Berlin is at- tributed to a decision by President Erich Honecker to grant asylum to those disillusioned with capitalism. With his filmmaker friend posing as the news anchor, the fictitious Aktuelle Kamera report explains:

Unemployment, dire prospects for the future, and the increasing electoral success of the neo-Nazi Republikaner have moved the clearly unsettled West German citizens to turn their backs on capitalism and attempt a new beginning in the worker and peasant state.

Several months into his charade Alex realizes that the fantasy is as much for himself as for his mother, admitting that "the GDR I created for my mother was increasingly becoming the GDR that I might have wished for myself."

Indeed, Alex ultimately rewrites the end of the Cold War, casting communism as the victor. In his final fake newscast, intended to put an end to his deception by informing his ailing mother that the border between East and West Germany is gone, Alex creates a narrative in which Erich Honecker resigns and his childhood hero, the cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, assumes leadership of the party and the GDR. Alex solicits Jähn's help after a chance encounter with him (or a convincing doppelgänger) as a taxi driver one evening. While the GDR national anthem plays in the background, Jähn delivers his scripted speech in Sachsen dialect (which had become identified with Eastern Germans and mocked in the West) to the nation:

Dear citizens of the GDR: Once you have experienced the miracle of seeing our planet from the cosmos, you see things differently. ... When viewed from outer space, this is a very small country, and yet thousands of people have come to us in the past year. People whom we used to see as the enemy and who want to live with us today. ... Socialism means not to be fenced in. Socialism means approaching others, living with other people. Not only to dream of a better world, but to make it come true. I have thus decided to open the borders of the GDR.

The anchor's commentary is juxtaposed with well-known footage of nine November, with Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall and climbing up the Western side:

In the first hours since the borders opened, thousands of citizens from the Federal Republic of Germany have already taken the opportunity to visit the German Democratic Republic. Many want to stay. They are searching for an alternative to the brutal struggle for survival in the capitalist system. Not everyone wants to participate in the addiction to career and the terror of consumerism. Not everyone is made for the elbow society. These people want a different life. They realize that cars, videorecorders, and televisions are not everything. They are prepared to build a different life with nothing but goodwill, determination, and hope.

Christiane dies three days after Germany is reunified, blissfully unaware, Alex believes, of the truth. In a small ceremony of family and friends, her ashes are scattered over Berlin by the kind of rocket ship that Alex used to play with as a child, a fitting and proper sendoff for his mother, his childhood, and his country.