 "Fly away Lenin: Parallels between Berlin's and Tripura's adieu to Communism")
One of the most iconic scenes in the 2003 German classic Good-bye, Lenin! shows one of the main characters, Christiane, watching the statue of the communist leader being flown away by a helicopter. It's 1990, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and capitalist West German influences are flooding the East, which had remained in a kind of Soviet silo for 40 years. But Christiane, wandering about the streets of Berlin, is unaware of this. She has recently come out a coma, and on the advice of doctors, her son, Alex, has created a fictional East Germany for her, so as to prevent her from the shocks of the momentous tides of history.
Directed by Wolfgang Becker, the film indulges in exquisite Ostalgie. The word, a neologism, is used to describe nostalgia for an idyllic socialist past, which has become a sort of cottage industry since the 2008 global financial crisis and the more recent challenges to neo-liberalism. Last week, watching videos and reading news reports of a statue of Lenin being razed in Tripura — allegedly by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, after the party snatched the state from the Left Front that had ruled it for the past two decades — I, too, was afflicted by a sudden bout of Soviet nostalgia. Having growing up in Left-ruled West Bengal, I have communist iconography as an indelible part of my mental landscape. Watching Good-bye, Lenin! was cathartic and illuminating at the same time.
In the film, Alex, his sister Ariane, and girlfriend Lara go to extraordinary length despite overwhelming challenges to keep Christiane from discovering the fall of soviet East Germany. To begin with, it isn’t that difficult, as Christiane is bedridden. Alex sources East German products, such as the famous Spreewald gherkins, so that his mother does not tumble upon new capitalist ones — Burger King, Coca-Cola — that have started flooding the erstwhile Soviet satellite state. When she wants to watch TV, he manages to show her staged videos that he shoots with the help of his friend, Denis, an ambitious West German filmmaker.
Yet, how long is it possible to keep up such appearances? In a rather comic scene, Alex goes hunting for discarded packages of East German products in a garbage dump so that he might use them to package West German things and fool his mother. While one laughs at his predicament, one cannot help but wonder: Is the socialist way of life nothing more than these symbols? Is communism intrinsically embedded in shoes and skirts and pickles made in state-owned factories, or even in the celebratory songs of workers’ unity or the statues of Lenin and Marx in every public square? The film seems to suggest that communism is merely a performance, like any other socio-religious philosophy.
Alex and his friends are performing socialism in front of his mother. It has every aspect of any theatrical or cinematic performance: They wear clothes that were fashionable in East Germany (costume), the out-of date products they use (props), the language in which they speak (dialogue) and even the news broadcast video (cinematography). They might as well be making a period film. We must also remember that Good-bye, Lenin! is, after all, a period film. It has been criticised for indulging in nostalgia, and avoiding comment on what was essentially a brutally repressive, one-party police state. But, I would like to argue that by dramaticising the quotidian of the socialist state it suggests that socialism at its worst becomes only about such redundant markers, its philosophy forgotten or shoved under the carpet. This obsession with symbols has been described by some scholars as the quasi-religious nature of communism.
Another German film which looks at the final years of the GDR is Lives of Others (2006). In some ways, it could be described as more political, as its narrative deals directly with the state surveillance of a playwright and his actress wife. Also a period piece, this Oscar-nominated film painstakingly creates the claustrophobic atmosphere of East Berlin where even the most intimate details of one’s life were always under state scrutiny, where intrusive home searches were the rule of the day rather than the exception, and where suicide seemed like the only escape from all-pervasive surveillance. The characters and the narrative quite naturally lend themselves to the idea of performance: How to be a good citizen? How to be a good communist? Whether or not one actually believes in it, one has to keep performing these roles to survive.
Good-bye, Lenin! is also a comment on this aspect of performing a communist, albeit in a humorous tone. At the very beginning of the film, we learn that Alex’s father — Christiane’s husband — has escaped to the West leaving his family behind. The constant interrogation by intelligence agencies leads to Christiane’s nervous breakdown. When she recovers, Christiane becomes devoted to the state, a sort of activist for greater equality and socialism. Alex comments that it’s as if she was married to the state and since it was an asexual relationship there was a lot of leftover energy for indulgence in vigorous socialist singing and dance.
The missing father/husband is supplanted by the Fatherland and paternal figures such as Papa Lenin and Papa Stalin. Towards the end of the film, after the Reunification, when the real father is reunited with the family, there is no more any need to parental guidance from the state. The son has stopped playing at being a Soviet cosmonaut or a good socialist. Yet, the communist utopia has been missed but democracy has been reclaimed. In Tripura, however, the wanton violence after the election results were declared makes it difficult for one to believe that two decades of Left Rule has been replaced with a more democratic alternative. One can only wait and watch.
Directed by Wolfgang Becker, the film indulges in exquisite Ostalgie. The word, a neologism, is used to describe nostalgia for an idyllic socialist past, which has become a sort of cottage industry since the 2008 global financial crisis and the more recent challenges to neo-liberalism. Last week, watching videos and reading news reports of a statue of Lenin being razed in Tripura — allegedly by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, after the party snatched the state from the Left Front that had ruled it for the past two decades — I, too, was afflicted by a sudden bout of Soviet nostalgia. Having growing up in Left-ruled West Bengal, I have communist iconography as an indelible part of my mental landscape. Watching Good-bye, Lenin! was cathartic and illuminating at the same time.
In the film, Alex, his sister Ariane, and girlfriend Lara go to extraordinary length despite overwhelming challenges to keep Christiane from discovering the fall of soviet East Germany. To begin with, it isn’t that difficult, as Christiane is bedridden. Alex sources East German products, such as the famous Spreewald gherkins, so that his mother does not tumble upon new capitalist ones — Burger King, Coca-Cola — that have started flooding the erstwhile Soviet satellite state. When she wants to watch TV, he manages to show her staged videos that he shoots with the help of his friend, Denis, an ambitious West German filmmaker.
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Alex and his friends are performing socialism in front of his mother. It has every aspect of any theatrical or cinematic performance: They wear clothes that were fashionable in East Germany (costume), the out-of date products they use (props), the language in which they speak (dialogue) and even the news broadcast video (cinematography). They might as well be making a period film. We must also remember that Good-bye, Lenin! is, after all, a period film. It has been criticised for indulging in nostalgia, and avoiding comment on what was essentially a brutally repressive, one-party police state. But, I would like to argue that by dramaticising the quotidian of the socialist state it suggests that socialism at its worst becomes only about such redundant markers, its philosophy forgotten or shoved under the carpet. This obsession with symbols has been described by some scholars as the quasi-religious nature of communism.
Another German film which looks at the final years of the GDR is Lives of Others (2006). In some ways, it could be described as more political, as its narrative deals directly with the state surveillance of a playwright and his actress wife. Also a period piece, this Oscar-nominated film painstakingly creates the claustrophobic atmosphere of East Berlin where even the most intimate details of one’s life were always under state scrutiny, where intrusive home searches were the rule of the day rather than the exception, and where suicide seemed like the only escape from all-pervasive surveillance. The characters and the narrative quite naturally lend themselves to the idea of performance: How to be a good citizen? How to be a good communist? Whether or not one actually believes in it, one has to keep performing these roles to survive.
Good-bye, Lenin! is also a comment on this aspect of performing a communist, albeit in a humorous tone. At the very beginning of the film, we learn that Alex’s father — Christiane’s husband — has escaped to the West leaving his family behind. The constant interrogation by intelligence agencies leads to Christiane’s nervous breakdown. When she recovers, Christiane becomes devoted to the state, a sort of activist for greater equality and socialism. Alex comments that it’s as if she was married to the state and since it was an asexual relationship there was a lot of leftover energy for indulgence in vigorous socialist singing and dance.
The missing father/husband is supplanted by the Fatherland and paternal figures such as Papa Lenin and Papa Stalin. Towards the end of the film, after the Reunification, when the real father is reunited with the family, there is no more any need to parental guidance from the state. The son has stopped playing at being a Soviet cosmonaut or a good socialist. Yet, the communist utopia has been missed but democracy has been reclaimed. In Tripura, however, the wanton violence after the election results were declared makes it difficult for one to believe that two decades of Left Rule has been replaced with a more democratic alternative. One can only wait and watch.