The Dreams of Others - by Slavoj Zizek - In These Times
Good Bye Lenin! tells the story of a son whose mother, an honest GDR believer, has a heart attack on the night of the demonstrations that ultimately led to the regime’s demise in 1991. She survives, but the doctor warns the son that any traumatic experience could cause her death. With the help of a friend, the son thus stages for his mother, who is contained to her apartment, the smooth continuation of the GDR: Every evening, they air the video-recorded fake GDR news. Toward the film’s end, the hero says that the game got out of hand—the fiction staged for the dying mother became an alternate GDR, reinvented as it should have been.
Therein resides the key political question, beyond the rather boring topic of Ostalgie - nostalgia for the East- which is not a real longing for the GDR, but the enactment of the real parting from it, the acquiring of a distance, de-traumatization:
Was this dream of an “alternate GDR” inherent to the GDR itself? When, in the final fictional TV report, the new GDR leader decides to open the borders, allowing the West German citizens to escape consumer terrorism, hopeless life struggle and racism, it is clear that the need for such a utopian escape is real.
To put it quite brutally, while Ostalgie is widely practiced in today’s Germany without causing ethical problems, one (for the time being, at least) cannot imagine publicly practicing a Nazi nostalgia: “Good Bye Hitler” instead of “Good Bye Lenin.” Doesn’t this bear witness to the fact that we are still aware of the emancipatory potential in Communism, which, distorted and thwarted as it was, was thoroughly missing in Fascism? The quasi-metaphysical epiphany toward the film’s end (when the mother, on her first walk outside the apartment, finds herself face-to-face with a Lenin-statue carried by the helicopter, whose outstretched hand seems to address her directly) is thus to be taken more seriously than it may appear.
..We are still waiting for a film that would provide a complete description of the GDR terror.