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Goodbye Lenin

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“Goodbye Lenin”
The movie that was planned on being shown, “The Miracle of Bern”, was replaced with “Goodbye Lenin” because the DVD was region locked for Europe and could not be played on an American DVD player. “Goodbye Lenin” was a story of a boy named Alex who saw his mother fall into a coma, and when she wakes, he tries to keep her from knowing all that has happened in the eight long months since she was last conscious. “Goodbye Lenin” starts out in 1989 in East Germany. The Kerner family is made up of Alex (main character), his mother Christina, and his sister Ariana. Alex’s mother is a huge believer in the DDR and when she sees Alex fighting against German police control, she faints in the street as he is taken away. He finds her in a hospital in a coma. Skip forward eight months and the Berlin wall has been taken down and the DDR no longer exists. Christina wakes up from her coma, but Alex is warned by the doctor that any sort of shock could scare her enough to kill her. So for the rest of the movie, Alex does everything he can to keep his proud, DDR supporting mother from knowing what has happened the past eight months and what the current state of West and East Germany is. It’s a bit difficult to write about what I learned from the film, solely because I just got back from a trip to Berlin a few weeks ago and I learned a lot about the history of West and East Germany. This film was more of an entertainment film, rather than an educational one. I suppose if you were new to Germany’s history you could pick up on a few things. You could have learned that before the Berlin wall was brought down, it didn’t matter whether your spouse, your children, or whoever lived on the opposite side, because German police were ordered to not allow people to cross the border. You would also learn that West Germany was based on capitalism, while East Germany was socialist. There were people who were passionate about the side of Germany they lived in and thoroughly supported that respective government, like Christina, but, there were also people who absolutely despised the wall and the separation and were very antigovernment at the time. Also, with the wall coming down and the merging of Germany, many things changed that were expressed in the film. People had to trade in their German Marks for Euros, many of the grocery stores began carrying more imported foods, and cultural differences were being set aside.

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