Nice movie released in 2003, “Good Bye Lenin!” was one of the very first to surf on a trend that has been called “ostalgia”. This story, completely crazy, has strange similarities with a news item that occurred in 1988 in Poland.
Alex, a young East Berliner, learns of the fall of the wall while his mother is in a coma following a heart attack. Months pass, the city changes, advertisements invade the walls. After eight months, she opens her eyes. Taking advantage of her bed rest, Alex then reconstructs the world of the GDR around her in the apartment, in order to avoid too brutal a shock…
Directed by Wolfgang Becker and released in 2003, Good Bye, Lenin!, broadcast tonight on Arte, is a little comedy gem. A work that is both subtle and acerbic, carried by a double charge, joyful and very melancholy, as we ultimately see not so often.
It is also one of the very first films to surf on what has been called “ostalgia”; a neologism first used in 1992, denoting nostalgia for the former East Germany (GDR); even though the Berlin Wall had fallen three years earlier. The term will later be extended to the former Eastern Bloc countries of the Soviet era.
With the opening of the Iron Curtain and German reunification, life very framed by the communist state, where all employees were civil servants and where there was no need to worry about the future; the disappearance of cheap consumer products in favor of a competitive market, the absence (official in any case…) of unemployment; obviously much cheaper rents because they were supervised by the regime…
Elements of explanation – which are obviously not the only ones – which have largely fueled this ostalgia. In 2009, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nearly one in five Germans from the former GDR said regret that time.
According to another study carried out in March 2009, 41% of the Ossies (term which designates the East Germans) surveyed did not consider the GDR to be a criminal state. Something to make you jump, you can imagine those who have been confronted with the dreaded Stasi…
This phenomenon of ostalgia still seems to have faded quite a bit over the years. And would now concern tourists looking for exoticism rather than the Germans themselves, as related a very interesting article from the Slate site devoted to the subject, in 2017.
Be that as it may, imagine that a story similar to that of Good bye Lenin! would have arrived. Well, more or less. If the screenplay of the film is an original creation, born in the mind of Bernd Lichtenberg, who had had the idea in the early 1990s, it turns out that a news item happened in Poland, in the middle of the communist period, in 1988.
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A railway worker named Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma. Victim of a violent impact against a train car, he developed a brain tumor which paralyzed him and plunged him into a coma. A particularly deep coma, since it would have lasted… 19 years.
When he woke up in 2007, he discovered that his country had long since ceased to be communist. But also that he now had eleven grandchildren, from the marriage of his four children. “When I fell into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and everywhere there were long lines for fuel. Now I see people in the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops that it makes me sick to my stomach” he declared.
However, this story, reported at the time by Polish television, was not entirely true. “it cannot with certainty be a case of coma or any of its forms” commented specialistsin 2007.