Wolfgang Becker's Good Bye Lenin is one of the better Wende films and does capture a good deal of the zeitgeist of the late GDR. Although Becker is a Wessi, he was a resident of West Berlin and did experience the fall of the Wall from the other side. The film, like many narrative structures, does take liberties with the historical record for the sake of plot. The main character Alex, for example, does find work in a Western satellite dish company quite quickly when in reality the employment prospects for young GDR men tended to be a much more protracted and painful transition. His sister's fall from university student to Burger King drive through employee was more typical for young men of Alex's generation. But on the whole, the film gets a number of key details correct.

One of the notable aspects of Good Bye Lenin was its focus upon the "losers" of reunification. At one point in the film, Alex visits his mother's former supervisor within the government and the man is clearly drunk while the empty alcohol bottles point to a drinking problem. This was not atypical for a number of SED functionaries who found not only that they were on the losing side of history, but that their careers were soon to be over. The FRG government possessed a great deal of leverage in the reunification process and the general position of Bonn was that SED loyalists would have no place within the future unified government and civil service. Not only were such individuals ideologically suspect in the eyes of Bonn, but the GDR also maintained a civil service that was overstaffed. The GDR's constitutional guarantees of employment created large numbers of staff. The GDR had significantly more civil servants per capita than the FRG. The reunification process subordinated the former GDR's bureaucracies to their FRG analogues and there was a process of clearing out the dead wood. Those GDR civil servants who were terminated got six to nine months reduced salary where they could adjust and find new employment, after which they were only eligible for unemployment. This issue became one of the major issues in the post-Wende courts as while the reunification treaty allowed for the summary dismissal of redundant civil servants, some former GDR civil servants argued this violated Basic Law. Within this context, the apathetic alcoholism of the former supervisor makes a good deal of sense.

The middle-aged friends and neighbors in Alex's apartment complex are also losers of a sort in the Wende, albeit far more sympathetic than the cynical SED functionary. These characters are complicit in Alex's attempt to maintain the charade of the still-existing GDR, which begs the question what else were they going to do. For those of middle age- too young to retire, but too old to learn new skills- reunification could be a difficult transition. Much like the bloated bureaucracy, many of the GDR's state-owned businesses were overstaffed, inefficient, and redundant. Although the generous social welfare policies of the SED state remained more of a promise than a reality, there was a perceived loss of a social safety net. Bonn eventually did decide on honoring GDR pensions and salaries on a 1:1 ratio of DM to M, this was a highly contentious issue in the run-up to the intergovernmental treaty. Reunification brought a degree of uncertainty for members of this generation,

Mary Fulbrook's study of generational divides in Germany also suggests a tantalizing reason for this middle-aged malaise. She notes in her interviews and archival research that reunification forced a degree of subtle self-inquiry among her subjects. Reunification caused a number of people to reexamine their decision to remain within the GDR, especially if they were young adults before 1961. The decision for this cohort to remain and "stick it out" became a bitter pill in light of the lost opportunities of a hypothetical Republikflucht and there was a degree of regret that they had wasted the best years of their lives in what was clearly a failed state in 1990. Good-bye Lenin actually toys with this concept near the film's climax where Alex's mother confesses that she too wanted to flee to the West with her husband, but feared for her family.

A focus on losers though are only a part of Good Bye Lenin's strengths as a Wende film. Becker does a good job on focusing on aspects of GDR life that a number of more critical films like The Lives of Others leave out. Good Bye Lenin manages to capture the culture of petitions to the state from its citizens as Becker portrays Alex's mother as a master of using wit and the regime's own language against it. Alex's mother also was representative of the type of German who was, at least outwardly, a true believer of GDR socialism and its stated values of social justice. Such individuals did exist within the GDR and Becker's film also acknowledges the SED's leeriness of such individuals. At one point in the film, the SED supervisor claims Alex's mother was "too idealistic" for his department and this rings true to some of the stymied careers of believers. FDJ hobby activities like model rocketry were fairly popular among GDR youth and this form of state-sponsored leisure enjoyed far more currency than the FDJ's ideological instruction. Jähn's spaceflight likewise was a media sensation within the GDR and had a degree of grassroots popularity. The Sandmännchen puppet show was also a cultural product of the GDR that actually managed to become one of the few GDR cultural products to find a wide audience within the FRG.

Alex's defense of the GDR late in the film also underscores an important element of Ostalgie. While many GDR citizens abandoned their unfashionable belongings for Western ones and exchanged their savings for DM, there was a palpable undercurrent of resentment between the Wessis and Ossis. Termed "die Mauer im Kopf" (the Wall in the head) by a number of commentators, a number of Wessis felt that the GDR's citizens were provincial and complaining while some Ossis found Wessis condescending and haughty. This internal division comes to the fore when Rainer, the Wessi boyfriend of Alex's sister kvetches that the Ossis complain too much when they do not know how good they have it. Yet, looking at the film closer, Rainer is not exactly an upstanding Wessi (a second viewing of the film shows he is kind of a Wessi hipster bum slumming it) . He has moved into the East partly because the cost of living is so cheap he can live comfortably on his meager salary than in the West. When he pretends to be a GDR citizen, he nearly uses the Nazi rank of Gauleiter when giving his biographical details to Alex's mother, again showing his low regard for the GDR. This film conflict was a phenomenon that was not atypical in the transition period of reunification and Ostalgie often started as a pushback by Ossis against real or perceived slights that there was nothing good about the GDR.

Good Bye Lenin is of course a work of fiction and not a historical documentary. Yet despite this, it gets a number of broad historical beats correct about the long and complex process of reunifying a country. The GDR may have been a crummy dictatorship that failed, but daily life in the GDR was more than Stasi domestic spying and flights to the West. Becker tries to thread the needle in the film between portraying why reunification was necessary while simultaneously showing why some people mourned the GDR's loss. Given the layers of the film, Becker succeeded quite admirably.

Sources

Caldwell, Peter C., and Robert R. Shandley. German Unification Expectations and Outcomes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Fulbrook, Mary. The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

_. Dissonant Lives Generations and Violence Through the German Dictatorships, Nazism to Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Rechtien, Renate, and Dennis Tate. Twenty Years on: Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2011.