The wife, recovering commie she is, rented the German flic Good bye, Lenin last night. Here’s a little background on the film:
“Good bye Lenin!” chronicles what happened shortly before and after the fall of the Reich, I mean, East Germany, in 1989. It is essentially a social commentary in the guise of a quasi-comedy (if you’d call it funny) about one family that is especially hard-shaken by the change because the mother Christiane (Katrin Sass) is a diehard socialist who regards herself as “married” to the party — apparently because she has no sex life. Why? Because her husband fled to the West twenty years ago, leaving her with their two kids, Alex (Daniel Bruhl) and Ariane (Maria Simon). Now, just weeks before the Berlin Wall fell, Christiane ate too much ice cream and had a heart attack that put her into a coma, and when she wakes up, East Germany is all but gone. It’s sort of like “28 Days Later,” except instead of waking up to see blood-puking zombies, you see people flipping burgers in McDonald’s, which apparently is just as scary a sight in East Berlin 1989.
But Christiane does not get to see the new IKEA or Walmart outlet around the corner, because Alex and Ariane, after learning from the doctor that their mother’s heart will explode if she is shocked again, have improvised a plan to hide the truth from her. Working the bed-ridden Christiane’s immobility to their advantage, they lock her up in the bedroom and force her to watch videotaped news reports, while Alex spends six hours a day in the kitchen switching the labels of canned food to make sure she does not know she is eating the latest American imports. What a stupid woman!
Pretty decent movie, I thought, and it does star the lovely Chulpan Khamatova. As her name would suggest, she is indeed a Tatar from Kazan, Tatarstan — and an easy-on-the-eyes one at that. Unfortunately, the only decent pic I could find of her via English-language search engines is the one above and to your right.
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The greatest Box Office hit in Germany of last year! The German film industry was in such a desperate, stagnant state, that everyone got crazy about the domestic and international success of “Good bye, Lenin!” (also the German original title - Teutonglish). Some German guys in the movie industry envy the quota system in France & South Korea… but I’ll surely slit my wrists open, if I’m forced by regulations to watch mind-torturing German arthouse movies too often.
Tatars are indeed a remarkable group of people. There’s a small community living here in Finland, immigrated mostly during the Russian rule - and the 4th generation still speaks Tatar as the first language. That’s a cultural achievement if any.
Talking about the downfall of East Germany brings a lot of memories - like the East German lecturer of German whose classes I was taking, and who suddenly lost his country during the winter vacation. I guess very few were surprised when it became known that he had been reporting to Stasi all the time - after all he had been let abroad.
Or like the young East German in a youth hostel in Budapest in the summer of ‘89, who was going to over the Austrian border the following night, while I was just going to take the train… Cases like him help to remember what it is to rule people with barbed wire and bullets.
I was in Berlin with some fellow Georgetowners 10 days after the Wall officially fell in 1989 (we were all juniors studying in Switzerland at the time). Amazing experience, walking up and down the West Berlin side of the Wall, watching people going at it with sledgehammers, carting pieces away as souvenirs, standing on top of the Wall. Our group crossed through Checkpoint Charlie (which was still there at that point… have they preserved the checkpoint for posterity?) into East Berlin; we weren’t allowed to take any of their commie cash back with us, which was unfortunate. East Berlin was little more than a sea of concrete, it seemed; drab, depressing, full of the kind of sculptures that one friend dubbed “Totalitarian Gothic”– 3-D odes to the working people. Ate some lame food before going back West; my plate held a strip or two of unidentifiable fish and some boiled potatoes in a watery cream sauce– communism’s finest. I remember huge, empty boulevards not far from Brandenburg Gate, and huge, empty bookstores with little more than propaganda on their shelves. The whole place was a buzzkill.
Over on the West side of the wall, there were masses of people celebrating, including a group of Koreans holding up a banner that said “KOREA IST EINS”– “Korea is one.” I recall being touched by this; it was probably sad for those Koreans to see reunification happening somewhere other than in Korea. At the same time, it might’ve given them hope that such a thing would be possible on the peninsula.
Your post brings back memories.
Kevin
huge, empty bookstores with little more than propaganda on their shelves
What is this shop with empty shelves?
- It’s a butcher’s shop.
What’s this another shop with emty shelves?
- It’s a sausage shop.
But how come this shop have no shelves?
- Because it’s a shelf shop.
And back to Korea: one of the scaries things about the totalitarianism in North Korea is that no jokes like that ever reach our ears, while the old Soviet block was full of that kind of stuff.
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
http://actors.khv.ru/h/hamatova.htm
http://www.sova.ru/kino/stars/68.shtml
and many more at:
http://www.google.com/search?q.....p;oe=utf-8
Most of the Berlin Wall has been torn down, except a few sections. They’ve drawn a line of the former wall on the ground. As far as I know, they’ve left at least the sign post of “Checkpoint Charlie” as a reminder for coming generations. I think, together with former communist Yugoslavia, the GDR had the highest living standard among East European communist nations. East Germany was in comparison to North Korea a “paradise”.
The weirdest case was a convicted jail inmate in East Germany, who came out of prison a decade or so after the German unification and had to cope with a totally different society.
Tatars were some of my favorite people in Uzbekistan. They were kind of like “Turkic Royalty” because they came from the RSFSR (Russia) and were well integrated into that machine (spoke Russian from birth, very well-educated). And they are very easy on the eyes.
Just saw Goodbye Lenin on Sunday. I have to agree with your assessment - she’s quite an attractive woman.