Goodbye Lenin (2003): History in the subjunctive

Abstract

Wolfgang Becker's film Goodbye Lenin (2003) has been popular far beyond Germany. It provokes questions not found in standard debates about film and history. Feature films and documentary representations frequently ‘adjust’ history, governed by criteria of narrative economy and audience expectations that are quite different from those of historians. A counter-current within the discipline has pleaded for acknowledging the capacity of film to represent different aspects of history, and potentially to explore dimensions which are beyond written history. In Becker's film, an East Berlin mother suffers amnesia at the historical moment of the fall of the Wall, and during the transition process to German unification. Her son's response is to stage-manage a transfigured version of the past, thereby creating a time warp between her consciousness and the post-Wall ‘reality’ beyond her walls. The historical reflection that emerges relates to history as it might have been, but wasn't: history, in short, in the subjunctive mood. Set in an East German context, the issues raised by this film look very different from contemporary debates about Germany's right/ability to mourn her own dead, the meaning today of Dresden, etc. Approaching history in the subjunctive mood might well open out the discipline of history itself. The film's treatment emerges as not just defensible, but as signally apt for subject matter as surreal as the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).