ABSTRACT
A giant Lenin statue is dangling from a helicopter as it is carried across Berlin. A bewildered woman stares at this surreal apparition, as Lenin’s bronze face gazes at her, his hand stretched out for a final farewell; then the helicopter and its strange freight disappear into the sunset. No dialogue accompanies this remarkable scene from Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 hit film Good Bye Lenin!, only Yann Thiersen’s urgent score and Becker’s careful lighting which emphasise this most vivid manifestation of system change in Germany. In the film, the bewildered woman is Christiane Kerner, who as a result of a stroke and nine months of coma is unaware that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has vanished and been replaced by a unified Germany. When her children find her on the street in a state of confusion, they refuse to explain. Instead, they simply return her to the safe haven of her apartment, where they had done their best to maintain the fiction of a continued GDR in order to spare her the discovery that her beloved socialist system had expired.
