AC 166 Trauma and Shame of the Unspeakable
The Holocaust, Slavery and Childhood Sexual Abuse
Department of American Civilization
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island

Goodbye, Lenin?
Social Change as Wound in Post-Socialist Eastern Germany

Bert Bobock
M.A. American Studies /
Modern and Contemporary History
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
15. May 2005

Table of Contents

1. Introduction ... 3

2. Synopsis of Goodbye, Lenin ... 4

3. Theoretical Background: Lay Trauma versus Cultural Trauma Theories ... 5
3.1 Cathy Caruth’s Traumatic Awakenings ... 7
3.2 Jeffrey Alexander’s Speech Act Theory ... 9
3.3 Piotr Sztomka’s Trauma of Social Change ... 12

4. Personal Trauma and Cultural Trauma in Goodbye, Lenin ... 15
4.1 The Mother’s Trauma ... 16
4.2 Alexander’s Trauma ... 20
4.3 Ariane’s Trauma ... 22
4.4 The Viewer’s Trauma ... 23

5. Cultural Trauma – Now and Then ... 25

6. Conclusion ... 27

Bibliography ... 28

Appendix ... 30

“If we observe heated debates and public disputes in the media, at public meetings, or in political bodies; if values and judgments are strongly contested; if certain themes become obsessive for artistic expression through the movies, theatre, literature, and poetry; if social movements mobilize for the expression of cultural discontents, then we are certainly witnessing unhealed and potentially evolving trauma.” Piotr Stzompka, The Trauma of Social Change

1. Introduction

One event that turned “ostalgia” - the term given to the nostalgia felt for East Germany - into an unstoppable popular movement in the spring of 2003 was the overwhelming success of Wolfgang Becker′s film, Goodbye, Lenin, a tragicomic satire set during the time of German reunification. More than thirteen years after the fall of the wall and the collapse of socialism in the Eastern Bloc, Goodbye, Lenin quickly became the biggest success in German cinema and gained worldwide recognition. Without glorifying the past, the movie brings the viewer back to an already faded image of life in the days of the “German Democratic Republic” - a life that disappeared almost overnight following the reunification.

The success of Goodbye, Lenin and the ongoing popular movement raises questions not only of why so many East Germans, after thirteen years of living in a market society, now feel the need to rediscover their socialist past and relive the change of 1989, but also why so many desire to regain something they feel was lost - their collective identity. Although it is part of a new marketing structure that profits enormously from the East German past, Goodbye, Lenin and ensuing television shows such as “Die DDR Show” clearly mark a late recognition of East German life and culture. Easterners felt their world change at a speed experienced by no other ex-socialist society.¹ By the end of their “revolution,” they were overwhelmed by the plethora of western laws, institutions, consumer products, and popular culture icons², and their identity had become torn between the capitalist West and the socialist East. Becker′s film portrays the East′s total dissolution into the West and the resulting fractured identity of East Germans and poses the question: Do the so-called “peaceful revolution” and the major social changes that followed need to be re-evaluated as ultimately traumatizing events? This essay will investigate this issue by applying three partly overlapping and partly contradictory trauma theories by Jeffrey Alexander³, Piotr Sztompka⁴ and Cathy Caruth⁵ to Becker′s film and examining whether the film successfully recollects German identity. If so, does the movie, according to Judith Herman′s definition of trauma resolution⁶, simultaneously help to resolve a specific East German cultural trauma that has been in a state of latency for more than thirteen years?

2. Synopsis of Goodbye, Lenin

By representing the events of 1989, Becker creates a narration with which all Germans can identify. Looking back to the summer of 1989, he tells the story of Christiane Kerner⁷, who, after losing her husband, completely devotes her life to teaching in the socialist state. Yet, after witnessing her son taking part in a violent protest against the socialist system, she suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. She wakes up only eight months later, having missed the many fundamental changes that took place within Eastern Berlin over these months. In an attempt to protect his mother from further shock, Alexander⁸ reconstructs the past and deludes her into believing that her former socialist world still exists. As the movie proceeds, his efforts to keep his constructed reality alive grow increasingly complicated - from remodeling the family’s apartment, re-labeling groceries, convincing family members, neighbors and friends to play along in his charade, bribing school children to sing East German songs, to producing his own television newscasts. Yet, during the showing of the final newscast, it becomes clear that the mother in fact knows that the newscast is her son’s invention. Though the movie concludes with the mother’s death, it still ends on a positive note, because the mother dies grateful that her son would go to such lengths to protect her.

1 The word communism is a utopian term, often mistakenly used to describe socialist societies of the Soviet Union or Eastern Germany. Since communism is by its definition historically unachievable, it is incorrect to use it as an exchangeable term for socialism. I will therefore use the term socialism instead of communism in the essay.

2 Stefan Theil, Red Again, The New Republic, October 13&20, 16-20 (2003).

3 Jeffrey C Alexander, et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

4 Piotr Sztompka, Cultural Trauma: The Other Face of Social Change, European Journal of Social Theory 3 (4): 449-466 (2000).

5 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.)

6 Judith Herman, MD. Trauma and Recovery. (New York: Basic Books, 1992.)

7 Katrin Sass is a well known East German actress.

8 Interestingly, the role of the East German Alexander Kerner, is played by the West German actor Daniel Bruehl.