Analysis Of Goodbye-Lenin

While humans may often analyze what impact our surroundings have on us, it is not nearly as common for humans to try and understand how we influence the consciousness and ideologies of others. In “Goodbye, Lenin!” directed by Wolfgang Becker, Alex attempts to shape his mother’s conceptions of the new world she inhabits through his manipulation of her experiences and material surroundings, betraying his ideologies as no longer matching the state of affairs present in Germany, like they didn’t match the collective ideology of East Germany when he was growing up. “Goodbye, Lenin!” starts in East Germany before Eastern and Western Germany reunite. Marx argues that “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is ….directly interwoven with the material activity…. of men, the language of real life” (409). Although Alex thinks that he is helping his mother by ‘sustaining her world view,’ he is actually imposing his ideologies on her, returning to a socialist-like lifestyle while living a non-socialist life, and using the benefits of capitalism to support his deception. Marx’s claim that life determines consciousness turns out to be the defining characteristic of the movie, because not only does Alex not realize that he is imposing his ideologies, he doesn’t realize that those are his ideologies that he is imposing upon his mother.

After Alex’s mother awakes from her coma, Alex works to prevent her from discovering that Germany is reunited. He recreates the life that was pre-reunification by creating a fake environment for his mother. He was able to do this because of the new liberties offered due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He is also assisted by the fact that various events that occur – such as the Coca-Cola banner, ...

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... Alex is convinced throughout the film that she would panic if she knew the truth.

Yet, Alex is the one that would panic if he acted upon the truth of his life. He becomes so obsessed with protecting what he believes to be his mother’s ideology that he becomes part of the system he has created: in living a certain way, his consciousness has come to believe it as well. He knows that without his input and work, the system he has created will fall apart. Yet instead of letting it fall apart once it becomes too difficult, he comes up with more and more creative lies to keep it in place. His mind’s inability to let go of something that everyone else is telling him is pointless, and is pointless once his mother knows the truth, shows Alex’s inability to realize that his ideology that he has formed is his alone, and that he is a subject of it just as much as his mother is.