Many of my readers might be wondering where I am and what I have to say about politics in this most political of all seasons. I have been paying very close attention to the race for President, but I'm not sure I can add much to the discourse that has not be addressed. What issue is there that I can address that has not already been flogged by the blogs and pummeled by the pundits? If you want a poll update, there are three or four websites that cover polls in great detail. If you want analysis on the left or on the right, I don't think there is a blogger or news outlet that can't give what you are looking for in spades. I have little to add, so I'll give an entertainment review. I promise my entertainment reviews will have more substance than Ebert & Roeper. ;)

I just watched the movie "Goodbye Lenin!" yesterday. It was a good movie on a few levels. It had some flaws, but special effects did not play a central role in the movie anyway. It was set in East Berlin, a location I have some familiarity with.

On the 40th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. DDR or East Germany), the main character’s mother slipped into a coma due to a heart attack and did not awaken until 8 months later. In the meantime, she had missed the reunification of Germany. The mother had always presented herself as a staunch supporter of socialism, so the son decided that news of the dissolution of the DDR would be too much of a shock for her. In order to avoid too much excitement, he hid the fact that the DDR was no more. Much of the movie is about the antics resulting from that decision.

The media and reviews of the movie had presented the movie as a light-hearted comedy, but in watching it (in German with subtitles), it had a little more depth than the average Hollywood comedy. It had a profound human element to it, showing the love of the son for the mother, the difficulties of a small family dealing with a sick member, and the coming of age of a young man in a time of great social upheaval.

First and mainly, the movie dealt with the effects of an overnight social revolution on a society whose hallmarks were order and security. Alex could no longer find his mother’s favorite foods, so he had to repackage Western foods in empty Eastern packages. He scavenged abandoned apartments for unopened wares. He bought the cast-offs of the East in flea markets and thrift shops. He had all visitors dress in clothes that had gone out of fashion literally overnight. Most amusingly, he and a techie friend recreated East German television news in order to explain the few oddities that the mother could see from her bedroom window, such as a Coca-Cola banner hanging from a neighboring window.

Many critics have accused the movie of pandering to Ostalgie, or nostalgie for the East. But the movie did not gloss over the darker side of the "worker and farmer paradise." The most obvious was early in the movie when we saw the brutality of the East German police in supressing a mostly orderly protest march. Slightly more subtle, but more important to the characters and the movie as a whole was the mother’s explanation of why she was left behind when her husband fled to the West, never to be heard from again.

The most surprising aspect of the film to me was that, towards the end, it seemed that the mother actually knew that the wall had come down and the world she knew was gone. Just as Alex had created the charade for the sake of his mother, the mother went along with the charade for the sake of her son. The scene that belies this is when they were in the hospital watching the final news report of the East German news reporting that the DDR had opened its borders to allow the Western refugees in. The mother looked at her son with a look of pride, not in the DDR, but in her son. It seemed as if she knew that he had created this illusion and the illusion he created was not the DDR as it was, but at it should have been; as they all wanted it to have been.

I believe that Alex created the charade in part to prevent any shock to his mother, but kept it going to prevent any shock to himself. He created in his mother’s bedroom the society he wanted to live in, with the cultural foundations of his childhood which were now gone, but also with the idealism that infused the socialist East Germany and without the brutality that kept it in line. His mother’s bedroom became for him a kind of refuge from the chaos and turmoil of the revolution going on outside.