Alex, a young East Berliner, learns of the fall of the Wall when his mother is in a coma from a heart attack. Months pass, the city changes, advertisements invade the walls. Eight months later, he opens his eyes. Using his bed mode, Alex then recreates the world of the GDR around him in the apartment to avoid a very violent shock…

Directed by Wolfgang Becker and released in 2003, Good Bye, Lenin!, which airs tonight on Arte, is a little gem of a comedy. A work that is subtle and ethereal, double-charged, funny and very melancholic, as we don’t often see at the end.

Strong nostalgia

It is also one of the first films to surf what has been called “nostalgia”; Neologism first used in 1992, denoting nostalgia for the former East Germany (GDR); Although the Berlin Wall came down three years earlier. Later, this term will be extended to the countries of the former Eastern Bloc of the Soviet period.

With the opening of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany, the life created by a communist state where all employees were civil servants and where there was no need to think about the future; Disappearance of cheap consumer products in favor of a competitive market, absence of unemployment (at least officially…); Apparently the rent is much cheaper because they were supervised by the regime…

The elements of the explanation – which are clearly not the only ones – that have largely strengthened this nostalgia. In 2009, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, almost one in five Germans from the former GDR said I regret that time.

According to another survey conducted in March 2009, 41% of Ossetians (a term referring to East Germans) surveyed did not consider the GDR to be a criminal state. Something makes you want to jump, imagine those who have faced the dreaded stas…

A strange resemblance

This phenomenon of ostalgia seems to have died down quite a bit over the years. And now it was about tourists looking for the exotic, not the Germans themselves, as related Very interesting article from the Slate site It was dedicated to the topic in 2017.

Be that as it may, imagine that a similar story Goodbye Lenin! would come Well, more or less. If the film’s script is an original creation, born in the mind of Bernd Lichtenberg, who had the idea in the early 1990s, it turns out that in Poland, in the middle of the communist period, a new story took place. in 1988.

A railway worker named Jan Grzebski, 65, fell into a coma. A victim of a violent impact on a train carriage developed a brain tumor that left him paralyzed and in a coma. Especially a deep coma because it would last… 19 years.

When he woke up in 2007, he found that his country was no longer communist. But also that he now had eleven grandchildren, four from his marriage. “When I fell into a coma, there were only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and there were long lines of fuel everywhere. Now I see people on the streets with their mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops that I feel sick to my stomach” he said.

However, this story, which was broadcast by Polish television at that time, is not entirely true. “Certainly cannot be a coma or any form of it” Specialists commentedin 2007.