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

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1, Brown University (Department of American Civilization), course: Trauma and Shame of the Unspeakable, 20 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: 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. 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 contradictory trauma theories by Jeffrey Alexander, Piotr Sztompka and Cathy Caruth 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 resolution, simultaneously help to resolve a specific East German cultural trauma that has been in a state of latency for more than thirteen years?