It’s quite surprising for me that I was born into a divided world. We were divided on the basis of geography, class, society, community and in some cases, walls. I try to remember my first days of existence in this world. My memory obviously fails, sadly.

The question is, what do we imagine our world to be like? What happens if the image of the world begins to fall apart? What if it was merely a broken sheet of glass patched up in the fog? Hit the right note, and you can hear it crackle.

Goodbye Lenin isn’t a great movie by any means, but it tells a very beautiful story and provides a very interesting perspective of the events that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in1989. Christiane Kerner (Katrin Saβ) a woman grown up on the vitality of a socialist regime in East Germany lies in a coma through the period of the fall of East Germany. She wakes up in a new world- the world on the other side of the glass door- a world where the socialism is only in dictionaries. Her son, Alex Kerner (Daniel Bruhl) constructs an East Germany in her bedroom fearing that the fall of the Berlin wall could possibly be her worst nightmare. He takes care of every possible detail from fabrication of the news on television to using food containers with East German labels.

Love walks into his life in the form a young nurse, Lara (Chulpan Khamatova). His sister, Ariane Kerner (Maria Simon) is pregnant with a West German boyfriend- a weak metaphor that the child born is not child of a divided country. But perhaps such clichéd occurrences and obvious intonations are the strengths of the movie. The narrative is very moving since it talks about how the life of a people changed in a matter of months. On the scale of a century, eight months, the period during which the woman was in coma seems miniscule. Time is fleeing, and eternity is only worth an hour.

Occasionally, a veteran of East Germany always walks past Alex when he rummages through the trash for old bottle labels and says, “Look what they have brought us to. Is this why we struggled for forty years” The movie tries to look at what the reunification of Germany did to its people. To text books, it created a chapter to be read many years later- The end of the cold war. To the people, such wars are pittance. The advent of capitalism swept aside the failing economy of East Germany and its people were hardly able to keep afloat in its waters. The East German mark had depreciated to fifty percent of its original value. It appears to me that the socialist government started the disintegration of East Germany and the capitalist influx merely accelerated this process. Cosmonauts of the former socialist regime were now taxi drivers. Alex’s childhood hero was now counting change.

Art is a reflection of our times. It is the only way to hear of a story that never happened. It is the only way for us to even attempt to answer the question ‘why’. (In my view, this isn’t a scientific question but rather philosophical. Kurt Vonnegut would have said, ‘there is no ‘why’, there only ‘is’ when he alludes to the inanity of the interrogative.) No matter.

The movie ends on a sentimental note, Alex in monologue says, “She’s up there somewhere now. Maybe looking down at us. Maybe she sees us as tiny specks on the Earth’s surface, just like Sigmund Jähn did back then. The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother.” And that’s what the world of East Germany was. A world in the memory of a woman trapped in a room. Perhaps all she needed to do to see the world; was to open the door.

The movie is directed by Wolfgang Becker and features appealing performances by all its actors. Lara, Alex’s girlfriend is very appealing and stands a voice of reason in the imaginary world that Alex so meticulously and tirelessly builds through the movie but that’s simply a bias I happen to have.