Hallo, Helmut!

I certainly don't regret shooting the fat with rollick, cassielsander, febrile, and off_coloratura, but I really do rue staying up until 3 a.m. doing it. Poor old me! I still haven't recovered and I've got two hours of Mandarin tonight, followed by dinner with Chef Jeff. There's no hiding in that class, not if the turnout is like last time and I end up forming fully 50% of the student body.

Even a Meinl mocha couldn't completely revive me yesterday. bunj said I'd perk up during the film and boy, howdy! I don't know that I can do justice to Goodbye, Lenin! in a review since I got so wrapped up in it. It played deftly on nostagia, both personal (overlapping chronologically with my first visit to Germany) and second-hand. We didn't have to live in the DDR to imagine what it must have meant to lose all your familiar brands, t.v. shows, and other cultural touchstones overnight. I was reminded of my buddy Holger, an Ossi I met in Rome back in 1991. He'd actually been kicked out of East Germany during the 80's for--like the mother of the film's protagonist--trying to hold the state accountable to its ideals. At some point, I was talking about my Catholic upbringing, how it had shaped me in such a way that I will always feel kinship with other parochial school refugees and he said, "I think it's also that way for those who grew up in the DDR. No matter how long we live, we'll always feel different from the West Germans." I didn't fully comprehend what he was getting at, but I think I finally do.

I wonder what he's upt to now. When Nuphy and I last saw him almost a decade ago, he was living happily in a beautiful townhouse commune in Weissensee--at that time, the hottest residential neighbourhood in Berlin. (The gentrification of my current neighbourhood looks desultory by comparison.) Did his yuppie neighbours force him and his fellow communards out? Or did the economic stagnation of Berlin leave them surrounded by half-completed luxury developments? Did he find the film an amusing nostalgia piece, too, or just a trivial attempt to cash in on Ostalgie? And what about Andreas' father, the Communist living in the West whose Weltbild went to pieces in 1990? Was he left adrift, like the elderly comrades depicted in the film or has he resigned himself to the triumph of consumerist capitalism?

I tried not to cry during the movie, but after the footage of the wall coming down blew open the ducts, I knew there was just no use. Can one ever explain what the end of the Cold War meant to those who didn't grow up with it? Will we ever see the Middle Eastern dictatorships tumble and fall due to the inexorable march of democracy like the Eastern European ones? Both bunj and I had a lot of admiration for the finesse with which the film shifted tone between comedy and pathos. The central gimmick is integrated into the plot rather than overwhelming it and the family melodrama never becomes too lugubrious. Still, I was left mopping my cheeks and the end and asking myself When did I become such a sentimental old fart?