Author: Luke Webb

Good Bye Lenin! is a film that explores the fall of East Germany on a personal level. My primary takeaway from the film is that eventually time catches up to you. Both the death of Alexander’s mother and the fall of the GDR are inevitable. By recreating the GDR for their mother’s health the family is artificially extending the “existence” of the GDR and their own mothers life. The mother finally passing away represents a sort of acceptance not only of her death but the symbolic death of East Germany. The GDR’s decline and downfall are played out to coincide with different periods of Alexander’s life. While the GDR falls, the charade of its continued existence is played out to protect Alexander’s mother from the truth. This is reflected in my opinion in Alexander creating a sort of charade that his own mother will be able to recover even after the doctor told him otherwise going as far to say that “doctors can be wrong” to justify the hope that his mother will recover after her second heart attack. I can see this movie being sort of symbolic of the realization of East Germans that their country was no more. The idealistic mother falling ill and passing away. The father who they initially thought abandoned them was actually kept away and wanted to be a part of their lives. East Germany can be seen as the sickly mother while West Germany is represented by the absent father who in the end wanted to be reunified with his children even if they want nothing to do with him. While this symbolic interpretation makes some sense, the film can also be seen merely as a representation of what East Germans felt at the end of the GDR. They were nostalgic for something that was never as good as they imagined it to be, they felt betrayed and ripped off by the new developments in currency and consumer goods while also enjoying the fruits of the new economic paradigm.

It is certainly interesting how the policies of Gorbachev alongside the will for reformation and change in the Eastern Bloc rapidly brought revolutions, mass protests, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and not long after the total collapse of many Communist countries. I think this was best demonstrated in the revolution in Romania which had a regime described in comparison to other Eastern Bloc countries “related to the nature of Ceausescu’s regime, which made East Germany and Czechoslovakia look like modern, benign dictatorships, and the Polish and Hungarian regimes positively enlightened and benevolent” (327) and this revolution was described as starting near the Hungarian Border. I think the fact that these revolutions and upheavals all happened at once demonstrated the fundamental fragility of the Eastern Bloc by the late 1980s. I would be interested in knowing why the Eastern Bloc collapsed so suddenly while other countries that called themselves communist lasted longer or still exist today.

One part of this chapter that I found to be interesting is how rock music and the youthful counterculture that came alongside it became tolerated by the Polish authorities under the premise that it would achieve “cultural superiority” to the capitalist West (231). While the toleration of Western music spread ideas and influenced Polish musicians to write music and lyrics that painted a less than glamorous image of Poland during the late Cold War. I believe this opens up questions as to whether Western culture seeping into Poland was the cause of youthful rebellion or if it was simply an outlet for the alienated and disaffected youth in Poland and other Eastern Bloc nations. I would argue that to some extent both are true. Western music spread ideas to the youth that could be considered “subversive” to the Polish state while at the same time it was Polish bands and musicians who were making music about living in Poland and Polish young adults who were interesting and consuming the music.

The post-war period in Czechoslovakia saw the spread of Soviet propaganda films and art throughout the country. These films were initially received well among Czechoslovakians, as they “resonated with…viewers who had just lived through six years of German occupation.” (Applebaum, 24) Czechoslovakians were more receptive to Soviet film and art in this post-war era in part due to the recently vanquished Nazi occupation and to a growing nationalism surrounding their pan-Slavic identity shared with Russia. The United States made a limited effort to influence the Czechoslovakians but this effort was insufficient to change the eventual domination of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had become the “friend” of Czechoslovakia. In some ways, this friendship was not honored by the Soviet Union. In chapter two the Soviet Union propagandizes itself as more advanced and modern than its “friends” in the Eastern Bloc. (58) Foreign students were prohibited from marrying Soviet citizens as well.

What caused the Soviet Union’s chauvinism and superiority complex? How did propaganda about the superiority of the Soviet Union affect it’s interactions with “friendly” nations such as Czechoslovakia?

Kovaly’s recollections offer insight into Czechoslovakian society in the early Cold War. The experiences shared by her and her husband Rudolf demonstrate the fear felt by party members as they tried to avoid arrest. Kovaly describes how “No one dared speak out loud, and hardly a week passed without news of someone’s arrest.” and how doorbells would turn people pale on certain evenings. (Kovaly, 101) Those living in Czechoslovakia were ruled by fear and the ideology of the party and any dissent from the party was seen as ideological impurity. Kovaly describes two instances of critical remarks about Soviet propaganda being taken as heinous ideological crimes. In the first instance described by Kovaly, a woman describes a propaganda film as “another grade-B operetta” and this remark is taken as a “fit of temporary insanity” and is forced to correct her “erroneous” views on the film. (Kovaly 98) The second example Kovaly describes is her own comment that was directed at a propaganda poster. She refers to a poster featuring Stalin as “unbelievable kitsch” and the man showing her the poster reacts by accusing her of wanting “another war” and being a “reactionary.” (Kovaly, 99) These examples demonstrate the rigid ideological purity that was required at this point in the Cold War in Czechoslovakia.

In what ways were other countries affected by the same kind of paranoia and ideological tests of purity? How does ideology control people to the extent that it does during this period of the Cold War?

Melissa Feinberg writes extensively on the occurrence of “show trials” in Eastern Europe during the early years of the Cold War. These public confessions of guilt by so-called saboteurs and spies exhibit the power the party had over the perception of reality of those living in Eastern Europe. Feinberg argues that the show trials served as an important tool of Cold War propaganda, stating, “All show trials had one central theme: the Socialist camp was under siege, menaced by hidden and dangerous enemies.” (Feinberg, 5) The show trial aimed at setting the population against fraternization with Westerners as “narratives depended on the idea that the world had been sundered into two diametrically opposed camps.” (Feinberg, 10) State authorities could create fantastic conspiracies detailing the guilt of a victim of a show trial. This helped to create and sustain a narrative that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republics under its thrall were under constant attack from capitalist, imperialist, and or fascist subversives. Show trials also enabled the party to dispose of those who were deemed to be ideologically impure. The occurrence and implications of the show trials were emblematic of the Cold War at large, as the conflict was a clash between two ideologies with little perceived room for fence-sitting. The show trials and paranoia surrounding them are analogous to the Red Scare and trials surrounding the fear of Communist subversion in the United States. The fear that the enemy is behind every corner seems to be a shared feature of the United States and the USSR during the early cold war period. Although different in several important ways, both the Red Scare and Show Trials aimed at maintaining ideological purity. Show Trials aimed to control the narrative and draw distinct divisions between the two sides of the Cold War.

By what other means was the narrative and reality controlled by the USSR? How does the narrative created by show trials compare to the narrative produced by the United States during the Cold War? What are the implications of the state control of information?