Daphne Berdahl's Film 'Good Bye, Lenin !'

Goodbye Lenin! (2003) appropriates the individual as bound to his environment, threaded, through strong cultural codes, to his neighbour. Regardless of the system, communist or capitalist, and though our goals may deviate, we are all pursuing happiness and comfort, the tools used to attain this products of that society. That said, it is immediately legible whereabouts Becker wishes us to view the East German state as wholly negative, and he does this through several key scenes.

Within the film, Good Bye, Lenin!, the transition from a Socialist society to a post-Socialist nation can be seen in the film’s utilization of symbolism. Symbolism used within the film can be understood as reflective of the actual lives of German citizens, and from this imagery, the transition to post-Socialism can be analyzed as bittersweet. Good Bye, Lenin! portrayed the conditioning of Socialist citizens by politicians, the citizens’ reliance on governmental support, the westernization of East Germany, and the gendered roles of men and women within society. Within the film’s symbolic imagery, these portrayals further resonate the bittersweet transition of Germany’s society and the reality of its citizens. It is from these various depictions

Set at the end of the Cold War in East Germany, the movie Goodbye Lenin is the story of a young man, Alex, trying to protect his mother, Christiane, who just spent the last eight months in a coma. Christiane is a personification of the values and ideology of socialism. She carries them out in her interactions with society, and is very hopeful towards the success of the regime. During her absence, the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the German Democratic Republic leads to a radical and turbulent change in society: the fall of socialism and the triumph of capitalism. Because of the shocking effect of such information and the danger of another heart attack, Alex creates for Christiane an ideological form of socialism. Fundamental themes in the movie are the difference between ideal and reality of socialism, as well as the positive and negative aspects of the transition to free market capitalism. Such themes are carried out through a juxtaposition of an ideal society and its reality in the form of a constructed reality of socialism. This idealized version of socialism served as an oasis from the chaotic transition from a problematic socialist regime to free market capitalism.

The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.

Funder’s use of symbolism in order to explore themes relevant to her own personal struggle with finding comfort and security within the former GDR is a concept central to Stasiland. The author’s more abstract use of darkness enables Funder to draw parallels between her own difficulty living in the former GDR and those who endured the true terror of the Stasi Regime, particularly in the retelling of Miriam Weber’s attempted escape to West Berlin. ‘It was dark...’ on the Eastern side of the Wall, and ‘...in the west the neon shone.’ West Berlin is painted as a safe haven, away from the dangerous and frightening ‘dark’ GDR.

Todd Gitlin is a notable author born in New York City. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a PhD in sociology and was heavily involved in the Students for a Democratic Society group. Gitlin is now a professor at New York University where he teaches culture, journalism, and sociology. Gitlin’s selection, Supersaturation, or, The Media Torrent and Disposable Feeling, comes from his book Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2001). In this selection, Gitlin describes how private lives and domestic spaces have evolved from the seventeenth-century until now. He feels as though our once

The Russian Revolution and the purges of Leninist and Stalinist Russia have spawned a literary output that is as diverse as it is voluminous. Darkness at Noon, a novel detailing the infamous Moscow Show Trials, conducted during the reign of Joseph Stalin is Arthur Koestler’s commentary upon the event that was yet another attempt by Stalin to silence his critics. In the novel, Koestler expounds upon Marxism, and the reason why a movement that had as its aim the “regeneration of mankind, should issue in its enslavement” and how, in spite of its drawbacks, it still held an appeal for intellectuals. It is for this reason that Koestler may have attempted “not to solve but to expose” the shortcomings of this political system and by doing so

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

From Stalin’s Cult of Personality to Khrushchev’s period of De-Stalinization, the nation of the Soviet Union was in endless disarray of what to regard as true in the sense of a socialist direction. The short story, This is Moscow Speaking, written by Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) represents the ideology that the citizens of the USSR were constantly living in fear of the alternations of their nation’s political policies. Even more, the novella gives an explanation for the people’s desire to conform to the principles around them.

The Russian Revolution is a widely studied and seemingly well understood time in modern, European history, boasting a vast wealth of texts and information from those of the likes of Robert Service, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Allan Bullock, Robert Conquest and Jonathan Reed, to name a few, but none is so widely sourced and so heavily relied upon than that of the account of Leon Trotsky, his book “History of the Russian Revolution” a somewhat firsthand account of the events leading up to the formation of the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that Trotsky’s book, among others, has played a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of the events of The Revolution; but have his personal predilections altered how he portrayed such paramount

“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer is a pivotal article in history that changed the way in which many communications scholars viewed media. Both authors were members of the Frankfurt School, a school of thought which looked further into Karl Marx’s theories about capitalism and the issues of mass production. Published in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer revealed their beliefs that the media, much like the economy, is becoming mass produced, and is therefore turning people in society into media-consuming robots. Industrialization created work lives for people in which they would work on only one part of a larger machine. As a result, they felt less involved in the completion of the project as a whole, and therefore felt less pride in their jobs and their lives in general. Instead, these people turned to media and pop culture so that they would feel more fulfillment within their lives. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that these people had a reduced capacity for original thought because media is now force feeding them the ideas of what they can think and feel. This essay will prove that although Adorno and Horkeimer’s points were justified through the eyes of authors George Lipsitz, Lev Manovich, and Susan J. Douglas, there are still exceptions to their theories that they do not account for.

Komar and Melamid’s painting titled “Lenin Lived, Lenin Lives, Lenin Will Live! (1982)” shows the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin lying at the top of the podium in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow and a kneeling female figure in mourning in the lower right corner. The painting bears resemblances to the Soviet and French Revolutionary and Christian models (Hillings 49). Lenin’s corpse and the other-worldly female figure show an artificial disconnect that resembles how various Soviet regimes used

The widely acclaimed film, Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), is a tragicomedy set in the immediate period preceding and succeeding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Directed and co-written by Wolfgang Becker, the film was a critical success. It attracted 6 million viewers in Germany alone, was sold to more than 60 countries and won multiple domestic as well as international film awards including six from the European Film Academy (IMDb). Two prominent and intersecting narratives underline Becker’s cinematic representation of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Firstly (and more conspicuously), the film relates a wry and often unspoken tale of German reunification through an Eastern perspective. Concurrently, a second narrative traces a private story of familial deception, tragedy and ultimately, kinship. Examining Good Bye, Lenin! under the lens of two German cultural phenomenons - Ostalgia and Mauer im Kopf - this essay contends that the film’s political significance exists primarily in its nuanced understanding and unique presentation of Germany’s journey towards national reunification. In this endeavor, Becker’s film succeeds in both reflecting and invigorating a wave of greater cultural as well as political dialogue within Germany. As such, one may view the film as a valuable socio-political instrument contributing to the country’s ongoing process of national reconciliation.

Mediascapes refer both to the distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations and film production studios), which are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world, and to the images of the world created by these media. These images of the world involve many complicated inflections, depending on their mode (documentary or entertainment), their hardware (electronic or pre-electronic), their audiences (local, national or transnational) and the interests of those who own and control them. What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their television film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the

Also, in order to define a certain phenomenon based on theory, I will hypothesize how extent the thought and theory are connected. For instance, globalization affects the way of perception of the world, which Tsagarousianou describes that “The global system of sovereign states has been familiar both structurally and symbolically in the daily acts of imagination through which space and human identity are construed. (Tsagarousianou, 2007, p175). I will analyze how the interviewer perceives media as part of their daily life in their mind.