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Article Excerpt
Two films, which were made thirty years apart, try to come to terms with daily life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. One film was produced in the former East Germany and the other in the reunified Germany: Die Legende von Paul und Paula (dir. Heiner Carow, 1973) and Good Bye, Lenin! (dir. Wolfgang Becket, 2003). The German Democratic Republic (GDR), like other Soviet-dominated socialist regimes of its time, pledged freedom from the chains of capitalism and fascism, yet frowned at the same time upon all forms of spontaneous self-expression. Only films adhering to the specific credo of Socialist Realism were acceptable. (1)
While only marginally known in the West, among East Germans Die Legende is arguably one of the most popular GDR films ever made and gained cult status after it was banned by the government. (2) Ulrich Plenzdorf, author of the immensely popular Die neuen Leiden desjungen W. (1972), wrote the screenplay for the film and in 1979 was permitted to publish it as a book entitled Legende vorn Gluck ohne Ende. (3) These two works by Plenzdoff, which are fairly critical of politics in the GDR, are true gems that somehow slipped through the cracks. Literature in the GDR was supposed to be oriented towards content instead of form. Cinema has a higher degree of visibility as it reaches more people than does literature. As a result, Plenzdorf's books managed to escape the scrutiny that Die Legende received when it broke with GDR cultural policy. (4)
Under Walter Ulbricht and the December 1965 Eleventh Plenary of the Central Committee of the SED, the artistic climate was largely frozen. (5) When Erich Honecker came to power six years later with the promise of a more liberal climate for the arts, a thaw in the Kulturpolitik was expected to follow. (6) Honecker declared that as long as art and literature were firmly grounded in socialist thinking, no subject was taboo. (7) Then, in November 1976, when the songwriter Wolf Biermann was expatriated from the GDR, everyone knew that the liberal climate Honecker had supposedly ushered in had come to a standstill.
Most scholars characterize Die Legende as an example of the somewhat belated arrival of Western sexual liberation to the East or as part of the German Neo-Romantic movement in the GDR. They argue that Paul represents the rational and Paula the irrational. If one were to critique merely the gender issues in this film, as some scholars have done, one would be ignoring the loud proclamation of true love--albeit with a twist of romantic irony. For a Western viewer without knowledge of the intricacies of East German life, the film seems simply to reflect everyday life in the GDR with all the hopes and frustrations that accompany it. But for East Germans, the love story between Paul and Paula serves as a thin veil for the director's political analysis and critique of the GDR.
Good Bye, Lenin! is also a depiction of life in the GDR, and is also a love story, but it depicts love between mother and son as well as between the son and his girlfriend. (8) It is set immediately before and after the Fall of the Wall, one of the most memorable times in the lives of former GDR citizens today. Thus the director felt he owed those citizens not merely a quality film, but a film in which they would recognize their former lives, down to the last genuine detail. (9) This film, as the title suggests, constitutes a formal goodbye to their former lives in a former land and to Marxist/Leninist ideals.
The theme of loss and reconstruction is explored in both Die Legende and Good Bye Lenin!. The GDR, under strict Soviet supervision, began imploding some five-story turn-of-the-century apartment buildings, Altbauten (or Mietskasernen) in East Berlin, and shoved its citizens into the newly built, Russian-designed, communist-approved Plattenbauten. (10) The Altbauten in Die Legende are constantly being demolished, and the street on which Paul and Paula live is always under construction. In one of the first scenes we witness Paul throwing dishes out of the window of his Altbau into the Hinterhof (courtyard). Clearly, it is time for cleaning house: After he discovers his wife stroking the naked leg of another man in his bed, he tells her they are going to start over and, having so obviously failed thus far, he promises her many things. Paul, after all, is beginning a new life as a well-paid upper-level bureaucrat in the socialist system, where he literally gets dealt a hand of cards every morning when he gets picked up in a shiny black car full of fellow bureaucrats. Paul and his wife Ines move into a Plattenbau (aka Neubau), but nothing really changes; she continues to cheat on him. Apparently the old bourgeois lifestyle, deemed decadent, was quickly replaced by a neo-bourgeois lifestyle, dipped in Communist red, and stifling everything new and different.
Reconstruction is going on, but nothing is really changing. The strict obedient creed of socialism in the GDR made it look like things were progressing when in fact they were not. In contrast to Paul, Paula continues living in her Altbau despite the construction going on around her. (11) With Paula and Paul we have the two sides of the GDR at that time, the old crumbling but unique buildings versus the new uniform faceless ones, coexisting opposite one another. Paul is usually dressed in a military uniform or business suit, living the cookie-cutter...
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