Bye Lenin! When One Views Term Paper

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For example, Roger Ebert describes Christiane in this way, "A loyal communist named Christiane (Katrin Sass) sees her son, Alex (Daniel Bruhl), beaten by the police on television, suffers an attack of some sort and lapses into a coma" (Ebert).

Whereas Stephen Jolly of the Australian Socialist Party writes, "Christiane is a socialist, loyal to the Party, but not scared to oppose the Stalinist leadership via letter campaigns and lobbying bureaucrats on issues such as the shoddy goods produced by a bureaucratically mismanaged workers' state (Jolly).

The obvious difference between the two character descriptions is one sees her as a communist and one sees her as a socialist, which begs the question, is there a difference between a communist and a socialist? What are the implications of each label? Are there nuances? To briefly answer the question(s), yes, of course there are. And to unpack this point just a little further, Jolly amends (maybe even justifies) her loyalist's mentality by implying that she wasn't blindly loyal, she did offer the GDR, as Alex mentions in the movie, "constructive criticism" via letters.

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Ebert simply calls her loyal communist without mentioning her "constructive criticism."

Why is this important? It's important because it proves that so much of how one sees the film is based upon one's own prejudices and biases (politically, socially, etc.). To a proud, patriotic American this movie is the conceptual equivalent of a movie extolling the virtues of the monarchistic rule of King George III. For an American viewer it's difficult to understand the import of a resistance to commerce and capitalism and a poignant nostalgia for communism. But again, if one extracts the politics out of the equation and focuses on the thematic element of living through/with change -- changing careers (working as a cab driver or at Burger King), a change in lifestyle (falling in love), a change in the family dynamic (losing a mother, while reuniting with a father) one can begin to appreciate what Good Bye Lenin was cleverly and compellingly examining.

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