Garbage Games: Postmodern Play in Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin!
My paper proposes the analysis of the film Goodbye Lenin! as an example of a postcommunist strain of postmodernism. My main thesis—that Becker purposely depicts a playful and light East Germany after the fall to counter the Sartreian nausea that accompanies dead ideologies—is informed by the concept of implausible "grand narratives" as suggested by Lyotard; by the character of postmodern space, as illustrated by Jencks; and by the workings of simulacra, as proposed by Baudrillard, among other theorists. I investigate the process through which garbage becomes simulacra, and vice versa, as a symptom of the blurring and collapsing of the binary antipodes of socialist and capitalist grand narratives. Furthermore, I explore how history is intentionally mummified and hollowed in Goodbye Lenin!, and how then the ahistorical subject deals with the loss of his tether to the past. The film presents a postmodern rewriting of traditional mythological models of the Biblical Fall and redemption; however, through the process of deconstructing the binaries, it removes the seriousness or shock from the allegory and replaces it with the playful ongoing symbolic exchange between the fragments of former narratives. This film, as well as Eastern European postmodernism in general, tries to release or cope with the trauma of rapid historical transformation; Goodbye Lenin! attempts to turn the shock of fractured ideologies into play.
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