Deconstructing Ostalgia: The national past between commodity and simulacrum in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye Lenin! (2003)

Abstract

Using Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye Lenin!, this paper analyses the phenomenon of Ostalgia through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theories on simulation and simulacra. It argues that Becker’s film deconstructs the nostalgic transformation and commodification of the socialist national past in the post-communist age by exposing the deep collective needs to which this phenomenon responds. Confronted with the ideological dominance of Western ideology after 1989, the characters in the film struggle to render their own past relevant by creating alternative personal and collective narratives hinting at how the core of one’s identity is intrinsically bound to both personal memory and to the collective past that frames this personal memory.