Post-Wende Films: A Comparison of "Good Bye, Lenin!" and "The Lives of Others"

I found this article on MUSE that you all might be interested in. It compares the two highly influential post-Wende (after the  fall of the Berlin wall) films, "Good Bye, Lenin!", which we saw this week, and "The Lives of Others." While both were filmed within the last 10 years and focus on the former GDR and  German unification, this article observes how the films differ greatly "in cinematic strategies, ideological positioning of the spectator, and the narrative function of gender."


Most interesting for me was the discussion on gender and how it created alternate views of the former East.


While the narrative and cinematic organization of The Lives of Others provide the viewer with an ideologically distinct, nostalgic reconstruction of a Cold War narrative of the GDR, in which the female protagonist and the GDR are clearly vilified, Good Bye, Lenin!’s narrative and cinematic strategies position the viewer as simultaneously sympathetic and critical, constructing the female protagonist as the site of contradiction between real existing socialism and the utopian impulse at its heart.