Hacker Cinema
Good Bye, Lenin!
2003 · Film · 121 min
Directed by Wolfgang Becker
Alex Kerner's mother was in a coma while the Berlin wall fell. When she wakes up he must try to keep her from learning what happened (as she was an avid communist supporter) to avoid shocking her which could lead to another heart attack.
8 positive5 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.
I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)
So much for GPT-5.
I'm not a movie critic, so it's hard not to be vague, I was just reporting on my own take and experience.
For a better arthouse movie, someone in this thread mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! which was indeed excellent.
For better directing and acting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin used real characters in a real situation, though with a dark-comedic take. Absolutely awesome.
There are several other interesting Berlin/East Germany films worth looking at. There is a very old and silly one called "One Two Three". It involves the Coca Cola. Not that it is a great film, but rather a Western/American take on Berlin at the time. Much better is "Good bye Lenin." Very haunting and peculiar. Not Berlin/East Germany but in the same vein is 'The Unbearable lightness of Being'.
grass is always greener =) I remember watching the movie Good Bye Lenin! (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/) and thinking how nice things would be if we had just one choice for every product in the supermarket, so I wouldn't research each one and what made them different, and decide which I wanted, only to have them disappear. I get why products made by a state enterprise with no regard to performance or consumer reception would make for a bad time, though. Store generic/"white label" brands do somewhat meet this niche. But I dig that minimalist, text or line drawing only esthetic!
Yep, they come with the whole shebang of self-issuing passports for their empire, and hoarding weapons for the next insurrection. Their fervor for the German Reich is absolutely comedic to Germans, especially the insistence on it having never ceased to exist. On the other hand their readiness to commit violent crimes (including readily assaulting city officials and law enforcement officers) is justifiably causing concern.
These people behave as though grandpa woke up after a 60 year sleep and he doesn’t know yet that Germany lost the war or that the wall has fallen (like that Germany movie Good Bye Lenin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! )
It’s the old trope of a family dinner where the eldest suddenly starts reminiscing how great things in the “3rd Reich” were. If I may draw comparisons then I hear that over in the US the Americans then I hear that similar situations are experienced during a thanksgiving dinner, when a certain relative shows up.
Relics from the past that refuse to disappear.
Reminds me of the "Goodbye Lenin" film, really good watch.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357
Reminds me of the film Good Bye, Lenin. A kid has to trick his mom when she comes out of a coma to believe that East Germany still exists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIjSaHUKD5I
Not a war, yet still a pretty big happening, a paradigm shift that can be very traumatic too - East Germany from socialism into capitalism and unification. How you hide that? A good and funny movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin! :
"The story follows a family in East Germany; the mother (Saß) is dedicated to the socialist cause and falls into a coma in October 1989, shortly before the November revolution. When she awakens eight months later in June 1990, her son (Brühl) attempts to protect her from a fatal shock by concealing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. "
> Tbh, taking the example of a country that didn't disappear, very few people in France would know who the first Frenchman in space was.
At least in Germany, Alexander Gerst
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alexander_Gerst&oldid=864298516
who is currently on the ISS
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_International_Space_Station_expeditions&oldid=865024994#Current_expedition
has quite celebrity status. Also "nearly everybody" in East Germany knows the Siegmund Jähn from the article and because of the movie "Good Bye, Lenin!", he also became quite well-known in West Germany (see my post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18268728). I openly admit that I had to look up the first West German and second German in space (Ulf Merbold; he is also mentioned in the Zeit article). In my defense, this was before my time. On the other hand, I can immediately additionally name Gerhard Thiele (SRTM - Shuttle Radar Topography Mission)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gerhard_Thiele&oldid=767769685
and Thomas Reiter (ISS)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_Reiter&oldid=860352159
So from my "sister posts" seems to me that in Germany, astronauts have more appreciation from fellow-countrymen than in many other countries.
The German movie "Good Bye, Lenin!"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Bye,_Lenin!
made Sigmund Jähn pretty well-known in West Germany, too. In the story of the movie, the protagonist convinces a taxi driver (who is or resembles the cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space and Alex's childhood hero) to act in a false news report as the new leader of East Germany and to give a speech about opening the borders to the West.
If you can read German, read the following article at Heise about the 40 year celebration of Sigmund Jähn's space flight:
> https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Ich-hatte-einfach-Glueck-Vor-40-Jahren-flog-Sigmund-Jaehn-ins-All-4141535.html
On 1999, the German band "Die Prinzen" (which was quite popular in the 90s and 00s) created a song "Wer ist Sigmund Jähn?" to celebrate this "unknown cosmonaut":
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY6uRERGWBw
Great suggestion!
Not merely microphones though, but also privacy at a whole.
The other reason is the WWII history.
Das Leben der Anderen is a very good movie with a sublime cast (including Sebastian Koch), but hardly entertaining. A somewhat entertaining movie about the GDR (DDR) is Goodbye Lenin [1], starring Daniel Brühl (Bruehl). Both movies are primary dramatic though.
I can also recommend any movie starring Jürgen Vogel [2] (Juergen). The subjects movies he's in touches upon are often thought-provoking. Although also, usually drama. I can highly recommend German cinema, I hold the authenticity of German cinema in high regard.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/
[2] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0900915/
The article title is a play on the film name "Goodbye Lenin", a comedy about the fall of the East German state and reunification.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/
Once you embark on the quest to learn japanese, you begin to look for other avenues to hone in on those skills -- whether its finding other people who speak it, or in some people's cases, play on japanese gaming servers, or skyping/hangouts and converse with japanese people in full immersion. After that you want to start reading more literature, so you do what anyone would do and search for japanese books on Amazon. After a while amazon starts offering you remarkable suggestions based on what the majority of japanese speaking people are reading.
You would be surprised how much you could learn on your own!
My case it was german. I was so fascinated with the german language, and germany as a whole, in part I must sadly admit because I was such an avid fan of WW2 history. I actually tried to go the traditional route, and I hated it. I noticed one time some germans playing counterstrike and other MMORPG's I was playing. I got to know them better, in part because of their extreme delight in my ability to say a few things in german. Then it turned into ventrilo/teamspeak sessions, which then turned into me wanting to read actual german books, then it went on to learning about Otto Von Bismarck, German Reunification, the East/West cultural divide, watching foreign german films such as Der Unterfall, Das Leben der Anderen, Good Bye, Lenin!, effects German engineering such as Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler and von Braun, which led me down the path of looking into german businesses, especially the ones that are here in my own home state (which are many), it was so much fun!
edit: I realize you qualified it with 'business' people, implying they won't see the value of learning the other things, but since business people is a large group (of which I myself can be considered a part of) I imagine there are others like me.
Maybe it's a German thing; it reminded me of "Goodbye Lenin!" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301357/