Ariane Kerner: You were in a coma. Eight months ago.

Christiane Kerner: Eight months? What happened?

Ariane Kerner: Yeah, it was...

Alexander Kerner: It was in October, in the supermarket. There was this enormous queue and it was really hot and you just passed out.

Christiane Kerner: In October?

Alexander Kerner: It was a really hot October. At the time.
[last lines]

[spoiler]

Alexander Kerner: [voiceover] My mother outlived the GDR by three days. I believe it was a good thing she never learned the truth. She died happy. She wanted us to scatter her ashes to the winds. That's prohibited in Germany, both East and West. But we didn't care.

[launches rocket]

Alexander Kerner: She's up there somewhere now. Maybe looking down at us. Maybe she sees us as tiny specks on the Earth's surface, just like Sigmund Jähn did back then. The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother.
Denis: Denis

[handing Alex a video cassette]

Denis: It's my best production ever. A pity your Mom will be the only audience...
Sigmund Jähn: Where to?

Alexander Kerner: Wannsee

Sigmund Jähn: I know what you think. Everyone does. But I'm not him.
Dr. Wagner: You must protect her from any kind of excitement. And I do mean any kind, Mr. Kerner.

Alexander Kerner: Any kind of excitement.

Dr. Wagner: It would be life-threatening.

Alexander Kerner: And this here?

[Shows the doctor a newspaper reading "Good Luck, Germany. Yes to Reunification"]

Alexander Kerner: Wouldn't you call this exciting?
Alexander Kerner: All this stuff has to go. Are the old curtains in the cellar?

Ariane Kerner: You can't be serious.
Denis: Eighth floor?

Alexander Kerner: Yup.

Denis: Elevator?

Alexander Kerner: Broken.

Denis: Shit.

Alexander Kerner: You can say that again.
Alexander Kerner: On the evening of October 7, 1989 several hundred people got together for some evening exercise and marched for the right to go for walks without the Berlin Wall getting in their way.
Alexander Kerner: The future lay in our hands. Uncertain, yet promising.
Sigmund Jähn: Socialism doesn't mean live behind a Wall. Socialism means reach the others and live with the others.

Good Bye Lenin! Quotes

Extended Reading

Good Bye Lenin! short comments

Clifford 2021-11-18 08:01:26

The GDR continues in a space of 15 square meters
Godfrey 2022-03-26 09:01:04

A very touching film, unlike that kind of high-level Western discourse, it is warm and even subversive. The core is a lie fabricated by the son to perpetuate socialism so that the mother will not be stimulated to live longer, but it has completed the double negation of the self through the double mapping of the film medium, deceived in the film (whether or not the mother already knew Son of White Lies) is the mother of East Germany, and the movie in the theater points to the real West or the be-West audience, it becomes a mirror: Who is the liar? Who is deceived? The son's seemingly silly and comical behavior and the mother's seeming obsession with the past are just one side of this huge parable, the other side of which falls in the post-Cold War world where capitalism has triumphed. You thought the Lenin statue was really taken down, and flying through Berlin by helicopter seems to be waving goodbye to this once oriental world. In fact, it is precisely the ghost of Lenin’s statue, which is gone, and this ghost will always be here. , it will keep returning to recruit the soul of capitalism. In this way, the film surpassed itself