Hello, Lenin!(Goodbye Lenin!)(Movie Review)

Ostalgia. it means nostalgia for the East, and 13 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, it's changing the way Germans view life in the former communist German Democratic Republic. Across the country, and especially the old East, tourist shrines are popping up commemorating the defunct regime. Floods of newly eager visitors are snapping up socialist-era "relics" and souvenirs. One enterprising business group even plans to cash in on the craze by opening a GDR theme park in Berlin--complete with surly East German border guards who rummage through your belongings, looking for counterrevolutionary "contraband."

So hot is "Ost," in fact, that trendy Berliners have taken to throwing so-called East parties. Guests dressed in the blue shirts of the former Communist Youth Organization cavort in halls bedecked with GDR flags. They quaff Rotkppchen, or Little Red Riding Hood, a sparkling wine produced by one of the few East German companies to survive the transition to capitalism, and they dance to the tunes of a bygone era. If only the band were named Erich and the Jackbooters, after Herr Honecker, the last East German dictator.

The star in this season of silliness is a new movie, currently breaking German box-office records. "Goodbye Lenin!" directed by Wolfgang Becker, is the story of a son's love for his mother, told against the backdrop of the toppling of the wall. The mother, a devout communist, suffers a heart attack upon seeing her son beaten by the police during an antigovernment protest rally in the autumn of 1989. She falls into a coma and remains unconscious as Germany reunites, whereupon she awakes. Fearing that the shock of the new political reality might prove fatal, the son opts instead to pretend that life remains as she knew it under the GDR, all within the confines of her home.

Since its release in February, more than 5 million Germans have seen "Goodbye Lenin!" There was even a special screening for the German Parliament. Audiences delight at the son's ingenuity in re-creating a vanished world. In one scene he arranges for a group of children, dressed up in the uniforms of the Young Pioneers, to sing official communist songs at his mother's birthday party. In another he stuffs Dutch pickles into old jars bearing official GDR labels and pours Coca- Cola into old East German Club-Cola bottles. When the mother notices a large advertisement for Coke outside her window and seems perplexed that there are more Opels in the streets than sputtering Trabants, the official people's car of the East, her son offers an explanation worthy of the former Iraqi misinformation minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. In the face of growing disenchantment with capitalism in the West, he tells her, East Germany has opened its borders to those seeking exile. His inspired fabrications are confirmed each evening by the television news program "Aktuelle Kamera," compiled by the son with the help of a friend and historical photographs of Honecker and his party chiefs. In this film version of the turning point in German history, the wall does indeed fall--thanks to the collapse of the West.

Katrina Suss, who plays the movie's heroine, thinks "Goodbye Lenin!" would not have been the success five years ago that it is today. Memories of the old regime were then too painful. But times have changed, and young east Germans, in particular, are less haunted by history. As for "Wessies," they think commie kitsch is cool. Elke Matz sees evidence every day. She has ...