Transcript
Speaker: Hello, hello, everyone. Your ears do not deceive you. This is his Chase coming in ahead of the intro music to notify you that Sam had some, we'll call them moderate mic issues during this recording session, but you've taken a firm stand. Rather than use generative AI to sort of overdub his voice with Donald Duck or to fill it in with other audio,
Speaker: We would never imagine erasing that indomitable and imperturbable spirit of human creativity. So we ask you to understand, to keep that in mind, and to still enjoy listening.
Speaker: See in a sec.
Speaker: Welcome to Death is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. This is Chase here with my co-host Sam. And today's movie, Goodbye Lenin, from 2003 by Wolfgang Becker, is a movie about the end to a brother war. That's right, the brother war between the BDR and the DDR, that is the West German Republic and the East German Republic.
Speaker: republic And i you know I had not seen this. This a Sam sort of recommended movie. And I think part of our goal here was to expand. Obviously, Gen X is an Anglo category, but to expand our reach beyond just the Anglosphere and to think about what it is that this moment means, this end of history moment.
Speaker: In obviously a place where it was particularly important, Germany, because you have the end to this longstanding separation. And it's at this point that i must tell a story, which is that listeners may or may not know that I spent a lot of time in Germany.
Speaker: And I remember being in a Goethe-Institut classroom in, i want to say it was Freiburg, and we were doing a listening exercise, you know, the sort of testing your ability to understand spoken German.
Speaker: And we listened to this radio program that I do believe was was a real recording of a radio program. And they were just asking people whether they were happy that the wall had fallen. And, you know, being raised in the sort of triumphalist West, it was like, well, you know, of course everyone's going be very happy. And this very like angry old East German man gets on.
Speaker: It's like, oh, it's awful. you know It's terrible. it i Things were so much better back then. And you know I think now this is maybe a bit better known because of the IFD's rise, the alternative for Germany's rise in East Germany. you know That's where a lot of its voting pool has traditionally come from over the last decade.
Speaker: But at that time, it was really a surprise to me. So was interesting to have that moment called back. I sort of did... you know If we want to talk about Y2K filmic, ah kind of formal devices, it like shot into my brain and unlocked the memory as like a brief a brief scene and then shot me back into watching Goodbye Lenin. Because it's a movie that is both very critical of East Germany and very kind of wistful about it at the same time. And it's it's ambivalent. It's a movie about the ambivalence of the Wiedervereinigung, the ah reunification of Germany.
Speaker: So yeah, what made you bring it, Sam? it It also sort of gave me a bit of a Prussian flashback to being in a museum. I think in Berlin when I was about 13 or 12 and seeing... It these there was like a children's museum for the victims of communism.
Speaker: I suppose the Angela Merkel government had ah erected 2009 and 2010. whatever at night and time um And there was this sort of crayon drawing collated by like 20 or 30 German children.
Speaker: And it was like East Berlin, West Berlin. West Berlin was like sports cars and like men with aviator sunglasses. Yeah, all drawn in like a childish style. The sun was like a circle with like big rays coming out of it.
Speaker: And then there was like a barbed wire fence. And then they were just like... like just like zombie looking Aussies just like drawing like black everyone was drawing like black crayon so yeah I i had this flashback this is kind of very like triumphalist German ah interpretation of West and East Germany I think prior to yeah that sort of realisation post Merkel that perhaps all was not well in the the which are a public So yeah, it's it's ah why did I bring it a film?
Speaker: I think it was assigned watching when I was at sixth form, about more than 10 years ago, ah from a history teacher. And so yeah, it's my first rewatch since I was about 18 years old.
Speaker: But i just thought it was, yeah, like perhaps an interesting relic in the sense that it's not like widely that famous in America and the UK. And then also, I think i reckoned I remembered it as being much more triumphalist than it actually is. And I think it was initially assigned to me as a piece of watching as an 18-year-old because of its triumphalism.
Speaker: And yet, actually retrospectively re-watching it, it's much more ambiguous, I think, about its assessment of reunification. Well, I think what what strikes me most about the movie before maybe we even talk about the plot is how much of the plot hinges on how cool it is that Berlin's going to get to be a party city.
Speaker: So I know at least when I got to visit, you know, 10 years ago or something, it's the whole thing about, you know, Berghain, will you be able to go in? Will you not be able to go in? Are you going to wear enough hip-ass black to be able to go in? Of course, I didn't try because i was you know i'm I'm an ant on the sort of pimply face of the globe, and I had no place there. But it it's an interesting bookend because I was watching, i don't know, you know if if podcast listeners only hear me for this, which would be the case for most of you,
Speaker: ah you're going to think all I do is watch sort of like half-baked YouTube videos, which is true to an extent, but not entirely. And I was watching one of these recently about, it might have been like Deutsche Welle or something like that, about how all of the German clubs have to, they don't have to close, but many of these sort of er-clubs from the period the movie is set in are closing.
Speaker: And there's a way in which that is like the final foreclosure of the dream of freedom that the movie does hold out to a certain extent, right? Like, The idea that, ah oh, we're going to have McDonald's on every corner. or We're going to have, ah you know, sort of abandoned homes that you can go into and find old East German food supplies that are super, super useful to you because you want to convince your mom that the wall didn't fall, blah, blah, blah. um So on, so forth.
Speaker: But all of that's gone now. And now you get all of the effects of West Germany winning without the cool club environment that, you know, initially promised you salvation. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. um In some ways, Berlin is is a sort of a millennial city, right? It represents this dream of millennial freedom.
Speaker: yeah that is built by Gen X and Boomers, I suppose, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, earlier on, but you know really comes to the fore in global consciousness in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I was just like, yeah, re-watching this film was suddenly struck by the... ah Do you know the novel Perfection by Machenso Latresino? No.
Speaker: Yeah, so Fitzgerald book about these two Italian millennials who, after graduation, moved in sort of digital nomad in Berlin during the 2010s. A fate worse than hell itself, yeah. Yes, and it's a sort of send-up of how hollow, you know, they're sort of going for the cheap rent and, you know, sort of sexual freedom and left-wing politics.
Speaker: of Berlin sort of, what, you know, 20 years post the wall falling. And it all ends up being sort of strangely hollow and disappointing. And it was interesting to sort of think of that book as an afternote or footnote to what we see in Goodbye Lenin, which is the kind of birth of that promise 20 years prior, right?
Speaker: But what's so fascinating about the movie is that it bakes that ambiguity in. I mean, granted, it's made 2003, so it's not like the wall falls and he starts filming or anything like that. But it's a movie in which, you know to be very clear to everyone if you haven't seen it, essentially...
Speaker: This woman has a heart attack or or is shocked when she sees her son participating in anti-East German government protests. And she's sort of a busybody who's constantly writing letters to the Supreme you know Council of the Day-Day-Air saying like, the the dirndles that you're making for the for the maidens who are, you know... They're not sufficiently socialistic enough.
Speaker: yeah. You made them all in size 18, but because of the way that grain rationing has changed, they're all size 16 now, so this is unacceptable. You know, we need this percentage of 16s. So it's a very... She and herself is a very funny character because she sort of buys into the project And becomes almost the equivalent of like someone who goes to town council meetings and like just berates the council about various concerns they have. But in a socialist environment where it just means writing letters and being like the quotas are all wrong.
Speaker: So she's on board, sort of, right? And she sees her son in these protests and she's, oh my God, my son, no. But she hits her head and goes into a coma. And of course, wouldn't you know it, the wall falls.
Speaker: Who could have seen it coming? The wall falls down, boom, you know, ah Humpty Dumpty, so on and so forth. And she needs to, or I should say this, she's delicate enough at this stage that he's afraid to let her know that, you know, everything is gone. And so the farce of the movie is him trying to preserve the myth of East Germany's existence and while you know McDonald's ads are going up, Western cars are coming through, the the clothing styles are changing, and all of these things.
Speaker: But because of that narrative device, the movie necessarily preserves a certain kind of ambiguity because it associates... the you know East Germany with the mother, who is you know a good character. She's not a bad lady. She's well-meaning. She represents in some ways like the best of the socialist promise. you know like We're going to do central planning and everyone is actually going to get the dirndl that fits them properly. you know so Even in the world of the movie, it's not as if the coming of the West means nothing but freedom. And I think what's very important is actually that the freedom represented by the West ends up being consumer culture. Like the protagonist's sister immediately gets a job.
Speaker: And where does she get a job? Burger King, right? Who does she start dating? The sort of like ideal Berlin man, which is to say a guy who loves being naked and having sex and doing drugs more than anything else on earth, right?
Speaker: Yeah, he's always like Euro trash German archetype, sort of like big baggy sort of balloon trousers, parachute trousers and ah small tiny mustache. like Like you know that he's got one of those tapestries that's just sort of various fragmented colors that he really likes to sit in front of. Maybe it glows in the dark.
Speaker: And so even in the movie, i mean, it's definitely not a movie that's like the Stasi, perfect. We loved him. You know, it's not saying that, but it also recognizes that the kind of freedom offered by the West is not necessarily going to be like the ideal promises of socialism. And in in fact, I think that you can kind of see that in how the movie chooses to present those freedoms. It's squatting.
Speaker: It's going to clubs. It's eating Burger King. It's drinking you know Coca-Cola. And frankly, above all, it's being able to have fun. like That is actually the main thing is like, oh, now you can flip off the stony-faced soldiers and they can't like put you in a gulag.
Speaker: And like that is actually what the promise of capitalism means in that moment. I think that's kind of what it meant to Gen X, to to be honest, ah generally speaking. Yeah, there's no It's not a particularly, like, a movie with much particular political valence. I think it's more interesting in the comedic trope than it is in making some kind of sustained or distinct, like, ah commentary upon the pre-quo-quo of capitalism versus communism as offered in sort of 1989,
Speaker: But it makes me think of, you know that, what's that song by um the Scorpions? It's like, oh, the wind of change, Scorpions. You know that song?
Speaker: ah don't. Oh, God. Okay. we know let's Let's have a little dramatic reading here. So Scorpions is this band who I believe they are originally from Germany, I think West Germany.
Speaker: And they really came up. in, i want to say, yeah, this song is 1991. So it's just, you know, basically as as these things are are happening and it's all about, oh the winds of change are blowing and everything is going to be different now. And there was this theory for a long time that they were secretly funded by the CIA. I don't know that that's true, but it may as well be true. You know, so this is,
Speaker: ah Wind of Change. I follow the Moskva down to Gorky Park, listening to the Wind of Change in August summer night. Soldiers passing by, listening to the Wind of Change. And then there's whistling.
Speaker: The world is closing in. And did you ever think that we could be so close like brothers? The future is in the air. I can feel it everywhere. Blowing with the Wind of Change. And so it's like, oh, can you feel it? It's happening. And what is that change? That change is putting on blue jeans and going to rock concerts because that is the future. Or like, yeah do you know the um the Australian TV show Danger 5?
Speaker: I do not. I don't deign to watch colonial television. Come up Audiences weigh in. Does this prove that Sam is out of touch or does it prove that I am an effete fool?
Speaker: But um Danger 5 is this Australian show in which it's basically World War II, but it's the 60s. In other words, it's in the form of a 60s spy program, right? But it's still World War II for some reason.
Speaker: And it's it's a you know kind of absurdist comedy. But there's a great moment in season two where they visit the Soviet Union And the Soviets have the sort of hall of the Americas. And the horrors of the Soviets are just like a 50s suburban family sitting around. And like the the television like breaks or the dog dies or something. And the little girl robot's like, Papa, the dog is dead. And the dad goes, we will just buy new one. And money starts falling out of the ceiling. And like you can see, i think the the movie's anxiety and also pleasure that it takes in that moment of change, much like the Scorpion song, is sort of like...
Speaker: that that fear as expressed in Danger 5. There's just going to be money everywhere, and it's just going to be the freedom that comes with money. I mean, one of the key parts to the movie is that he wants to exchange his East German currency for the new West German currency, and he goes into the bank And, you know, the sort of, like, blonde-haired teller is like, you're a few days too late. Unfortunately, I cannot exchange the currency for you. And he's like, no, but, like, you Westies came in here and now are telling me what my currency is worth? that what What is that all about? And he's like, this is the bureaucracy. This is the way that it works. And it's this wonderful moment in which he has to confront the fact that, like,
Speaker: The freedoms brought by the West are not just the anarchy of the squat and the anarchy of the dance floor. It also means, like, you know, Willy Brandt is bringing his special brand of technocracy to the East. Well, it's probably the closest we get to any sort of a mission of shock therapy, right?
Speaker: And admittedly, a listener can call me out if I'm wrong on this. I think East Germany got off relatively lightly on shock therapy compared to Russia a few years later, um yeah when sort of currency controls were liberalised, etc. and yeah The price mechanism set in.
Speaker: But yeah, it's it's probably the the only moment we get that... sort of puts you into that position of arbitrariness, right? That this is, this is this we've gone from one arbitrary system to another, both of which are of absurd in different ways.
Speaker: But yeah, this is kind of arbitrary deadline that the main character doesn't meet. And suddenly his, what's it, his mother's, it's like 20, 30 years of sort of savings under the mattress. Just totally useless. Yeah, suddenly just rendered like completely, completely, like, yeah, it's it's it's government fear gone.
Speaker: No, that's the wind of change. like the wind The wind of change is that your currency doesn't it doesn't mean anything anymore. Yeah, it's I think that part of the reason I appreciate the movie, and I think I said at the beginning that like it it didn't... This may have been off mic, I can't remember, but didn't totally land with me because part of it becomes kind of a story about finding his father, which for the purposes of this podcast is maybe a little less interesting. I guess it is interesting that the dad fled, right? They all thought that the dad...
Speaker: Maybe he had, like, he disappears one day before the wall falls when they're children, the main character and his sister. And there's this thought that, oh, you know, he did he actually flee? Did he die? Whatever. And they find out he actually is now has a second family on the other side of the wall. And it's like... Their mother tells them that he he has an a affair.
Speaker: And he's a West German woman. That's the... Oh, right, but he goes on a conference. Yeah, he leaves for a conference. Yeah, has effect, yeah. But I guess that's interesting insofar as it does act to represent sort of like the fact that people did want to escape.
Speaker: Because obviously one of the lies he tells his mom, right? Because it comes to a point where like he can't hide it anymore, right? He's in this terrible situation. He's making these these films using his friend who's a director who allows him to make these fake television broadcasts that are, you know, just guys getting up and being like, another successful day in East Germany. and we've you know basic Everyone is very jealous about... He does a fake broadcast saying that the East Germans actually invented Coca-Cola.
Speaker: ah that like That the reason that she's seeing Coca-Cola in the East is because they they the West finally admitted that the East Germans actually invented Coca-Cola. And so it gets to this... Yeah, they have to like concede the passing, don't they? Yeah, they have no choice. So there's a point later on where this is kind of all coming to a head and he has no choice but to like bring the worlds together. And so to explain the influx of new people, he makes a fake broadcast saying that um the the refugees are fleeing the West to come to the East. And out of like a brotherly spirit, East Germany is now absorbing them. So of course, the opposite of what actually happened with his father.
Speaker: And so it it does take seriously, I guess you could say, the the the difficulties there. But it it's willing to be playful with them, which also does feel kind of like a certain certain kind of like, not quite pastiche, but like Gen X postmodern response to the trauma. Because like, I know joy comes out of the moment, but it's obviously very traumatic for Germany. I mean, look at the IFD. Like, it's not it's not as if this stuff has stopped being relevant, you know?
Speaker: the The main sort of like dagger I want to dig into the heart of this movie, which is a far far more violent metaphor than I need, um is for me, it is most interesting as a stand-in for that generational trauma, both German and not German. Because if you think about Gen X as a as a generation that's growing up on like threads, the potential of nuclear holocaust, the SALT treaties, you know Nixon's opening up of China, all of this sort of geopolitical wizardry that defines...
Speaker: all foreign policy and therefore a lot of domestic policy for an enormous portion of the 20th century and certainly all of the lives of Gen X, right? Like for the boomers, they, yes, the Cold War basically begins when they're born, sure.
Speaker: But there's a way in which their proximity to World War II and their parents' involvement in that conflict for the most part gives them a, um I don't know, like a feeling of one foot in one world and one in the other. i mean, certainly culturally, if not politically. But Yeah, I think that's very true. like i I remember reading Christopher Hitchens when I was about 18. It's quite embarrassing. um But it was it was notable that there was a line in it, something about like he he said that his the biggest trauma he'd faced in his life was that he'd missed the Second World War.
Speaker: yeah yeah and as As a boomer. I think Hitchens was born in like 45. ah Yeah. ah The biggest trauma in his life was coming to the realisation of the War. The Blitz! Oh, I missed the Blitz! No! Yeah. I generally do think that's ah an abiding concern for that generation. i mean, to the extent that like a lot of people still use the Second World War as smokescreen or an excuse when it comes to criticising the boomers. They're like, well, they served in the war. It's like...
Speaker: Yeah, whereas Gen X is totally outside of that. I mean, if you if you're born in 1970, you've missed the summer of love. World War II is now several decades behind. By the time you're born, the Cold War has actually now sort of become colder, right? This is the era of relative disarmament.
Speaker: Yeah, this is detente, right? This is Kissinger, right? Yeah, think the interesting thing is that you have the Tonten 70s, and actually the primitive geopolitical conflict moves from the Cold War to things like OPEC in the Middle East.
Speaker: So actually, the Middle East and things that aren't the Cold War, well, sort of peripheral to the Cold War become more important. And then by the time that Gen X are getting into their twenty s in the late 80s, you actually get nuclear conflicts sort of heating up again.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good point because obviously one of the early Gen X sort of bugbears is no NATO missiles in continental Europe, no you know nuclear power plants because that's part of nuclear technology, which is bad, and nuclear disarmament more broadly. right Those are kind of the three 80s continental European concerns that we would associate with the generation that you know we now know as Gen X.
Speaker: There go. For anyone who's interested, it's Deutschland 89, which is about the sort of pacifist younger son of a German military general when Reagan is standing off against the Soviet Union. Well, another way of thinking about it is that the, okay, let's take Germany and what we call like the years of lead, right? That's more of an Italian term.
Speaker: But you have this moment where we have groups like the Red Army Faction running around Germany. They're sending, this is true, i don't know if if listeners will know this, but the West German government is sending um orphans to live with pedophiles as part of this sort of like, did you know about this? There's a big... yeah go Yes, go and read the New Yorker article. Yeah, the New Yorker article that's very good.
Speaker: Well, the the content is very bad, but the article is pretty good. you know This moment of, sort of like on the one hand, violence, the age of the plane hijacking, the age of the bank robbery, our equivalent in the US s would be like the Weather Underground. In Britain, it was probably like grim Trotskyists you know doing entryism in the Labour Party. Well, the the obsession at this point right is for the West Germans of the Beamer generation is that it's a realization of like, holy shit. Yes.
Speaker: Yes. or you know If they weren't Nazis, they were complicit, or how complicit were they, or how adjacent were they? Yeah, I think that's the kind of abiding neurosis of the sort of German boomer generation. Yes.
Speaker: What the abiding neurosis of the German Gen X generation is, I don't know. Listen, I'm not a German Xer. don't know for sure.
Speaker: But my you know sort of historiographical belief is is that first of all, it's that it actually takes until the 80s for that full reckoning you're talking about to happen, Sam. So I'm not saying it doesn't happen to some degree with individual Germans, but the kind of movement to do something about it is actually a Gen X moment. I'm not saying Gen X is leading that charge, but it takes 40 years basically for them to be like,
Speaker: Oh, no, it might oh my grandfather was a camp physician at Dachau. These are real things that you know they had to deal with. Shout out, Here There Are Blueberries, a play that I helped out with to some extent, where you know in the 80s and early 90s, they need to then come to terms with this, which, side note, is why one of my favorite filmmakers, Reiner Werner Fassbinder, was not fully appreciated in his lifetime because he was there in 1969 being like,
Speaker: They're all Nazis. Don't you understand what this means? They're still Nazis. Nothing changed. um But it it takes kind of general German society almost until the point of the Wiede of Reineggen to really like accept that.
Speaker: And so I think a lot of this stuff, a lot of this nuclear stuff, NATO missile stuff, I think is in part a kind of delayed reaction to one, what we were just talking about with you know reckoning with the legacy of Nazism.
Speaker: Two, is rooted in pacifism, right? Very importantly, as you noted with that series a moment ago, right? Like, is rooted in getting yourself as far away from that as possible?
Speaker: Possibly pacifism is Gen X's abiding neurosis, right? If we think about the Zeinwender under Olaf Scholz in, what, 2022, 2023? Yeah. And the sort of psychological trauma it took Germany to sort of start rearming.
Speaker: I think potentially, you know, if Nazism, yeah. you know you're You're completely correct. And I would just add in there that the sort of green energy stuff, ah the fact that they made like a big sun their logo, I'm pretty sure, for this movement. like These are all the things you would do. yeah said Atomkraft, nein danke.
Speaker: Atomic energy, no thanks. I just have to bring this up is that this film was made 2002. Um, there's all these tangled German sort knots that I'm trying to undo in my head. The film was made in 2002. So it's what, it's 12, 13 years after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Speaker: we're in the middle of the Gerhard ah Schroeder administration, who is yeah effectively Germany's like Clinton or Blair. And yeah he's a social democrat, but he's capitulated to the third way. He's pushing through the Hartz reforms, which are sort of, you know, stripping workers' rights from labor from labour contracts, decimating the welfare system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: So, yeah, mean, interesting to this film is a kind of, what have we let ourselves in for in a sense that we... That kind of hope of maybe having kind of, ah yeah that they called it the socialism of a human face of Gorbachev. Or I can't remember the Czech prime minister in 1968, he also tried for a kind of socialism a human face. But I think perhaps there was quite a lot of these Germans who at reunification were hoping for a synthesis of West German capitalism and socialism, that some kind of middle way would be found.
Speaker: And yet by 2002, you're right in the midst of the Schroder's neoliberalization. And it must have been a disappointment, I think, for a large amount of ah East Germans. The irony is that Gerhard Schroder is completely in bed the Russians now.
Speaker: Yeah, so he's on the board of Rosneft. I think he the board for Nord Stream 2. Yeah, so somehow some strange, ironic sort of auroboros of...
Speaker: No, but that's the true neoliberal move. like like The truly committed neoliberal will do business with Russia. like do you know like if If you're actually like just committed to the Fukuyama vision of global liberalism, you're going to be like, yes.
Speaker: for this so like It seems like there's something deeply in the i don't want to say the German blood, but almost in the German blood where it's like... yeah The Germans who were like, yeah it's that German generation who broke with the Soviet Union, broke with Eastern Bloc, and yet inadvertently through campaigning for against nuclear power, they've tied themselves back up to Russia by being reliant on gas. Do you see what I'm getting at?
Speaker: No, I do. The German heart longs for the Tsar, I think is what you're saying. It does. there is it it All these like nice middle-class Germans campaigning against nuclear power. Well, where did it get them?
Speaker: I was going to say that the irony of that German movement to be like, we're going to go barefoot now and use the essential oils, um is that like that is also the origin of Nazism. I don't mean to turn this into you know a referendum on German cultural existence, but like a lot of these right-wing groups in the Weimar era and before were like...
Speaker: Vegetarians, Hitler, of course, famously vegetarian, nudists, they loved alternative medicine. They loved a tincture. They loved finding an element, getting a little bit of it, a little bit on the tongue, and you're like, my my crabs are gone that I have from all the sex I'm having.
Speaker: Yeah, Himmler was a ah homeopath. Yes, they in Germany, I'm pretty sure homeopathy is still treated like medicine, like actual medicine. I think it's Jonathan the English architectural critic, Jonathan Mead's called Nazis, armed bohemians.
Speaker: Yes, like you you must cross the street when the light turns green, but you must do it barefoot. you know like this is the You cannot wear shoes when you cross the street. No, it's true. And so the irony there is, of course, that this generation, i don't know if they fully get out from under that, but the point is that they're defined by, in a way, their own desire to find a third way between you know the fact that they're like,
Speaker: Yes, my grandfather was Richard Hus. Yes, unfortunately, my family is directly responsible for the internment and extermination of a lot of people.
Speaker: But on the other hand, needing to ah also, yeah, as you said, not just want to be ah America's puppet, the sort of skill and carb dis of how do i chart this way? and i think what the movie is reckoning with is sort of, oh, well, that that didn't go you know all that well. like I think, yeah I'm sure you know the band Rammstein, the famous kind of German metal band with the fire and the...
Speaker: hu Du hast mich. Yeah, that one. um But they're you know famously from East Germany and the sort of disgraced singer of the band Till something.
Speaker: ah you know They have a song, for example, from this period, maybe a little bit later, called Links, which is just a song about how they're like, no, we're still with the left in East Germany. We still believe in the old left of East Germany. Which is funny because like obviously they're not Stasi-aligned, but they represent that Ost-nostalgie, this nostalgia thing um for what was you know in the past. And i think the East German Gen Xers probably in particular get hit with this the hardest because the old ones don't seem to have faith that things are going to be that much better.
Speaker: But these guys are like, yeah. That's the interesting thing that the film does depict is that the Gen Xers in the film are embrace like rave culture and drugs and sex and the West. And it's that their parents, I presume, silent generation.
Speaker: Here are the ones who are griping almost immediately. But I think that that's, I find that sort of prescient. I don't know. ah Partly just because of germany Germany's political problems today, where the East is sort of a hotbed for the AFD, which you could basically see as like absorbing all of the bikers who got tired of doing meth all the time and are like, oh, we should probably try to affect political change.
Speaker: Well, it's interesting, isn't it, because De Linke also grew out of the old um East German and Socialist Party and sort of tried to make itself into a sort of Luxembourgish, more democratic socialist type sect. But now effectively De Linke is, I think, it strongholds a like kind of West German university system. Yeah, I think it's like Berlin, basically. Yeah, like maybe like Heidelberg or something. Well, because a lot of those voters are the ones who went IFD. And I mean, to me, this works really nicely as a metonymy for Gen X's general relationship to the end of history and political change. Because if I think about what's going on in the late eighty s very early 90s with Gen X,
Speaker: they're all about that rock and roll, right? like that's I mean, if we're talking about, like let's say, the average middle-class white American or European, they're like, my God, we've got music. We're inventing new drugs all the time.
Speaker: We got ecstasy now. We got raves, as we talked about with 24-hour party people. Things are looking up, at least in the sense that the freedom of expression promised me by the victory of the capitalist class of the West is finally upon us.
Speaker: And deindustrialization has not kicked in to the extent that I'm feeling that in the same way. And if I'm political, yeah, maybe I'm mad at Ronald Reagan. Maybe I'm mad at Margaret Thatcher. But at the end of the day, i can sort of numb that through the chill beats of rock and roll and party drugs, right? And I can have a really, this is, we're in the era of frigging Boy George, okay? that Like, they That is what we are dealing with here. And I think that we're in a moment of, of you know, so it's defined by the promise of self-expression. It's sort of the capitalist fulfillment of that Marx passage about being a fisherman by day and a poet by evening and
Speaker: Yeah. And importantly, i feel like there's there's a lack of scarcity in the system that allows for that that kind of like self-actualization to happen. right There's a point where the son and his Russian nurse girlfriend just like break into this huge of the bourgeois abandoned apartment and just start living there. Which ironically is where he finds all the old East German stuff he needs to convince his mom because up to that point, he's been using the old jars he found like in the garbage can.
Speaker: There's a scene of him boiling them to like disinfect them. And then he's pouring like the new sauerkraut into the old jars so that she thinks it's still the old East German sauerkraut. But here...
Speaker: he's finally found the real thing. He's finally discovered the cache. And of course, it only exists because of the flight of those people to the West, right?
Speaker: Which is astonishing. I also think it's interesting the kind of, if you made much of the relative downward social mobility, at least in communistic terms, in the family. So obviously, I think it made clear that the father of who abandons him as a surgeon or some kind of doctor. And then yeah and the the mother is a teacher.
Speaker: um But but ah just prior to the wall falling, the two children, the boy fixes radios, sells radios, something like that. And the daughter is kind of unclear. You hit on something important, actually, that I would have forgotten to mention. So i i doff my my later huta to you.
Speaker: um And I say, what, of course, is he immediately doing? So he's fixing radios and stuff before the fall. What does he do after? He's responsible for going door to door and being like, you really need satellite television.
Speaker: Like, like you wait like do you really need to get linked up with the rest of us and start watching The Simpsons because that's what we're doing now, right? Or like he goes to that one guy who I forget what foreign country he's from, but he's like you want to watch, you know, i let's just mix things up, ah Swahili television.
Speaker: Perfect. I will get you whatever Swahili language channel you want, right? the sort of smorgasbord of choices. And so the only job available to him It's not just that, oh, it's a capitalist job. It's that it's a job that represents the victory of capitalist media culture. It's no longer like, you know, three channels, all of which are like a version of C-SPAN, but for like the East German Socialist Party. Instead... yeah i think it's like, it's super ironic that in the UK, it was like a point of pride to not have a satellite dish and to effectively have like four channels up until 2005. I respect that. I kind of respect that.
Speaker: This is what the third way labor rights took from us is that opportunity to have one nation, one crown, one channel. I think that this movie is particularly important for conceiving of Gen X as the generation who feels like they had liberation taken away from them. like Think about how crappy it would be to grow up and think that the entire problem with the world was that like Gorbachev held half of the world in fetters.
Speaker: And that if only we could get rid of that, we would finally be experiencing, you know, again, like a 1920s German style, like Aryan race nudist colony, right? Like that is the goal. That's what you get.
Speaker: If you can just get rid of them. And then for a while, you know, things kind of go okay unless you're affiliated with these particular left movements. Fast forward to 2026, and we had an assassination president an assassination attempt on the president of the United States like earlier this week, where everyone's reaction was just like,
Speaker: Oh, again? That happened? like think about Think about what it takes to get to that point. And i mean, we've got ah what I trust will be an amazing interview coming with Anton Jaeger, where we will hear about that in some more detail.
Speaker: But the point is, like that disappointment for that generation, i think, has to drive a lot of the neuroses globally, certainly in the Anglosphere, but also in Germany. like The Avde being like,
Speaker: huh, curious. We had this promise of freedom, curious. And then all of a sudden these Syrians show up and it goes away, curious. And of course, that's like a massive misreading of what actually happens. But you can see how that scapegoating can sort of enter the conversation when your life is essentially defined by like being like, oh no, just wander in the desert for 40 years. You will get to Canaan.
Speaker: And then you're like, well, we got to Canaan and Baal is everywhere. Okay? all is it there's There's no sign of of Yahweh anywhere.
Speaker: So I think that that sense of disappointment is is constitutive. And I think that it almost should be in the background. like It's almost such a basic point. It's almost like when someone thinks Gen X, they're like, oh, the wall fell and blah, blah, blah. And that's very important. Nirvana, whatever.
Speaker: But we've kind of skirted it some of the more like the smaller stuff, in some ways the more interesting stuff, but we shouldn't let it recede from our horizon. that like They're a generation defined by disappointment, essentially. They are they are the fail-son generation, not even as a result of anything they've done, necessarily, but just because of what they've inherited. Yeah, I think sort of downstream of this film is... isn't it The film is interesting in its ability to deflate what is still, I think, quite a mythic moment for Gen X and maybe later boomers, i.e. the fall of the burn wall. um
Speaker: And i just it reminds for the fact that so many events of the 2010s and 2020s been read through the prism of 1989. Yes. And ah people decided about people power that comes from the political scientist a Gene Sharp. Insert booing noises here, please. I want some booing noises for Gene Sharp.
Speaker: um But yeah, I think this idea of the kind of people power in 1989 and the sort of colour revolutions as well, I suppose, slightly later. Yeah, it's completely coloured at the Arab Spring, Euromaidan,
Speaker: ah probably Hong Kong, student producers in Hong Kong, shout out Vincent Bevins and If We Burn, thoughts about this a lot. um And yeah, I think that there is a kind of simplistic, almost sort of ah apparatus for understanding historical events that yeah everything is either Munich, it's either Munich, 1938, forever, or it's like Berlin slash Moscow, 1989 to 1991, forever.
Speaker: um And like any sort of dynamic sociological, economic, whatever the dynamics that fall outside of that are ignored. um And yeah, so it's an interesting film in the sense that it refuses that mythologization to to an extent.
Speaker: And so early on, so early on as well, right? Like, it's prescient in the sense that I think an emerging scepticism about that moment and the shortcomings slash emissions of understandings of that moment maybe only came by 2008, started to be generated in a fulsome way. And yet, yeah, yeah ah here it is in 2002. And like like you said, the disappointment leads to the AFD.
Speaker: is there in 2002. So, although it's not, it's not like a brilliant film, like, I think I gave it three stars on Netflix or box whatever. I do think it's prescient I agree, and it's actually funny. What this made me realize is I mentioned that assassination attempt earlier, and, like, I don't know if you've read his it manifesto. I mean, it's really more just like an email.
Speaker: But, like, he's, he is the radicalized Clintonite. Like, do you know, like, like, like, the assassination attempts are now coming from precisely the liberals who don't, So is Luigi Mangione as well, right? and like He's a radicalized... like Well, I think it's like two different branches, right? Mangione is like the the effective altruist, like sort of almost more libertarian wing.
Speaker: But like this guy, Cole Allen, was just like on Blue Sky being like... Hassan Abiyah Satan, um you know, like we must back Chuck Schumer in this election, right Like even the way he writes, I mean, this is sort of an over made point, but as a in an Englishman, not in the sense of being from England, but a man who has studied English, it is hard to not read his letter and be like, my God, this is the most like Reddit manifesto of all time, which is no small task.
Speaker: I think it opens with like, hi, everybody, or something. Like, it's really... like Hey, guys. Hi, guys. Like, oops, by the time you read this, I'll have done a thing. You know, it's it's a little it's a little nuts. And that is coming from precisely the group of people who, yes, everything has to be Hitler, or you know the Velvet Revolution. like Either we live in a moment where the only possibility is like conflict. By the way, shout out former guest John Dolan, his show Radio War Nerd, had a really good series on the Munich conference with Annibale, guest of theirs, where his point is like most people's understanding of the conference is
Speaker: very bad. And in fact, it is not a good example, even in the way that people try to use it. But the point is, in the popular understanding, that's the moment where you got to you got to put up. You can't actually just recede or be an appeaser, right?
Speaker: But the other possibility is oh, it's 1989, soft power will win, they will hear Bruce Springsteen, their officials will commit suicide, and you know the people will rush into the streets. Which, of course, is ironic given that much of Springsteen's music is like a criticism of American society, but you know that's that's the consumer for you.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's a template as well. that the image of I think it's Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia, right? They they hold hold hands in a big human line. Oh, yeah. it's ah You're talking about, was it Hands Across the World or something like that?
Speaker: Yeah, I think a sort of precedent set by that, that all political action is somehow kind of spontaneous and bottom-up and sort of humanitarian and sort of non-political in a moralistic way. yeah it's Like it's moral, but it's not political.
Speaker: And yeah, I think Goodbye Lenin is an interesting, again, an interesting subversion of that in the sense that it's... It also refuses politics, but it refuses politics, but it also refuses morality in a way. It's it's not particularly interested in kind of like feel-good slash early 2000s of globalism. um You've made me realize the title...
Speaker: is kind of a pun in a way. Because the obvious meaning is goodbye to state socialism in East Germany, right? There's that moment where they're like flying away the bust of Lenin or whatever it is they're doing.
Speaker: Which, just quickly, is that a piss take on Fellini's Dolce Vita? I mean, it wouldn't surprise me. There's the statue of Christ that's being dragged by helicopter across the... To be deposited into the ocean by Pinochet's goons. But the other pun there is actually that it's a goodbye to Leninism, right? Like what you're describing is just an anti-vanguardist mode of political organization where rather than a vanguard party capturing political discontent and directing it towards specific ends, actually the only truly effective politics is this, not to put on my Deleuze and Guattari hat, but the sort of rhizomatic, it just kind of happens and it sprouts in various places and it's spontaneous. And so the Lenin being said goodbye to there is also a certain mode of organization, argumentation. I don't know that that was intended, but it clearly works, right, as a way of thinking about the movie.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that lack of organisational structure, even coming from the capitalist right or centre, it's not like a capitalist vanguard party is planting cells in East Germany, right? and then they sort of yeah There's a certain change in the economy that allows them a gap to seat the telegraph office in in East Berlin.
Speaker: it's Yeah, it's it's it's it's much more sort of just like this rotting carapace it's slowly descending and then effectively the collapse is on the back of kind of its inability to compete.
Speaker: um And changes in technology as well. ah The underlying technology changes, right? We have the rise of the internet internet and computers and the command economy just can't deal with that. I was just thinking about Viktor Orban, right? He's just lost power in Hungary. I'm always thinking about Viktor. This is a news episode now, actually. We're just we're just doing the news. yeah No, I think it relates, though, in the sense that Orban is a man who comes out of that goodbye Lenin moment in the late 80s in Hungary, obviously, not in East Germany.
Speaker: And he's kind of figure of this kind of Gene Sharp-esque ah liberal Clintonian people power initially, I'm pretty sure. And then somehow inexplicably transforms into the sort of yeah the most right-wing conservative force in Europe.
Speaker: um And I think it's interesting that someone who's so representative of that moment of the fall of communism and the rise of liberal democracy... Because there are no sort of undergirding party structures allowing for that change. It's all kind of this like fluid, just stochastic destruction.
Speaker: Yeah, he can sort of go on a trajectory away from that like fairly quickly within two decades. Yeah, what you've made me realize is what's the um the Elliot line? Is it from the love song of Jail for Prufrock maybe from The Wasteland?
Speaker: The Hollow Men. So it is, between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow. For thine is the kingdom.
Speaker: Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the shadow. Life is very long. Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow.
Speaker: For thine is the kingdom, for thine is life is, for thine is the, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Speaker: And i I think that if we could summarize the sort of the paralysis of Gen X and the sort of politics that arises out of the moment you're describing or we're describing here that you're talking about with Orban a moment ago.
Speaker: For me, it's that. It's like these things fall, the shadow falls between the moment of excitement, the moment of the 90s, the moment when Orban might, you know, become a a liberal in the in the normative sense, and the results, the existence, which is, of course, you know, sort of like...
Speaker: liberalism with urbanist characteristics that they got in Hungary for, you know, a decade plus, or, um you know, the AfD threatening to win the the German chancellorship if, um you know, every single other party doesn't unite into a große coalition to ah keep them out with, like,
Speaker: 50.1% of seats where like every minister comes from a different minor party and like the entire opposition is like guys whose great grandfathers like invented homeopathy and like, you know, we're measuring like skulls in Rwanda in 1903.
Speaker: Like that is, that's the product. And I think it's helpful actually for us to think about Gen X is that as, you know, but it's as as seeing the end of the world. It's interesting that Elliot,
Speaker: Eliot was in rebellion against his own kind of conception of hollow liberalism in the interwar years, right? Yeah. and In some sense, you can see the liberalism. I don't i don't mean liberalism in the American sense of anything that's set the center left, but I mean normative liberalism, that yeah classical liberalism, whatever you want to call it.
Speaker: a kind of liberalism emerges from the trauma of the First World War, which is the the sort of hollow liberalism, technocratic liberalism that Eliot is reacting so strongly against. And then you have a sort of second traumatic liberalism that comes out in 1945, both of which are less positive ah descriptions of the world or positive proposals for politics. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: but rather negative constraints, right, on the worst of human nature. um I think Moin, Samuel Moin, who I think we're also going to have on, called it sort of cultural liberalism, right? and This doesn't really die with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it just mutates.
Speaker: And it perhaps becomes even more diffuse and sort of characterless as it's the one thing that it's set up against yeah disappears. Yeah. once it doesn't have that negative capacity or sort of negative thing that's downing determining itself itself against, it becomes even less ah compelling, right? and that And you have that party, yeah that there's the characters of Goodbye and have the party, and once the party ends, what are you left with, really?
Speaker: You're left with, like, your aging mother who has to now inhabit this new world. And it's so funny, because I think what we've got here is a new academic monograph called The Traumas of Liberalism.
Speaker: That's sort of, a you know, just about the difference. Well, like, yeah, I do think they're all like the the sort of post-First World War and post-Second World War liberalism is is kind of a way of dealing, you know, Isaiah Berlin is kind of like, I think maybe representative of this. um I think there's a, it might be in the essay, Positive and Negative Freedom, where he's sort of answering the question of why he's a liberal. And he sort of goes, when I was an eight-year-old boy in 1917 in St. Petersburg, I saw a soldier being dragged off into an alleyway by like a horde of workers and sort of beaten to a pulp.
Speaker: And that's why I'm a liberal, because i can't trust yeah because i can I can't trust human nature. And yeah, I do think there's a ah sort of liberalism born of trauma. knew that the The other great example there would be, of course, Barack Obama's favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who becomes famous for being like, well, St. Augustine in Original Sin is why we all have to be realist liberals. you know like that's which when you say that out loud, it sounds deranged. It sounds like the most insane thing a person could possibly think. But it really is just sort of like, well, um we no longer believe in perfectibility and we no longer believe in in the human spirit. andt mean you know Rousseau, he's out.
Speaker: normal Rousseau. Rousseau goes into the camp with the totalitarians like Stalin and so on. And we're going back to Hobbes and we're going to design the system. And I think if I can tie that back to that moment of sort of orgasmic excitement for the the youth, the jet you know Gen X of this moment, it's sort of like they end up fulfilling the other side of that, that someone like Niebuhr or probably Berlin would get upset about, which is like Not the totalitarian control, but the the the the breaking forth of freedom without restraint, right? And so they sort of produce maybe something that they then can't even keep up with, but that they themselves probably wouldn't even look that kindly upon in the first place.
Speaker: But I will say, Sam, I think you should close this out with the story of your parents' relationship to the Berlin Wall. This is kind of one of the reasons I picked the film's One of two reasons picked the film. The first reason was it was given to me by a very elderly history teacher when I was studying for my A-levels.
Speaker: He must have been 70 then, 15 years ago. so yeah, fairly old. And it was sort of given uncritically as a a piece of sort of liberal triumph list satire.
Speaker: Which is a crazy way to read this movie. i like For those who haven't seen it, this is probably as pro-East German as a movie made in any kind of mainstream way could possibly be.
Speaker: Yeah, without going full on. No, yeah. He thinks the Stasi is bad, right? Like, it's not. But it it doesn't just like... It it clearly has a a positive relationship to it in some way. yeah The second reason I put the film was that it's a defining piece of mythology for my own family. um My parents rode a motorbike in 1989 along the Iron Curtain as sort of 20-somethings. It must have been sort of Bavaria all the way to Denmark along the German section of the Iron Curtain.
Speaker: And they rode into the sort of panhandle of the Iron Curtain that goes in and connects West Berlin to West Germany. And they sort of tried to set up a bunch of permits to go and visit the East, which they were very excited about growing up the shadow of communism and nuclear annihilation. They wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
Speaker: They got to the checkpoint and this stern East German guard checked their papers and went, Nein! Come back tomorrow! But um yeah they figured out that the paperwork was going to take so long to refile that they would be back in England. so they so they gave up and they sort of went, we'll be here for an entirety of our life, it'll be fine.
Speaker: And obviously like a week later the ball fell. Oh, and just missed it. From that moment, my dad has been obsessed about going to Cuba because he wants to get there before it. Well, there's always North Korea.
Speaker: i think, yeah. I mean, it's like like we were saying, what the boomers being obsessed about the fact that they missed the war. I think my Gen X dad is perhaps slightly annoyed that he missed communism. Well, you know, and and a lot of people in the mainstream media would say many such cases with the youth of today.
Speaker: Hello, hello, everyone. Your ears do not deceive you. This is Chase coming in ahead of the intro music to notify you that Sam had some, we'll call them moderate mic issues during this recording session, but you've taken a firm stand. Rather than use generative AI to sort of overdub his voice with Donald Duck or to fill it in with other audio, we would never imagine erasing
