Goodbye Lenin! (2003) tracks closely to the history of the GDR. In August 1978, Alex’ dad abandons his family. Ten years later, on Oct 7, 1989, Alex is sitting on a park bench while Gorbachev is visiting the GDR to celebrate the 40th anniversary of East Germany. One year further on, October 6, 1990, Alex’s mother dies and Germans celebrate the reunification of their country, undoing the iron curtain that had separated Germany since 1945.

But the film is more than a history lesson. It’s a dramatic retelling of these events and a meditation on the differences between East Germans and West Germans (ossies and wessies), the price of unification, the impact of consumerism, the generational gaps that shape perceptions. The film contemplates an old fantasy – to hold back time against radical change – and the inevitable resolution that our hero (and the rest of us by extension) need to accept a changing world. Hence the filmmakers play with ironic juxtapositions and time effects.

The film is often described as a demonstration of ostalgie (nostalgia for the East German past). But the filmmakers – the director Wolfgang Becker and his co-writer Bernd Lichtenberg – are wessies. What should we make of the story they tell? As a retelling of the events of 1989-90? As a product of 2003?