IN THE 2003 MOVIE Good Bye, Lenin!, the staunch socialist Christiane Kerner witnesses East Berlin's Volkspolizei (people's police) ruthlessly clubbing peaceful demonstrators during the celebrations marking the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in October 1989. When she discovers her teenage son Alex among the predominantly young people demanding freedom of the press and the right to travel without restrictions, Christiane suffers a near-fatal heart attack, falls into a coma, and is hospitalized. When she awakens eight months later, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and the new furniture and appliances in the family's apartment signal the changes in society. The doctors warn Alex that any anxiety could kill her, prompting him to protect his mother from the historical transformations by reconstructing the GDR in and also as her sickroom. Christiane's death three days after German unification (October 3, 1990) and the dispersal of her ashes in the wind correlate with the end of the East German socialist state. Alex highlights this idea at the end of the film: “Das Land, das meine Mutter verließ, war ein Land, an das sie geglaubt hatte… . Ein Land, das in meiner Erinnerung immer mit meiner Mutter verbunden sein wird.” (The country my mother left was a country she believed in… . A country that in my memory will always be linked with my mother.) Alex's final words link the grief over his mother's death with the demise of the socialist state she believed in. They leave the audience with an opportunity to mourn the GDR, which symbolically comes to an end when the mother's body vanishes into thin air. When Alex emphasizes the role memory plays in connecting the GDR with Christiane, he points to the female character's function as a reminder of cultural, political, and historical memory. The son remembers the GDR through his mother, assigning her a commemorative function that suggests to the audience how history from below is an addition and a challenge to hegemonic historiography.

This film became the biggest commercial success of any German film since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It won numerous European awards, circulated internationally, and was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.