"Goodbye

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1, Brown University (Department of American Civilization), course: Trauma and Shame of the Unspeakable, language: English, abstract: One event that turned "ostalgia" - the term given to the nostalgia felt for East Germany - into an unstoppable popular movement in the spring of 2003 was the overwhelming success of Wolfgang Beckers film, Goodbye, Lenin, a tragicomic satire set during the time of German reunification. Beckers film portrays the Easts total dissolution into the West and the resulting fractured identity of East Germans and poses the question: Do the so-called "peaceful revolution" and the major social changes that followed need to be re-evaluated as ultimately traumatizing events? This essay will investigate this issue by applying three contradictory trauma theories by Jeffrey Alexander, Piotr Sztompka and Cathy Caruth to Beckers film and examining whether the film successfully recollects German identity. If so, does the movie, according to Judith Hermans definition of trauma resolution, simultaneously help to resolve a specific East German cultural trauma that has been in a state of latency for more than thirteen years?