Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World

Wolfgang Becker's multi-award winning film Good-Bye Lenin (2003), which is discussed in the final chapter of this collective volume, plays on the dissonance between the new ways of life that followed German reunification in 1990 and the difficulty some had in relinquishing the past's illusions about a socialist ideal that was never realized under the German Democratic Republic (GDR). To help the viewer understand this subtle theme, the film lends an important emotional charge to a makeshift speech delivered by a taxi driver who bears an uncanny resemblance to East German Army Major-General Sigmund Jähn, the first German to fly into space (in 1978 for an eight-day mission to the Soviet Salyut 6 space station). Reading from a television screen, Jähn's doppelganger captures the sense of moral longing that for years had made Christine, the terminally ill mother of the film's protagonist, believe in Communism generally and in the GDR's...