History Film / GoodbyeLenin

* AnachronismStew: At one point, Denis says "[[Film/Apollo13 Houston, we have a problem.]]" While the Apollo 13 mission did take place twenty years earlier, the phrase was not popularized until the film ''Apollo 13'' was released in 1995.

* YouAreTooLate: [[spoiler:After Alex and Ariane finally find their family's life-savings, the bank teller informs them that they are past the deadline and are unable to exchange them for West German Marks]].

** Any time Alex notices a sign of West Germany within proximity of his mother's bedroom. The first is when their neighbor is watching ARD's Tagesschau, to which Christiane wonders why he is watching West German television.

Shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, the young East German Alexander Kerner's dedicated Communist mother, Christiane, sees her son in an anti-government demonstration and falls into a coma due to a heart attack. When she awakens eight months later, the doctors tell Alexander that his mother cannot abide a new shock. Alexander therefore orchestrates an elaborate ruse, complete with fake television programs, to keep his bed-ridden mother from finding out that the GDR is gone.

German [[{{Dramedy}} bittersweet comedy]] from 2003, directed by Wolfgang Becker. Has a lot of subtle humor, playing on the feeling of shell-shock many East Germans felt upon being catapulted into the Capitalist world and the almost overnight disappearance of their country. Many of the visual clues might be easy to miss for people not familiar with the common cliches about the GDR. The film also put actor Creator/DanielBruhl on the map.

Shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall, the young East German Alexander Kerner's dedicated Communist mother sees her son in an anti-government demonstration and falls into a coma due to a heart attack. When she awakens eight months later, the doctors tell Alexander that his mother cannot abide a new shock. Alexander therefore orchestrates an elaborate ruse, complete with fake television programs, to keep his bed-ridden mother from finding out that the GDR is gone.

* TheReveal: [[spoiler: When the family visits their old dacha toward the end of the film Christiane confesses to her children that their father did not abandon them. The plan was for the whole family to flee to the West, but at the last moment she decided to stay in the GDR out of fear. Their father had actually written letters to his children for years, but she hide them.]]

* DumpsterDive: Alex discovers that most of the old product brands have been replaced by imports from the west so he searches dumpsters for jars with the old labels. He cleans the jars and puts the food into them so his mother never knows that they are actually eating food imported from the capitalist world.
** The one exception being pickles from Holland, as Alex could not find the label for Spreewald gherkins.

* ForeignLanguageTitle: Uses the English "Goodbye" instead of the German "Auf Wiedersehen".

* LockedOutOfTheLoop: The entire plot is based on locking Alex' mother out of the loop. [[spoiler:Later, it's Alex that has to be locked out of the loop, and slightly before that we discover that Alex and his sister were locked out of the loop for over a decade by their mother.]]

* PresentDayPast: Some of the western brand products are in contemporary (with respect to the making of the film) rather than circa-1990 packaging.

* ProductPlacement: Essential to the story; particularly well-handled when the big red banner being lowered on the building across Karl-Marx-Allee from mom's bedroom window turns out to be [[spoiler: a Coca-Cola ad]].

* UnusualEuphemism: Alex refers to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a "recycling campaign," and the mass emigration of East Germans to the West as people failing to return from "vacations in Hungary," among others.

** The fast-forward scene where they put Alex's mother's bedroom together while William Tell Overture plays, is a clear nod to a similar scene in [[Film/AClockworkOrange A Clockwork Orange]].

* WhyWeAreBummedCommunismFell: And how it affected some people more than others- TV repairman Alex fairly quickly finds a better job as a satellite dish installer while his sister, finding her pursuit of a degree in Marxist-Leninist economics suddenly obsolete, winds up working at Burger King and several neighbors in their 50s are unemployed with no prospects. Even East German cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn seems to have ended up as a cab driver after the fall of communism.

* TheGreatPoliticsMessUp: an in-universe example, given Christiane doesn't realise the Wall fell and Alex has to go and try and pretend nothing much has changed.

* ShoutOut: A subtle but meaningful anachronism: Alex's partner-in-fake-newscasts Denis Domaschke is seen several times wearing a T-shirt from ''Film/TheMatrix'', another movie about an artificial re-creation of a world that no longer exists.
** It's only anachronistic in the final cut of the movie: a deleted scene expains that Denis has an idea for a film that is essentially exactly the same as The Matrix, which is why he's wearing that shirt.

* TheGreatPoliticsMessUp: the movie explores the effects of such (namely the fall of Communism and the re-unification of Germany) on the lives and psyche of ordinary people- some embrace the changes, others struggle to cope.

* NoticeThis: After the Wall comes down, Ariane gets rid of the old furniture in the apartment by marking it with red stickers, one of which the camera zooms in on as she puts it on a set of drawers. [[spoiler:It turns out to be the location of their life savings.]]

* MaleFrontalNudity: Rainer.

* RuleOfFunny: Alex's quest to find ''Spreewaldgurken'' (Spreewald pickles) for his mother. In reality, they were one of the few East German products that were available without interruption during and after reunification. You can still buy them today. But it helps underline that their supermarket has literally changed overnight.

* OhCrap: Alex when his mother asks for some ''Spreewaldgurken'', her favorite pickles, as practically all East German brands have been replaced by Western foodstuffs.

** The one exception being pickles from Holland, as Alex could not find the label for Speewald gherkins.

* DumpsterDive: Alex discovers that most of the old product brands have been replaced by imports from the west so he searches dumpsters for jars with the old labels. He cleans the jars and puts the food into them so his mother never knows that they are actually eating pickles from Holland.