Volume 6, No. 5, May 2005

 

The Dream That Lives On

JOY

 

It is that sinking feeling when the real world around seems to betray in every respect. The sky above comes down heavily with roaring thunder and the earth shakes beneath the feet. The windows through which ray of hope enliven closes one after another. Almost overnight all the pillars of ideals and dreams collapse, and one is find being a captive in an isolated island of gloom and despair, surrounded by a hostile sea - threatening in roaring arrogance to overflow the last frontiers of resistance. It may not be an easy task to fight back, since the possibility of any help from the world outside is none, not in the beginning at least! There are, indeed, distant and scattered islands where the flag of resistance still flies high with great pride and determination. It certainly takes some time to see through the darkness of confusion, and to reach the comrades sailing across the turbulent sea. The initial phase of lone battle is the toughest, since one has to dig out optimism from within oneself. And then, to protect that tiny lamp of hope from a treacherous wind.

Such is the situation in several parts of the world today, following a temporary setback of revolution in many countries. The reactionary forces of global capitalism are baring fangs and claws in a jubilant mood since the fall of the so-called socialist regime in eastern Europe. Those who do not want to yield to the forces of global capitalism and imperialism, but cannot find an immediate way to join the mass-struggle against these monsters, are desperately trying to keep the dream of equality, freedom and peace alive, nonetheless in their hearts! To reject and retaliate temptation and pressure from outside, it is necessary for them to take refuge in a dream-world, to create and nurture it as a parallel reality, stronger and truer than the world that exists in the space-time of immediate vicinity.

Utopian as it may be in the beginning, soon it becomes a unique source of inspiration and moral strength. Like a luminous star - millions of light-years away, yet brighter than anything compared on the earth, it guides the lone sojourner on the long and difficult path of individual struggle till he reaches the forefront of mass-struggle against capitalism. Its bright rays pierce through dark mist and clouds to bring the assurance that the revolution will emerge out of the ashes of yesterday’s failure like a nascent Phoenix. And as one advances along this path of battle, the dream-world appears to be more and more real and within ones reach.

It’s not a mere coincidence that the urge of keeping the dream of socialism alive has found very similar expression in the contemporary cultural media in Germany and West Bengal almost simultaneously. In spite of the vast geographical distance and difference in the social, political and cultural history, there is one thing common for people of the present generation of the erstwhile east Germany (D.D.R.) and West Bengal; namely the disillusion about a regime that had proclaimed itself as socialist but in reality has sabotaged the revolution.

While in D.D.R., the regime formally threw away symbols of socialism and openly merged the state with the capitalist western part in the name of the grand re-unification, the left-front Government of West Bengal still calls itself communist and performs rituals like uttering hollow promises of revolution. However, it has since long proved itself to be a trusted protector of the class-interest of the bourgeois by openly joining hands with the national and global forces of capitalism, adopting pro-rich economic policies, and finally by unleashing a reign of terror against all those who want to take sides with the oppressed people. This regime in West Bengal has been sharply criticized and the quest for a revolutionary alternative has been given voice by a contemporary play "Winkle Twinkle" written by Bratya Basu and directed by Debesh Chattopadhyay. This is already so much discussed and debated here that it does not perhaps need any introduction to the readers. Just to remind one, the play depicts the struggle of Sabyasachi Sen, an ex-revolutionary who reappears after having vanished into the thin air 26 years ago while trying to escape from the police, to cope with a world far different from what he had dreamt of and to search for a way to revive the spirit of revolution. The play ends with a strong message of optimism when Sabyasachi wins over his son Indra, who had initially joined a right-wing political party out of his frustration and disillusion about the so-called leftist parties. In a dramatic and symbolic scene, the two generations unite for a struggle against capitalism.

It is remarkable but not surprising that a film with very similar political message but in a completely different spatio-temporal perspective, has occupied the cultural centrestage of Europe in recent years. "Goodbye Lenin", directed by Wolfgang Becker based on the story by Bernd Lichtenberg, narrates the extraordinary personal struggle of Alex, a young man from D.D.R., against the changes brought by the Fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath. The mother of Alex, who was a devoted follower of communist ideals, went into coma following a severe heart-attack resulting from the shock she had received to see her son being arrested by the police from a protest-march against the ‘socialist’ regime. By the time she recovered from the state of coma, the Berlin Wall and D.D.R. had ceased to exist. The similarity between the long coma of Alex’s mother and the supernatural hibernation of Sabyasachi of "Winkle Twinkle", both in a sense symbolizing a long phase of political confusion and inaction, cannot be overlooked...however, the analogy cannot be stretched too far since unlike Sabyasachi who had to face the new and alien reality himself, Alex’s mother is protected by her son, who is determined not to let her know about the changes. The doctor warned that the feeble heart of the mother could not stand any more shock, and thus Alex wages a lone battle to prevent the outside world from encroaching into her mother’s 79 square meter room, where the old D.D.R. needs to be re-created and restored. Thus the making of the dream-world begins...however, even though initially it was out of his personal emotion for his mother, gradually he identifies himself with the ideal socialist world that her mother dreamt of. This dream could not touch him earlier, when he had seen only the deteriorated form of a ‘socialist’ state which had already been taken over by the reactionary forces. In such a suffocating and oppressive regime, he could not identify himself with his mother’s optimism and her ideals of socialism, and naturally fell prey to the capitalist propaganda that a better and happier world was waiting for them on the other side of the Wall. However, now he faces the stark reality of a capitalist state, where the uncertainty of life haunts him and his sister every moment, where he finds his sister brutally beaten up by the boss at the place of work for slightest absent-mindedness, where the rich marginalizes the poor in every sphere of life. In a symbolic scene, when he tries to console and comfort his sister, he identifies the new, united Germany with a fat, greedy customer at the Burger-King (the workplace of his sister) munching french fries with his ugly and ferocious teeth, symbolizing the super-rich bourgeois depriving the poor of all the means of subsistence and survival.

Thus, Alex is getting disillusioned about the capitalist system, and the belief that an alternative can be found only in an ideal form of socialism as his mother had thought of is growing stronger within him. As he carries on with the material restoration of D.D.R. in his mother’s room, which ranges from replacing the labels of bottles and cans of packaged food and other things having new brand-names by the old ones to using a projector and old video-cassettes obtained from the archives of the national TV-channel of D.D.R. to "telecast" news for his mother, Alex also discovers the dream of socialism for himself day by day, bit by bit, and falls in the love of it. This dream is identified with the life of his mother, as if the need for keeping this dream alive is synonymous with her survival.

We cannot go into too many details, but mention must be made of a few significant scenes. The windows of the room of Alex’s mother are kept shut on the pretext of doctor’s advice but actually to hide from her the changes in the surroundings of the house. One day she requests to open the shutters for a while, and the first thing catching her sight is a hoarding of Coca-Cola, a taboo in the socialist D.D.R. In order to pacify her, Alex has to fabricate an "evening news", shot with a friend’s help, reporting that the rights of Coca-cola was reverted to D.D.R. following the revelation that the secret formula had actually been discovered in D.D.R. and thus an intellectual property of the socialist country. Then comes a day when the mother comes out to the street on her own to be confronted by a stunning scene: The big statue of Lenin is being shifted elsewhere by a helicopter! She almost collapses to the ground, just when Alex and his sister come to her rescue. In the evening, Alex invents an explanation for the incident, interpreting it as part of a conspiracy against the socialist regime which could be foiled. The film is indeed full of many such episodes for which Alex is supplying explanations suitable for her mother through his "domestic channel"...it is not only for the mother but also for himself, as his increasing emotional attachment with the imaginary world he’s creating becomes more and more clear as the film progresses. This really reaches its height when he adds commentary to the scenes of the Fall of the Wall to make the mother believe that the western part has merged with the D.D.R. to form a united socialist Germany. This is something she had wished throughout her life, and now it is also the dream of her son, a dream that he knows not achievable in a near future, perhaps not even in his lifetime...yet he is convinced that this must come some day. Following his mother’s request, he searches for their father who had fled to the west long back, and finds him out. The film then ends in a symbolic and emotional scene where the re-united family, also including Alex’s girlfriend, his sister’s husband and child, watches the extravagant celebration of the first anniversary of the re-unification of Germany... to the mother, however, it is the celebration of the triumph of socialism over the capitalist west. The others in the room, while being fully aware of the reality, are identifying themselves, though in varied degrees, with the dream-world of the mother. For Alex, the jubilation outside the room seems as illusive and short-lived as a mirage, and his optimistic vision as if propels through the dark sky of the night cutting a fiery path, like the rockets shot by the people on streets, to reach far beyond today’s world of despair and failure, to usher the new world which he can feel with all his senses, and for which he is determined to struggle.

As the author Lichtenberg puts it in an interview :

"Der real existierende Sozialismus ist nicht aufgegangen, aber der Gedanke lebt weiter. Das ist vielleicht naiv, aber auch sehr stark." (The socialism has not yet come in reality, but the thought lives on. It may be just too naive, but at the same time very strong indeed.)

This strong optimism is the bridge that connects Alex and his mother with Sabyasachi and Indra of "Winkle Twinkle", and which will eventually bring all those fighting for the fulfillment of the dream of socialism to a common battlefield where the final and fatal blow can be inflicted on capitalism.

For further information about "Goodbye Lenin": see the website www.good-bye-lenin.de

Some of the awards received by the film:

Blue Angel Award for Best European Film Berlin 2003, 8 German Film Awards 2003, German Screenplay Award 2003, FIPRESCI Award Belgrade 2003, Premi Internazionali Flaiano for Best Foreign Language Film & Best New Talent Pescara 2003, Special Jury Prize & Youth Award Valladolid 2003, 6 European Film Awards 2003, Goya 2003 for Best Foreign Film, Best Non-American Film from the Danish Film Critics’ Society 2004, César for Best European Film 2004

 

 

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