Katja Hoyer on Good Bye, Lenin! and the idea of nostalgia - Ostalgie - for East Germany.
One of the films we wanted to show in Out of the Rubble: Berlin on Film is the 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin!, in which an East German family try to prevent their mother - who has been in a coma for eight months - learning about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the communist cause she has devoted her life to.
Katja Hoyer - author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 - talks about the film, the idea of Ostalgie, her family history in the GDR and how people there remember the past now. There might be elements of Ostalgie for some music and drinks from the period, a thriving hobby in repairing Trabant cars, and an acceptance that some parts of GDR life and work were better - very few people in what used to be East and West Germany want the country or the system back again.
Biography: Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron. A visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and hosts the podcast The New Germany together with Oliver Moody. She was born in East Germany and is now based in the UK.
Katja Hoyer's Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990: uk.bookshop.or....
Presented by Bristol Ideas: www.bristolideas.co.uk
7 сен 2024
