Berlin Hero (Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstraße)

In cinemas as part of the German Film Festival

This film has something of a dazzling pedigree and navigates a rich symbolic landscape, namely the historical residue of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR). Made by Wolfgang Becker, who was responsible for the 2003 hit, Good Bye, Lenin!, Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstraße is based on Maxim Leo’s 2022 novel of the same name.

Leo was born and raised in the DDR and wrote one of the best treatments of its lived experience in his memoir, Red Love. He was critical of Good Bye, Lenin!, saying that it reflected the West German worldview of the DDR and not the reality of those who lived there.

Attitudes towards the DDR are an ideological combat zone, quite astonishing given that 37 years have passed since its demise.

Australian attitudes towards the DDR have been largely formed by Anna Funder’s first-person narrative book, Stasiland. Funder presented a bleak, monochromatic dictatorship in which regimented citizens were methodically brainwashed and repressed. 

Her work fitted with official Germany’s Aufarbeitungs (reprocessing) or historical discarding of DDR history – essentially, institutionally enforced delegitimisation. That work of combating any affirmative memories of the DDR is conducted by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany. It has a core budget of €75,000,000 (over $122 million Australian dollars). 

Despite this, opinion polling shows that Germans in the five eastern states that once made up the DDR consistently demonstrate what is derisively called “Ostalgia”, positive reminiscence for the fallen socialist state.

Katja Hoyer, who was born in the DDR, using oral history methodology plus archival sources, draws a different picture than Funder’s in her Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990. While not sweeping under the carpet anything about the Stasi, she portrays a DDR that was both a genuine workers’ state and one that was beset with crippling incongruities from its foundation. While not sweeping under the carpet anything about the Stasi, she portrays a DDR that was both a genuine workers’ state and one that was beset with crippling incongruities from its foundation. 

The DDR was a complex place, with many paradoxical things being true at once. For example, there were unrivalled social services and dilapidated, antiquated infrastructure. There was no hunger or homelessness, but the quality of consumer goods was low. There was a popular socialist spirit alongside a bureaucratic superstructure. There was pride in the nation’s achievement, combined with frustration and anger with the intrusively rigid political structure.

The DDR’s weaknesses were a product of the contradictions in which it was embroiled. Existing as a state transitioning from capitalism to socialism was hard enough. But the DDR also had to grapple with the dialectically interpenetrating opposites of capitalism and socialism in a war-ravaged environment. Additionally, there were the processes of denazification and the enmeshment with the Soviet Union, bringing its own pressures and contradictions. All this played out within a framework of Western imperialist hostility. There is much to learn from the DDR’s successes and failures, and Berlin Hero opens a humorous window into it.

Like Good Bye, Lenin!, Berlin Hero is straightforward about the weaknesses of the old East Germany while ruthlessly satirising the capitalist culture of the modern, unified Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD). Set in 2019, on the 30^th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Hero aims its barbs more at the BRD. 

The narrative begins simply: Micha Hartung, a washed-up, ex-railway worker from the DDR, is barely making a living in Berlin. Older ex-DDR citizens failing to cope with life under capitalism is somewhat of a standing joke in Germany.

When Micha’s old Stasi file is brought to him by an ambitious reporter, one thing leads to another as an opportunity arises to dig himself out of financial difficulty. All he has to do is allow others to project onto him the BDR’s official narrative of the bad-and-wrong, repressive DDR versus the glittering, democratic West. All goes well until competing political, financial, and romantic agendas intersect.

The film exposes, among other things, the BRD’s industrial-scale ideological production of DDR-vilification and its culture of personal unscrupulousness and shallow materialism.

Similar to Good Bye, Lenin!, this film wraps its irony around a touching tale of personal relationships. In Good Bye, Lenin! it was the love of a son for his mother, while in this film, we see lonely hearts finding each other. The emotionality balances the sharp edge of satire, allowing it to cut through more tellingly. 

Among the jokes are scenes where a political defence of the DDR and its egalitarian culture pops out of the mouths of characters who are supposedly the most critical of it. The BRD ideologists simply cannot hear those words being said, while simultaneously they demonstrate crass opportunism. Ultimately, even if Hartung states the truth bluntly, it seems like nobody is listening.

Wolfgang Becker died in late 2024, shortly after completing Berlin Hero. It would have been interesting to have heard him in conversation with Maxim Leo about the adaptation of his novel.