The story follows a family in East Germany (GDR); the mother (Sass) is dedicated to the socialist cause and falls into a coma in October 1989, shortly before the Peaceful Revolution in November.
When she awakens eight months later in June 1990, her son (Brühl) attempts to protect her from a fatal shock by concealing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in East Germany.
Christiane, seeing Alex being arrested and beaten, suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma because nobody initially comes to her aid.
Ariane's university closes and instead of studying economic theory, she now works at Burger King, and is dating its manager (Rainer, who moves into their apartment).
The deception is increasingly complicated as Christiane witnesses strange occurrences, such as a gigantic Coca-Cola banner on an adjacent building.
Alex and Ariane take her back home and show her a fake newscast explaining East Germany is now accepting refugees from the West following an economic crisis there.
At the family dacha Christiane reveals her secret: her husband had fled not for a mistress but because of the difficulties he faced for refusing to join the ruling party.
Under pressure to reveal the truth about the fall of the East, Alex creates a final fake news segment, persuading a taxi driver (who ambiguously either is or strongly resembles cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space and Alex's childhood hero) to act in the false news report as the new leader of East Germany and to give a speech about opening the borders to the West.
Lichtenberg's experience of the reunification period as a New West Berliner at a similar age to his protagonist Alex was formed into a story which already included many aspects of the later film, but first ended up "in the drawer" for a few years.
Especially interested in the mix of sadness and comedy, which he also envisaged for his film, he believed he had found the right person to bring his idea to life.
[7] "All of a sudden there was this energy", recalls producer Stefan Arndt; when he and Becker read the 5-page synopsis, "right then we knew exactly we could tell everything that we so badly had wanted to tell".
Initially conceived as a young overweight boy from Turkey who was to be married off against his will, he was changed into an amateur film maker, who is as boldly imaginative as he is practical.
The final fake newscast with Sigmund Jähn features a rousing rendition of the East German national anthem, "Auferstanden aus Ruinen".
Ostalgie is a German neologism for nostalgia for some aspects of life in former East Germany, which is a common theme in Good Bye, Lenin!
He argues that Alex's efforts to present his mother with an alternate narrative of what happened during her coma are not meant to preserve a bygone state or falsify history.
does not reflect a nostalgic attachment to the past, nor its retrospective idealization, but the film demonstrates a creative way of handling societal transformations, even beyond the specific East German setting.
was released 17 years later in the form of the Hindi-language comedy-drama Doordarshan, also referred to by its changed title Door Ke Darshan; written and directed by Gagan Puri, it explores a family's attempts to recreate a bygone era to prevent the family matron from suffering a shock when she recovers 30 years after having fallen into coma.
In Japan, Masaki Aiba of the music group Arashi will play the role of Alex in the stage version scheduled for Spring 2025.