Good Bye Lenin! Quotes

“Chulpan Khamatova - Lara”

“Florian Lukas - Denis”

“Wikipedia: Good Bye Lenin!”

“Katrin Saß - Christiane Kerner”

“Daniel Brühl - Alexander Kerner”

“Maria Simon - Ariane Kerner”

“After over a year, it was time to end the scheme. But unlike in real life, the GDR would get the sendoff it deserved.”

“Internet Movie Database (IMDb): Good Bye Lenin!”

“Somehow my scheme had taken on a life of its own. The GDR I created for her increasingly became the one I might have wished for.”

“Are you serious?! This is 30,000 Marks! [The bank teller says his time is up] Your time is up, too! We used this money for 40 years and now you Wessies think you can tell us it's worthless!? [Bank security men arrive] Let go of me! [Alex shouts at the customers] What are you looking at? It was your money, too!”

“My mother outlived the GDR by three days. I believe it was a good thing she never learned the truth. She died happy. She wanted us to scatter her ashes to the winds. That's prohibited in Germany, both East and West. But we didn't care. She's up there somewhere now. Maybe looking down at us. Maybe she sees us as tiny specks on the Earth's surface, just like Sigmund Jähn did back then. The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother.”

“[In a fictional address as the new head-of-state of the DDR] Dear citizens of the German Democratic Republic... If you've lived to see the wonder of watching our blue planet from the depths of the cosmos, you see things differently. Up there, in the depths of space, the people's lives seem small and insignificant. Our German Democratic Republic seems tiny. You ask yourself what humanity has accomplished. Which objectives did we set, which objectives did we realize? Today is our country's anniversary. It's a very little country, seen from the cosmos. But still thousands of people came to us last year. People who we looked to as enemies and who want to live with us today. We know our country is not perfect. But what we believe in, inspired a lot of people in the whole world. Maybe we have drifted off course from time to time. But we collected ourselves. Socialism doesn't mean walling yourself in. Socialism means reaching out to others, and living with others. Not just to dream about a better world, but to make a better world. I have therefore decided to open the GDR borders.”