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Andrea DeCapua

The use of language to create realities: The example of Good Bye, Lenin!

Schlagworte: semiotics, language, culture, signs, meaning, film

Neither reality nor language is genuinely objective; rather, both the interpretation of reality and the use of language to create and manipulate reality represent a subjective understanding of both. This paper examines the role of language in creating, representing, and manipulating realities, using the 2003 German movie Good Bye, Lenin! as a vivid and striking illustration of the role of language in constructing alternate realities.

When the protagonist's mother, a committed East German socialist, awakes from the coma she entered after a heart attack on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the doctors warn her son that any shock could kill her. In order to prevent his mother from learning of the demise of her beloved socialist Germany, Alex manipulates the reality of post-wall East Berlin to match his mother's (perceived) reality of an earlier socialist East Berlin. In so doing, Alex makes the viewer question what reality is and how reality can be constructed and manufactured. There is no absolute objective reality, but only realities based upon the beliefs and preconceptions of participants, which may be and often are, manipulated by the use of language in the presentation of ‘facts.’

Semiotica, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0037-1998
Volume: 2007, 08/2007
Seiten: 69 - 79

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