Did you know that ‘Good Bye, Lenin!’ (2003) is the most famous recent German film? What kind of storytelling choices are behind this story, which fascinated audience and critics alike?
Here I want to show you how clear storytelling – applied to each storyline – amounts to an expertly perfected structure. I will also explain how unplaiting single narrative strands in a script can help your own writing. This kind of storytelling means to not only work with one main character, one conflict, one goal and one set of plot points, but – in the case of ‘Good Bye, Lenin!’ – with four storylines with respective main characters, conflicts, needs and wants, several twists as well as an individual insight and realization.
‘Good Bye Lenin!‘ is the story of an East-German family around the fall of the Iron Curtain. It tells how individual family members deal with the father’s Republikflucht (escape from the GDR) to the West several years ago (backstory) and how the remaining family deals with the mother suffering a heart attack and falling into a coma for several months, and then waking up to a new world.
The tragicomedy is told from Alex’ point-of-view, his sister Ariane’s as well as their mother Christiane’s and creates therewith several storylines:
