Ich bin ein (Ost) Berliner

'Good Bye, Lenin!' is an unlikely comedy about keeping the fall of communism a secret. Derek Scally reports on a German phenomenonEast Germany is alive and well and living in a 79-square metre Berlin apartment. Outside, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and the streets are filled with all the trappings of capitalism, from Mercedes cars to neon Coca-Cola signs.

Inside, a young man tries to keep the communist regime going for the sake of his mother, a die-hard communist who doctors say will die of shock if she finds out that East Germany vanished while she lay in a coma.

It all seems unlikely material for a comedy, but Good Bye, Lenin!, which opens in Ireland on Friday, has proved otherwise and has become the most successful German film of all time.

Nearly six million people have seen the film since it was released earlier this year. It was the hit of the Berlin Film Festival in February, winning the prize for Best European Film, and has just won nine Lola awards from the German film industry. The film has, in short, become a cultural phenomenon by using humour and drama to bridge gaps that still exist between eastern and western German society.

But domestic success is no guarantee of a favourable reception abroad and Good Bye, Lenin! has the odds stacked against it. German comedies rarely play well beyond the domestic market because of their reliance on culture- specific humour. As one German film critic puts it, German comedies come coated with a "laugh-resistant" coating.

"Good Bye, Lenin! is as specifically German as Monty Python is British," says Hans George Rodek, of the newspaper Die Welt. "But Germans have arrived at a point in their history where they can make fun of themselves together. And this ironic distance doesn't just apply to the 40 years of the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) but also to the 12 years of Nazism."

There are few signs of the GDR on the streets of Berlin these days. After unification, eastern neighbourhoods were quickly colonised by successive waves of artists, students and yuppies, forcing out original tenants and businesses. Anything that's left has often only been retained for its ironic value, giving visitors the impression that the GDR was not so much a socialist regime as a style of interior décor.

The success of Good Bye, Lenin! lies in director Wolfgang Becker's ability to look at the vanished East Germany in a clear-eyed but affectionate way rather than mine it for cheap nostalgia and easy laughs.

"I thought the film was super, it was really made with such love and showed what was good in the GDR, but also what didn't work," says Michael Neumann, a former easterner now living in Berlin.

For many former Easterners, the film does a good job of capturing the disorientating feeling of watching your world vanish around you. It seems to tap an artery of memory that most Germans had grown used to ignoring. Crowds streaming from the cinema were full of comments such as "I'd forgotten all about that . . ." or "I wonder if you can still get that . . ." There have been other, equally successful attempts to recapture the more innocent side of the GDR: twice a year more than 100,000 people visit Ost-Pro, a Berlin fair devoted to East German products from coffee to tights, shopping nets to nailbrushes that can't be found in regular supermarkets. One of the most popular products at Ost-Pro are the "Spreewald Gherkins", an East German speciality that features in one of the film's most humorous scenes. But Ost-Pro is mostly an experience for former Easterners, those who remember the way things were before unification.

Good Bye, Lenin! is careful not to rely exclusively on in-jokes or lapse into East German nostalgia, dubbed "Ostalgie" (ost is the German for east) by critical westerners who had no experience of life in the other Germany.

"I liked the film because East Germany was taken seriously," says Polish-born Mikolaj Ciechanovicz, who grew up in West Berlin. "It gave people the feeling that something of value, something normal that had a positive and a negative side, has vanished." But he isn't sure that the film, packed full of German situations and mentalities, will be play well abroad.

"Only when you know Germany's recent history, or have lived through it, can you laugh at it. I'm afraid that it won't be seen as a comedy abroad, and that the more the tragic, melodramatic aspects will be stronger," he says.

The producers hope that the film's success right across Germany, and not just in the eastern half of the country, bodes well for the film's chances abroad, and that audiences across Europe will make a connection with the mother-son relationship at the heart of the film.

"I think family stories such as this, in which you lie and where lies of necessity or lifelong lies get in the way of the truth, are things we know in the West just as in the East," says Bernd Lichtenberg, the screenwriter. "And that doesn't have anything to do with the societal system."

If anything, the film's central story, a teetering tower of white lies, is enriched by being played out against a backdrop of bigger lies, of "real existing socialism" and Western capitalism. Lichtenberg says the film has been a success in Germany because an audience can decide for itself what to take from it.

"I can imagine that Westerners go for the family story, while Easterners who were maybe eight years old at the time ask about the history of the vanished country, because it's about their history and their origins," he says.

Huge critical praise has been heaped on the young actor Daniel Brühl, who plays the young East Berliner at the centre of the film, although he comes from Cologne and has only limited memories of reunification.

"A theme like this needs to sit for a few years before you can deal with it. That's true for most great historical events. Things have to be right," says Brühl. "I have the impression that only now are East and West beginning to get closer and grow together. And the time was right for Good Bye, Lenin!

Good Bye, Lenin! opens on Friday on limited release