Goodbye Lenin

On Thursday 18th May we took the PG Café off campus for the first time for an end of term special at Bar Europa. This café was the first in our series on national identities and focussed on German identity, especially that of the former East Germany. As a prelude to our discussion we watched the film ‘Goodbye Lenin’, an hilarious yet poignant and at times moving take on the collapse of the Berlin Wall. We had two speakers from the former GDR, Martin Weinel and Heike Doring, who regaled us with both warm personal anecdotes and slightly chilling tales of political oppression, all drawn from their experiences of growing up within East Germany at such an epochal period. The discussion which followed was especially lively, not least because of the many new students that attended from a variety of postgraduate disciplines. We hope to follow this up during the summer months with two café’s focussing on the theme of ‘Welsh Identity’.