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Good Bye Lenin!

The film is set in East Berlin, in the period from October 1989 to a few days after German reunification in October 1990.

Alex Kerner lives with his mother Christiane, his sister Ariane, and Ariane’s infant daughter Paula. Alex's father purportedly abandoned the family for a mistress in the West in 1978. His mother joined the Socialist Unity Party and devoted her time to advocating for citizens. Alex is disillusioned by the celebration of East Germany's 40th anniversary and participates in an anti-government demonstration. There he meets a girl, but they are separated by the Volkspolizei before they can introduce themselves.

Christiane, seeing Alex being arrested and beaten, suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma because nobody initially comes to her aid. Visiting his mother in the hospital, Alex finds that her nurse, Lara, is the girl from the demonstration. She (an exchange student from the Soviet Union) and Alex begin dating shortly afterward.

Erich Honecker resigns, Egon Krenz takes over, the borders are opened, the Berlin Wall falls, East Germany holds free elections, and capitalism comes to East Berlin. Alex begins working for a West German firm selling and installing satellite dishes. He befriends a Western colleague, aspiring filmmaker Denis Domaschke. Ariane drops out of university, where she studied economics, and begins working at Burger King, dating her manager Rainer, who moves into their apartment.

After eight months, Christiane awakens from her coma. Her doctor warns her family that she is still weak and any shock might cause another, possibly fatal, heart attack. Alex resolves to conceal the profound societal changes from her and maintain the illusion that the German Democratic Republic is just as it was before her coma. He retrieves their old East German furniture, makes everyone in the flat dress in old, East German clothes, and repackages new Western food in old East German jars. The deception becomes increasingly complicated as Christiane witnesses strange occurrences, such as a gigantic Coca-Cola banner on an adjacent building. Denis and Alex create fake news broadcasts in the style of old East German news tapes to explain these odd events. Alex and Ariane fail to find where Christiane keeps her life savings (in East German marks) in time to exchange them for West German marks before the deadline.

Christiane gets stronger and one day wanders outside while Alex is asleep. She sees her neighbours' old East German furniture stacked in the street, new West German cars for sale, advertisements for Western corporations, and a statue of Lenin being flown away by helicopter. Alex and Ariane take her back home and Alex shows her a fake newscast explaining East Germany is now accepting refugees from the West following an economic crisis there. Ariane tells Alex she is pregnant with Rainer's baby; it will be half East German and half West German, a symbol of the new Germany.

At the family dacha Christiane reveals her secret: her husband had fled not for a mistress but because of the difficulties he faced for refusing to join the ruling party. The plan had been for the rest of the family to join him. Christiane, fearing the government would take her children if things went wrong, decided to stay. Contrary to what she had told her children, their father wrote many letters that she hid. As she declares her wish to see her husband one last time to make amends, she relapses and is taken back to hospital.

Alex meets his father, Robert, who has remarried, has two children, and lives in West Berlin. He convinces Robert to see Christiane one last time. Under pressure to reveal the truth about the fall of the East, Alex creates a final fake news segment, persuading a taxi driver (who strongly resembles cosmonaut Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space and Alex's childhood hero) to act in the false news report as the new leader of East Germany and to give a speech about opening the borders to the West. However, unbeknownst to Alex, Lara had already recounted the true political developments to Christiane earlier that day.

Christiane dies two days later, outliving the German Democratic Republic by three days after German reunification. The family and friends scatter her ashes in the wind using a toy rocket Alex made with his father during childhood.