In his award-winning book, The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Miłosz wrote a chapter on “Ketman,” a form of deception the citizens of communist nations used to fool their governments and societies into believing their ideological loyalty as subjects. At its core, Ketman relies on splitting a person’s personality into two identities. The film, Goodbye Lenin! effectively demonstrates the versatility and power this split can exert in preserving cultures and ideas that are either totally absent from or antithetical to ideologically oppressive societies. Ketman has the potential to serve as strategy for survival under, and resistance to, a deeply oppressive and ideological regime. As a film, Persepolis effectively represents the ways in which Ketman can…show more content… Alex strives to hide from his bed-ridden mother the total collapse of East Germany. Having suffered a heart attack, Alex’s mother could not bear such drastic news without risking her life. As a result, Alex goes through extraordinary lengths to preserve the quickly disappearing East German lifestyle and state in his family apartment. By doing so, Alex effectively defies a reality that applies to millions of people by preserving a world and lifestyle that no longer exists outside his apartment’s walls. Alex acknowledges the versatility of this defiance when he narrates, while producing a fake new broadcast for his mother outside a Coca Cola building, “As I stared at the clouds that day I realized that truth was a rather dubious concept easily adapted to how Mother saw the world”. Alex was able to defy the challenges reality, namely the collapse of East Germany, threw at world he preserved and produced for his mother, through faked news broadcasts, and other lesser efforts. This is relevant because radical ideologies, such as Nazism, and Communism, also seek to destroy the worlds that existed under the regimes they succeeded. Communism, for example, seeks to stamp out liberal and capitalist political ideas, and cleanse society of all forms of bourgeois culture, and memory. Radical ideologies, such as Communism, seek to transform their old world into a new one along ideological lines. Engaging in Ketman, splitting one’s life along private and public spheres, as Alex does, enables people to defy radical regimes’ efforts by secretly preserving the worlds and ideas they seek to destroy. Such defiance not only challenges regimes’ power, it contests their claim to ideological infallibility and subsequent legitimacy. This can be clearly seen in
