When I think of love, I essentially think of two things: the song Eu Te Amo by Chico Buarque and the film Good Bye Lenin!. At first glance, it may seem strange that the same feeling transports me to a Brazilian song from the 1980s and a German film from 2003, but I believe this discrepancy somehow reflects the complexity of love itself.
The first time I watched Good Bye Lenin!, sitting next to my mother—whose name, Cristiani, is almost identical to that of the protagonist’s mother, Christiane—it was not difficult for me to understand that what drove that young man, who strongly opposed the Soviet regime, to uphold the wall that had already fallen was love. And if Gorbachev couldn’t preserve the GDR, the truth is that a son’s love for his revolutionary mother managed to do so—at least within a few square meters. And where there is a revolutionary mother, there is love for the revolution, and without discrediting romantic love, I believe there is no love more beautiful than the kind that transcends our individuality and is fueled by the belief in a world that can transcend it as well.
When Chico sings in Eu Te Amo, “If upon meeting you, I began to dream, I made so many follies / I broke with the world, I burned my ships / Tell me, where else can I go?”, I think of the scene in which Christiane watches Lenin’s statue being carried away, and how the fall of a regime can, in many ways, be equivalent to a broken heart. How beautiful it is to love, and how wonderful it is to love so deeply and so fiercely that it can defy German reunification and turn Coca-Cola socialist.
As long as love exists, the revolution will live on.
August 2022
carolina ramos 