THE POLISH RIP VAN WINKLE
Rip Van Winkle was a character in a short by the American writer Washington Irving.
In the story, Rip lived in a little town in the Hudson Valley, in NewYork, in the 1770s, around the time of American Revolution.
Rip went out hunting one day, took a nap under a tree, and fell asleep.
He woke up 20 years later to find himself a citizen of a brand-new country the United States of America.
Similarly, in the movie Goodbye Lenin, Kathrin Sass an East German woman, who dedicated her life to the perpetuation of Communist Party ideology, slips into a come just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
When she wakes up eight months later, she is a member of capitalist society.
While she has been "asleep", governments have tumbled, barriers have fallen, and a whole new tide of Western goods and values has come flooding eastward to an eagerly awaiting public.
Her loving son, Alex, fears that the shock of finding such a redically changed world will lead to a heart attack.
So he prepares an elaborate plan to protect her from the truth and to make her believe that the world she lives in now is the same as it used to be.