After the Wall
Hensel, J. (2004). After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life the Came Next. New York: Public Affairs.
Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell? How old were you? Do you remember people talking about it?
Jana Hensel was 13 on November 9, 1989, the day the Wall came down. She wrote After the Wall (on order for the library -- in the meantime you can get it through Interlibrary Loan) to describe a life in transition, from her life as a young citizen of East Germany to a teenager of a newly reunified Germany. As she puts it,
The Wall fell and left our world utterly confused. We were just becoming teenagers when suddenly everything started spinning around us. We were too young to understand what was happening, and too old not to understand that big changes were in the making (p. 163).
But she refrains from offering a formulaic interpretation of how good or bad life in East Germany was, or how good or bad things have been since then. Instead she offers a straightforward account of the changes she experienced. In so doing she adds new dimension to standard accounts of life in East Germany and later reunified Germany. She writes that
After the Wall, we soon forgot what everyday life in [East Germany] was like, with all its unheroic moments and ordinary days. We repressed our actual experiences and replaced them with a series of strange, larger than life anecdotes that didn't really have anything to do with what our lives had been like. The fact that we began exchanging such stories ourselves shows how much we had internalized the West German take on our history. We had forgotten how to tell our own life stories in our own way, instead adopting an alien tone and perspective (p. 25).
With stories that are frequently enjoyable, potentially disillusioning, and always enlightening, Hensel reclaims these accounts of life in East Germany from foreign reinterpretations, and offers an account of what life was like after the Wall was torn down.
Contributed by Aaron Bowen