The Fall of The Wall In Fiction And Nonfiction
Translations From The German
The following is a list featuring books on the fall of the Fall of the Berlin Wall or the transition from East and West Germany to a united Germany.
Heroes Like Us
by Thomas Brussig
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2000
Fiction
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and according to Klaus Uhltzscht, hero of German author Thomas Brussig's novel, Heroes Like Us, he was responsible. Klaus feels responsible for a lot of things, not the least of which is his parents' happiness. It is to please his father--an agent with the notorious East German secret police, the Stasi--that Klaus himself joins up. Once there, he has serious doubts about whether his Stasi is the genuine article or just a decoy to distract attention from the Stasi for which his father works. When the Wall finally falls, Klaus worries that his activities will be distorted in the Western press, so he decides to unburden himself to Oscar Kitzelstein, a New York Times correspondent. The darkly ribald, satirical tale Klaus tells in Heroes Like Us marks the strong debut of an important new voice in the postcommunist literary world.
Kennedy in Berlin
by Andreas W. Daum
Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute; Cambridge; New York
Cambridge University Press 2007
Nonfiction
"Kennedy in Berlin is a remarkable book about a remarkable moment in 20th century history. John Kennedy's trip to Berlin was defining moment in the history of the Cold War, but as Daum writes, it was also an extraordinary moment in transatlantic relations, symbolic politics at its best. Daum's approach to this event is innovative and highly original, and provides a clear insight into how a transnational community of interests was forged between the United States and Germany. With the recent fraying of those ties, this book becomes even more timely and important." -Thomas A. Schwartz, Vanderbilt University
Too far Afield
by Guenter Grass
Mariner Books 2001
Fiction
Recent German unification is neatly, if protractedly, likened to the inner development of one of its bureaucrats in this novel of Berlin after reunification. The book is a worthy follow-up to My Century, which taught 100 years of history in human, understandable terms. Theo Wuttke, known as "Fonty" because he's obsessed with famous German novelist Theodor Fontane, is a former war correspondent now on his uppers as an elderly file courier in a government agency of the former German Democratic Republic. Blessed with an encyclopedic memory, Fonty often recites poems from different languages, to his co-workers' secret derision. Weary of life at the agency, he tries to escape once to Scotland, another time to Great Britain but a spy named Ludwig Hoftaller, himself an incarnation of a 19th-century figure and often called Fonty's "day-and-night-shadow," always finds him. Hoftaller's motivation is never made clear: perhaps fear that Fonty will leak German state secrets, perhaps loneliness, perhaps both. The past keeps impinging on the present; Hoftaller knows truths about marital infidelities in Fonty's past that keep Fonty from rebelling too forcefully. The two old men wander the streets of Berlin, each struggling with WWII guilt, as both of them had connections to Hitler's regime. Some overlong passages detailing German history will be lost on American readers, and Fonty's rambling monologues constantly threaten to bring the novel to a halt. However, the psychologically complex portrayal of a man's gradual relinquishing of his social position in order to keep his spirit intact is more than enough to maintain a reader's passion in the work. Fonty does manage to escape eventually, his victory that of a profoundly human figure who embodies both the bitterness and the sweetness of an era's passing.
Settlement: A Novel
by Christoph Hein
Metropolitan Books 2008
Fiction
Provincial Guldenberg is still reeling from World War II when a flood of German refugees arrives from the east, Bernhard Haber’s family among them. Life is hard enough—Bernhard’s father has lost an arm and his carpenter’s income. But added to this injury comes an accumulation of insults, as the upright town turns hostile toward the newcomers. After a string of mysterious losses—from the killing of the boy’s dog to the unexplained death of his father—Bernhard is set on extracting revenge.
Rich with psychological insight, Christoph Hein’s acclaimed novel tells Bernhard’s story across nearly fifty years, chronicling his remarkable rise from victimized outsider to Guldenberg’s most prominent burgher. What began as a geographic dislocation evolves into a personal quest: the thirst for vengeance yields to the deeper need for a home and settling down proves more important than settling grudges. As the socialist state gives way to reunification and the capitalism of the 1990s, Hein’s masterful, multivoiced narration charts the transformation not just of one man but of an entire nation struggling to leave history behind and claim a home.
After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next
by Jana Hensel
Public Affairs 2008
Nonfiction
Hensel was born in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1976 and was 13 when the Berlin Wall fell. This intriguing but frustrating memoir, a bestseller in Germany, portrays the disorientation of her generation, whose upbringing under communism ended abruptly with the integration of East and West Germany. Hensel rambles through a wide range of subjects: the erasure of memory; East German youth's alienation from their Western peers; her ambivalence about her childhood; their inability to adjust to the new world, which resulted in a role reversal in which Hensel had to "interpret" Western customs for her parents; and her generation's compulsion to disguise themselves as Western, changing their clothes and even their accents. But the disappearance of the artifacts of her childhood and the lack of value attributed by her Western friends to her memories leave Hensel at a loss. According to Clarke's note at the book's end, this was the first title to expose the experience of Hensel's generation. Although the memoir clearly struck a chord in Germany, it is so blurred by the "twilight zone" of Hensel's existence, "in which daily life seems arbitrary, provisional, and somewhat unreal," that Clarke's thoughts more clearly reveal East German history and Hensel's generation than the author does herself.
The Adventures of a Bed Salesman: A Novel
by Michael Kumpfmueller
Picador 2004
Fiction
When we first encounter Heinrich Hampel, in 1962, he is thirty, an affable womanizer in West Germany whose job as a bed salesman affords him continual opportunity. After running up big debts, he flees to the East, where he zigzags from delivering bread and dealing black-market goods to being an informer for the Stasi. Heinrich is a likable scoundrel, and it is easy to see why the book was a best-seller in Germany. Still, the author's insistence that his protagonist symbolize every single aspect of postwar Germany—in the manner of Grass's Oskar Matzerath or Fassbinder's Maria Braun—leaves Heinrich even more of a cipher than the allegory requires.
Gay Voices from East Germany (A Midland Book)
by Juergen Lemke and John Bornemann
Indiana University Press February 1991
Nonfiction
Fourteen East German men who identify themselves as gay are the subjects of these interviews. "Interview" perhaps is not the right word, since these are presented as lengthy first-person accounts rather than the interactive dialogs they originally were. All of these interviews predate the profound changes that have overtaken the German Democratic Republic, changes that will no doubt lead to a revision of the consciousness of gay men in what was once East Germany. These narratives provide helpful insight into daily life in the GDR--a state that highly valued conformity--as lived by a minority rarely acknowledged.
Animal Triste
by Monika Maron
University of Nebraska Press 2000
Fiction
Maron's disturbing but erotic novel of remembrance takes the form of the haunting recollections of an elderly woman. Raised in repressive East Germany shortly after World War II, the nameless heroine earns a paleontology degree, marries, and has a daughter. Years later, when the Berlin Wall comes down, she meets Franz, a scientist from West Germany who has come to work at the museum where she is employed. Their affair is passionate, and she abandons her family. When Franz is accidentally killed by a bus after a lovers' quarrel, she shuts herself up in her tiny apartment, torturing herself with guilty memories of their affair. Maron uses her heroine's descent into insanity as a framework for exploring the role that memories play in our identity, and the power we have to reshape ourselves by rewriting the past. Examining the relationship between passion and our instinctive animal selves, Maron demonstrates how we can allow ourselves to be driven by love to defy both social rules and our own natural instinct for survival.
Remake Berlin
by Monika Maron (Author), Laslo Foldenyi (Author), Thomas Kapielski (Author), Astrid Klein (Photographer) and many more
Steidl 2002
Nonfiction
The Old Berlin is lost, as would be any city that has been destroyed more than once. No "Remake" can change this. What then is the new Berlin? Only one thing is certain, that Berlin, today, can only be described as a stringing together of fast-changing phenomena. A city suspended amidst massive developments, Berlin now exists as a metaphor for the unknown. Remake Berlin attempts to do the impossible, to pull together a visual and textual portrait of this unknown city, through the combined imaginations and documentary explorations of eight artists and six writers, men and women, national and international, locals and visitors. They approach the city in a careful way, laconically recording its violent geographies, ironically commenting on the peculiarities of its architecture and population, and finally forming a constructive, exploratory array of subjective glances which, together, draw up a possible portrait of a new Berlin.
Origins of a Spontaneous Revolution: East Germany, 1989
by Karl-Dieter Opp, Christiane Gern and Peter Voss
University of Michigan Press 1996
Nonfiction
November 1989: East Germans danced on the Berlin wall and the Communist regime began to collapse. A unique revolution occurred: changes were brought about by peaceful, spontaneous demonstrations. No group organized the famous gatherings of thousands of people at the Karl Marx Square in Leipzig on October 9, 1989.
Why did so many citizens participate although they risked their lives? Why were the demonstrations peaceful? How was it possible that so many people demonstrated without any organization? What part did the church and opposition groups play in the emergence of the revolution? Why didn't the government crack down the demonstrations? How did political events such as the liberalization in Eastern Europe influence the demonstrations?
In a readable and accessible style, Origins of Spontaneous Revolution provides an explanation of this revolution based in rational actor theory. The authors support their arguments with documents, jokes, and a unique data set: one year after the revolutionary events a representative survey of 1300 Leipzig residents was conducted focusing exclusively on the revolutionary period.
This book will be of interest to sociologists and other social scientists such as historians and political scientists.
Karl Dieter Opp, Peter Voss, and Christiane Gern are members of the faculty of the Institute of Sociology, University of Hamburg.
The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story
by Peter Schneider
University of Chicago Press ed. 1998
Fiction
When the Berlin Wall was still the most tangible representation of the Cold War, Peter Schneider made this political and ideological symbol into something personal, that could be perceived on a human level, from more than one side. In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country.
New Lives
by Ingo Schulze
Knopf 1 edition 2008
Fiction
Schulze's dense and beguiling novel about the reunification of Germany consists of the collected works of Enrico "Heinrich" Türmer, a member of the East German intelligentsia. The works are his correspondence with his sister, Vera, with whom he has an incestuous relationship; his best friend, Johann Ziehlke; and his future lover, a photographer named Nicoletta Hanson. The remainder is rounded out by an appendix that contains a novella, plus nitpicking footnotes from Schulze, who casts himself as the volume's editor. As we learn from Türmer's letters, he quits the theater job he'd been given by the state to partner up in running a newspaper. His guide to the new world of capitalism is "Baron" Dr. Clemens von Barrista, a sort of Mephistophelian mini-Soros. Throughout, Schulze captures something ephemeral but critical about how the idealism that brought down the Wall also brought down itself. Or as Türmer remarks about his fellow intellectual dissidents, "Any attention paid to us--the attention that called us onstage--would vanish from the face of the earth" when they succeeded. This novel shows the tragicomic prescience of that remark.
Jewish Claims against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy
by Angelika Timm
Central European University Press 1998
Nonfiction
This is the first comprehensive history of Jewish negotiations with East Germany regarding restitution and reparations for Nazi war crimes. Angelika Timm analyzes the politics of old and new anti-semitism and the context in which they grew under the officially propagated ideology of antifascism. Investigating the mass of unpublished, newly available archival data, and using more than forty personal interviews, she examines the role of the Holocaust and the image of the Jews in the historical consciousness and political culture of East Germany, and chronicles the efforts of Jewish organizations to negotiate reparations with the East German state. She shows how the unique relationship between ideology and Realpolitik defined the manner in which East Germany confronted the crimes of its past and allowed antisemitism to re-emerge.
Man without a Face
by Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy
Public Affairs 1999
Nonfiction
Imagine if Heinrich Himmler or Lavrenti Beria had written an autobiography! Well, a secret police chief of even greater prowess (and even greater secrecy) has done just that. For 34 years--through almost the whole of the Cold War--Markus Wolf was the head of East Germany's foreign intelligence service. As such, he gathered and disseminated to his Soviet sponsors many of the deepest top secrets of the whole era. A good example of the mirrors-within-mirrors nature of Wolf's world is his description of his service's interactions with celebrated terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Wolf relates that whenever Carlos came to East Berlin, the spymaster's main concern was "getting him out of the country as soon as possible." But this proved difficult because well, Carlos was a terrorist not above turning on his hosts. Indeed, Wolf reveals that while Carlos was a guest of his government, he made threats against East Germany's Paris embassy and that the reaction was not to expel him, but to beef up embassy security. Similarly, Wolf tells how the 1986 La Belle disco bombing in West Berlin, which killed two U.S. soldiers and resulted in a U.S. reprisal air strike against Libya, involved East Germany's knowing admission through border control of Libyan diplomats with explosives in their luggage. Here, Wolf questions the notion that such terrorists were worth coddling for their usefulness in any all-out war against the West. You have to wonder if he also did so in his old job.
Medea
by Christa Wolf
Nan A. Talese 1998
Fiction
German novelist Wolf's discursive retelling of the familiar Greek legend, a logical outgrowth from her earlier novel Cassandra (1984), ispace Margaret Atwood, who contributes an informative ``Introduction''a humorless and essentially predictable political allegory envisioning the reviled sorceress and murderer (of her children) as a victim of male arrogance and sexual insecurity. Medea's homeland Colchis is a ``darker'' counterpart to the kingdom of Corinth, a self-aggrandizing state that brutally distorts truth to justify its imperialistic crimes. Wolf offers a chorus of ``Voices'' herethe eponymous heroine, her weak-willed adventurer husband Jason, and other players in the drama of Corinth's power struggleto chronicle the scapegoating of an insubordinate female goaded to become ``immoderate . . . a Fury, just what the Corinthians needed her to be.'' Overwrought, and markedly inferior to Wolf's better fiction.
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