‘It is obviously incredibly difficult to understand and make comprehensible how we lived back then,” sighed a frustrated Angela Merkel shortly before she was appointed chancellor of Germany in 2005. She was about to become one of the most powerful women on Earth, yet the world made no effort to understand how she had got to this point. Occasionally a commentator would remark that she was different from other German politicians: a scientist, a woman, and from the East! But like many others who grew up in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially called, Merkel found that any references to this past were met with derision or even suspicion. It was “as if this life before German reunification didn’t really count,” she said in 2021 in a rare public show of her frustration, “no matter what good and bad experiences one had.”
More than three decades have now passed since the Berlin Wall fell and, like Merkel’s, other East German voices are finally beginning to break through. And not just in Germany. There is a new and much welcome curiosity in Britain, too, about what life was really like in the countries that once lay behind the iron curtain.
The beauty of the new books, productions and translations that bring unprecedented insight into East Germany to an interested British audience is that it opens up new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world. With Germany divided into two radically different systems for 41 years, the GDR became a field experiment in alternative politics, economics and social policy – with profound consequences that can still be observed today. It would be foolish to ignore this on account of the fact that the west won the cold war. Marvelling at how the GDR achieved the highest rates of female employment in the world, or how it encouraged working-class men and women to be ambitious about their life chances, is not to diminish the memory of those who were were shot at the Berlin Wall, or languished in Stasi prisons for no more reason than having said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
One authentic voice evoking this lost world is writer Jenny Erpenbeck. Translated into English for the first time, Erpenbeck’s book Kairos follows a teenager and an older married man, who fall in and out of love during the last years of the GDR. As the country around the couple begins to crumble and change, so does their tumultuous relationship.
In choosing East Berlin as the backdrop to her deeply human tale of love, jealousy and despair, Erpenbeck returns to her roots. She was born in East Berlin in 1967 and was, like her protagonist Katharina, a young woman and a drama student when the fall of the wall reunited her city and her country. Kairos cleverly plays with the unique burdens of history that bear down on her two characters. A generation apart, they represent a range of East German experiences from the legacy of Nazism to the hopes, dreams and fears associated with the fall of the GDR. But first and foremost, Hans and Katharina are people: human beings with complicated lives, sorrows, joys and ambitions. As writers such as Erpenbeck are translated into English, they open their own, uniquely East German memories and perspectives to new audiences, who, it seems, are ready for them.
While the English translation of Kairos is relatively hot on the heels of the German original, which appeared in 2021, older East German fiction is also being discovered by British publishers. Another book now found on British shelves is Clemens Meyer’s While We Were Dreaming. The novel appeared in Germany in 2006, where it was awarded several prizes and made into a film. The fact that it appeared in the UK this year speaks volumes about the increasing interest in its subject matter.
Set in the 10 years between 1985 and 1995, it follows a cast of teenagers who grow up in Leipzig as the country they were born into vanishes and they become part of a new system that promises much but is entirely alien to them. Meyer’s intense prose follows them as they try to escape the world of drugs, drink, violence and crime they find themselves in, creating lingering images of the hope and despair experienced by many East Germans in the early 1990s. Meyer himself belongs to this generation. Born in the East German city of Halle in 1977, he was 12 when the Berlin Wall fell. The tumultuous period afterwards seemed like a “dance on ruins” to him as he struggled to find his feet in the brave new world that had replaced the one he once knew.
While Erpenbeck and Meyer wrote about life in and after the GDR at a time when it had long vanished, East German authors who produced their work between 1949 and 1989 are also being discovered by audiences in the west. Previously their work was often dismissed as irrelevant, as it had self-evidently passed the censorship threshold of a dictatorial regime. In truth, there were many talented writers, such as Brigitte Reimann, who negotiated a path between restriction and opportunity, creating incredibly perceptive and powerful work. Reimann’s Siblings, first published in 1963, only two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, is a semi-autobiographical novel about the personal tragedies caused by the German division. While Reimann was awarded the government-sponsored Heinrich Mann prize for it, she also became a cult figure among many young East Germans. Now the first English-language translation has appeared, granting non-German speakers entry into Reimann’s world.
There will no doubt be critical voices who worry that this newfound interest in the vanished world of socialist East Germany amounts to ostalgie, as nostalgia for the communist East is called in Germany. Take the Netflix hit Kleo, an action-thriller series about a former Stasi assassin seeking revenge for her betrayal and arrest in 1987. The characters drink East German cola and watch the GDR’s bedtime show The Sandman on TV. The entire visual setup intends to evoke a sense of the time, even though much of the show deliberately diverges from the realities of the last years of East Germany. The production was so successful globally that a second series is now under way. But while most reviews were positive – Stephen King praised it as “a breath of fresh air – suspenseful and also very funny” – some German observers remarked that a conscious effort to evoke nostalgia was part of the success.
As a former East German who has lived in the UK for more than a decade, I have been encouraged by the curiosity the country of my birth seems to inspire in my adopted country. It made a refreshing difference, compared with the reservations many Germans still have when it comes to talking about East Germany outside anything other than the framework of its dictatorial politics. My new book, Beyond the Wall, East Germany 1949-1990, became a bestseller and was lauded by reviewers from across the political spectrum in the UK. Yet in Germany, some observers are still extremely critical about my approach of allowing East Germans to tell their own story, fearing that this more nuanced approach might encourage ostalgie.
But such a view is condescending towards readers keen to explore a country that no longer exists. They are very much capable of entering the world described to them by former East Germans, and deciding for themselves what they make of the things they find there, as the responses to Beyond the Wall readily demonstrate. Where Jacob Mikanowski, a historian of Eastern Europe, found the “human face of the socialist state” in my book, as he wrote in the Guardian, Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday decided it was a “fascinating” insight into “a filthy, malevolent little state”.
Three decades after the fall of the iron curtain, it is time to look at the entire spectrum of experiences that unfolded behind it. Studying them is not only extremely interesting but tells us a lot about today’s world. With tensions in Europe between east and west, questions over the place of Ukraine on the continent, concerns over the way we live and work together in the west and many other big questions back on the table, it has become clear that 1990 was not the end of history, merely the beginning of a new chapter. In order to write the next one, it is worth looking back a few pages to see what came before. It seems many British readers and viewers agree.
Beyond the Wall, East Germany 1949-1990 is out now
