I’m a Scottish journalist. In the 1980s, I studied German at Karl-Marx University in Leipzig, East Germany. It was a fascinating experience that changed my perceptions of the world. I didn’t become a communist, but I did begin to see that where you stand depends on where you sit and that principles are easy to maintain when it costs you nothing to do so. There was a bleak glamour to East Germany that I loved, and so I decided to set my first novel in the shadowy world of intense personal connections, underground artists, and unofficial informers that I’d found in Leipzig.
In Times of Fading Light is a masterful five-decade family saga that melds the personal and the political to create a fascinating portrait of East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Intelligent, fearless, and full of dark humor, it is both an ingeniously structured page-turner, moving back and forward in time, and a literary tour de force. Eugen Ruge was a 35-year-old playwright when the Wall fell, and In Times of Fading Light, published in 2011, was his first novel. It provides a rich understanding of how people lived and loved in East Germany that scotches both nostalgia for the old East and Western clichés. Shining a bright light into the darker corners of family dynamics, it is also a tale with universal resonance.
They Divided the Sky, which is set in 1960-61 and was published in 1963, offers a rare first-hand insight into the period leading up to the construction of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. As one of East Germany’s leading writers, Christa Wolf enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom of expression, and this novel wrestles openly with the central question that afflicted many East Germans of whether to stay in the East or defect to the “decadent” West. Written in flashbacks, They Divided the Sky transports us to that highly charged time, offering an evocative portrait of the socialist project in East Germany when it was still fresh and meaningful for many East Germans, including Wolf.
First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961. The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to…
What happens when a feminist who studies romance turns the lens on her own romantic adventures?
Loveland is about how the author came to understand this journey to the far country of love—dating, marriage, a forbidden love affair, an unusual love affair as an older woman—as part of a larger…
Kairos is the story of an affair between a late-middle-aged man and a young woman set in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic. The disappearing nation is almost incidental to the main plot, which charts the peaks and troughs of an unequal and sometimes abusive relationship. For me, this light touch says everything about what it was like to live in East Germany. People were mainly just getting on with their lives, as they do everywhere. The book’s closing chapters explore emotions that were too often overlooked in the rush towards reunification: the dismay and disorientation that afflicted many East Germans, especially older ones, as their institutions were dismantled and they became foreigners in their own land.
Eine ganz und gar epische Erzhlerin eine der kraftvollsten Stimmen der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. NZZ am Sonntag ber Jenny ErpenbeckDie neunzehnjhrige Katharina und Hans, ein verheirateter Mann Mitte fnfzig, begegnen sich Ende der achtziger Jahre in Ostberlin, zufllig, und kommen fr die nchsten Jahre nicht voneinander los. Vor dem Hintergrund der untergehenden DDR und des Umbruchs nach 1989 erzhlt Jenny Erpenbeck in ihrer unverwechselbaren Sprache von den Abgrnden des Glcks vom Weg zweier Liebender im Grenzgebiet zwischen Wahrheit und Lge, von Obsession und Gewalt, Hass und Hoffnung. Alles in ihrem Leben verwandelt sich noch in derselben Sekunde, in der es geschieht,…
Set in 1955-56, The Architects by German-Jewish author Stefan Heym is a rare find. It delivers a stark portrait of East Germany in the period around Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin, which Heym lived through. The author uses the politics of architecture to expose hypocrisy and personal jealousy in the new “anti-Fascist” German state. At the heart of the book is a devastating personal betrayal that gives the lie to communist claims of moral superiority. Written in the 1960s’, The Architects is a searing critique of the New Germany by a convinced socialist. This helps explain why Heym wrote it in English and did not publish it until 2000, a year before his death, in his own German translation.
Written between 1963 and 1966, when its publication would have proved to be political dynamite - and its author's undoing - this novel of political intrigue and personal betrayal takes readers into the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s, shortly after Khruschev's ""secret speech"" denouncing Stalin and his methods brought about a ""thaw"" in the Soviet bloc and, with it, the release of many victims of Stalinist brutality. Among these is Daniel, a Communist exile from Hitler who has been accused of treachery while in Moscow and who now returns to Germany after years of imprisonment. A brilliant architect,…
Cities of Women is a dual timeline novel that interweaves the contemporary story of Verity Frazier, a disillusioned professor lacking passion and love in her life, with the tale of a medieval woman, who transforms herself into the artist, Anastasia, an unidentified illuminator of the manuscripts of the historical Christine…
Stasiland is a gripping non-fiction account of personal histories from the former East Germany told retrospectively. We live alongside Australian writer Anna Funder amidst fast-changing 1990s Berlin as she meets Stasi men and those who resisted them. We learn of their struggles in East German times and beyond through her outsider’s eye. Some may balk at the book’s personal tone, but for me, Funder pulls it off. I found this first-person blend of memoir and journalistic investigation to be utterly irresistible.
“Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. . . . A heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic.” — Claire Tomalin, Guardian “Books of the Year”
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction: a powerfully moving account of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi.
Anna Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of the resistance against East Germany’s communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain—and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East…
The Leipzig Affair is a tale of love, betrayal, and redemption set in East Germany in the dying days of the Cold War. Magda, a brilliant but disillusioned young linguist, is desperate to flee to the West. When a black-market deal brings her into contact with Robert, a young Scot studying at Leipzig University, she sees a way to realize her escape plans. As Robert falls in love with her, he stumbles into a complex world of shifting half-truths that will undo them both. Many years later, long after the Berlin Wall has been torn down, Robert returns to Leipzig in search of answers. Can he track down the elusive Magda? And will the past give up its secrets?
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria…
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is…
