After The Wall

This book is beautiful. Having briefly visited East Berlin in 1959, I was impressed with its cleanliness and dullness in contrast to the chaos, colour, mess and joy of life in West Berlin. Hensel explains the difference with skill and personal example: East Germany, the most successful and prosperous of the Soviet satellites, was a collection of industrious, intelligent and obedient ants. In many ways, her life until the collapse of "The Wall" was marvelous, packed with activities, programs, events and adults intended to uplift, enlighten and motivate youngsters to do good for others. The frightening aspect of her life was the unrelenting pressure to support these organizations to do good for others. East Germany was a cult without charisma, a ritual without religion in a minutely organized system designed to eliminate every element of chaos from the otherwise free human spirit. She is acutely aware of her parents' and grandparents' generations who lived a rigidly controlled life for almost 60 years, during which even so much as smiling at the wrong event would bring suspicion and possible punishment. When very young, Hensel knew it was dangerous to pick up a discarded Western chocolate bar wrapper from the street; but, she also knew the pure joy of such rebellion. As a teen, she suddenly plunged into a free lifestyle in which almost everything was possible and nothing was unlikely. This is a beautiful portrait of her astonishment at the democratic freedom -- much the same sense of astonishment I feel, having lived all my life in the luxury of such freedom -- the chaos and pure joy of "leaving people alone". In today's politics, too many talk about creating an inspiring sense of purpose for their country; Hensel deftly and with chilling starkness portrays the cost of such enforced "purpose", and the wondrous freedom and peace of mind that comes from respecting the rights of others. The happiness of Americans is the ability to celebrate or condemn their consumer culture without restraint; this book is a warm, human and personal memoir of what it is to not have such freedom. This book is everything anyone could want in a good book; it's well written, concise, poignant and utterly relevant to American society and the world at large. Thank you, Jana Hensel, for a marvelous explanation of what I saw in Berlin almost 50 years ago but didn't fully understand until now.

I was very interested in reading this book after visiting Berlin last year and noticing that this author is close to my own age. I was looking forward to either a colorful description of what her personal life was like both before and after the fall of the Wall or a reasonably detailed discussion about the experiences of her generation at large. In fact, she tries to tackle both storylines--her family's and her generation's--and she doesn't succeed very well at either one. Maybe I was expecting too much from such a slim book, but I felt shortchanged, like she skates neatly over the surface of everything and fails to provide memorable anecdotes, details, or even evidence.Her anecdotes about her life as a child in East Germany aren't compelling. She recalls the organizations she belonged to, sports she participated in, magazines she read, and schools she attended, and a handful of the memories she relays are mildly interesting, but overall her storytelling is lackluster and disappointing. Unfortunately, her accounts of her life post-Wall were equally flat and unenlightening. She did write with interesting perspective about what a complicated relationship she has with her parents because of the gulf between her life experiences and opportunities and theirs. Although it seemed a little insulting to her parents, I give her credit for her candor, and if she had approached other aspects of this book as forthrightly, maybe it would have improved her story.Probably the worst aspect of the book, though, is her attempt to assume the voice of her generation. The author is a journalist, and I'm kind of shocked that she makes so many assertions with no supporting hard evidence, even when it is readily available. One of her primary arguments is that people her age from the former East Germany still struggle to compete with their peers from the former West Germany. She offers no data to support her point. It would have been interesting to hear about whether their incomes lag, their unemployment rates are higher, or their university or secondary school graduation rates are lower than their peers, for instance. I'm not saying she should have stuffed the book with statistics--that's for a different kind of book--but it really felt like she didn't even try to do her homework. A few well-selected points could have done much to help her readers better understand the nature and scope of the problem she's describing. Instead, this whole facet of the book is nothing more than a bunch of squishy generalizations, assertions, and unsubstantiated conclusions. It reads like a college student's term paper written hastily at the deadline, when the student ran out of time to gather research but was determined to reach the requisite number of pages by resorting to off-the-cuff pontificating. It's amateurish.I really wanted to like this book and this author, but I just couldn't. I didn't like that she recalled with no remorse the fact that she and her friends shoplifted frequently as adolescents. Her references to her parents are terribly condescending and must have been exceedingly hurtful to them. Her writing makes her seem humorless, apathetic, materialistic, and irritatingly self-absorbed. She clearly takes herself very, very seriously (much more seriously than she takes her audience, for that matter), and that makes it hard to like and empathize with her. If it hadn't been such a quick read, I wouldn't have stuck it out. A few months ago, I read Stasiland by Anna Funder, which was absolutely fascinating. If you're looking for insights into the lives of East Germans and their government, that book is definitely the one to choose, especially when compared to After the Wall.

I've read both the German and English version. I think it did a great job in explaining the former East-German life, even though I believe that the original version in German was able to capture the emotions and sentiments a bit better. But I guess it's not really fair to compare those two, since the German language is more expressively exhaustive to begin with.

This was my second reading of this book....I liked it again. Recent travels to Poland and Hungary and stories of their life under soviet rule enhanced my understanding of Jana's life. Also last year when we visited Cuba, we were made aware of being 'careful' as our Cuban guide is being watched, lest we jeopardize his job. We were constanly reminded of freedoms we take for granted.

I'm giving this a 3/5 because at times the book is very interesting culturally of the period that happened during the fall of the Berlin wall. However the author goes out of her way to idealize herself to the reader as the prime source of all that is good during this time period. It glosses over periods in history that should not be glossed over as assimilation of East Germany was almost immediate due to the soviets holding back its push forward.In a manner of saying this I found this book both interesting and boring at the same time which rarely happens to me. It was like looking back in a grey past that had no liveliness to which to speak of as nothing stuck out to me. The repetitions occur over and over again through out the book never piercing the vale of intrigue that the book was supposed to explain.

Part of my temporary obsession with East German after seeing "The Lives of Others." Poignant memoir of growing up in the GDR

I was a little bit disappointed n this book concerning the reunification of Germany. I somehow expected a little bit more insight into the life of people of Eat Germany, though it has to be said that Jana Hansel was perhaps too young to give her own experiences, as she would be too young. The premise of the book seems to be the lack of understanding of West Germans for their fellow citizens of East Germany. At the end of reading this book I felt no wiser about what happened previously before the Wall came down, and afterwards. Fell it is a bit of a missed opportunity to explain the differences, and the mind set the an East German would have as opposed to a West German

If this had been a schoolboy/girl's homework assignment, it would have been marked 'could do better'. I was disappointed reading this as I expected so much more. As one of the other reviewer's has mentioned, the author puts across her views and experiences as if they were a whole generation. The author is currently a journalist for Der Spiegel, so I was hoping for a more mature writing style. I am fully aware this book is based on her childhood memoirs, but this could have been re-worked into a more adult read. I haven't had the benefit of reading the German edition 'zonenkinder' and I believe it is a fuller read than this English translation. That all said and done, I read this with great interest and I am glad to have done so. If you wish to purchase this book, ensure you don't pay cover price.

Used this as part of my dissertation, providing we with excellent insight of a post-communist Germany, and the idea of Ostalgie. If you just like a good book, by all means pick it up.

Read this as an acurate account of events pre / post 1989.

Not a bad read and brings back to the reader the beauty of growing up in a socialist state. The Author makes some good points but sadly let's herself down with anti communist comments.