Customer Reviews

German Comedy: Scenes of Life after the Wall

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A nice series of essays on what life was like after the fall of the Wall. East Berlin and East Germany become part of the Federal Republic. East Germans face a new society as they seek to integrate into the Federal Republic and Western Europe. This shock produced by the fall had many unsettling results. Schneider tells these stories in a series of essays addressed to German readers.

There are some interesting situations described here. The East German policeman pursuing a Vietnamese into West Berlin so as to deport him. Poor Polish merchants peddling goods in a walled off West Berlin portion of the city. Questions whether the greater Germany will pose a threat to Europe. The costs of bring East Germany up to West German standards. There are many fine points to discuss here.

This is an OK read for those interested in the division of Germany. I wish I could have read this book when I visited the remains of the Berlin Wall in April, 1990. Germany and Berlin are now united, but the Germans will be working through the problems of the separation for many years to come.

I started reading this book several months ago and now have slowly wandered my way to the end. It is a book best read an essay at a time. Otherwise it seems to jump around too much. A movie in the Seattle International Film Festival, "No Place to Go (Die Unberuehrbare)" reawakened my interest in the book. In the movie, a leftist writer struggles to discover how to survive after the Berlin Wall has fallen and all her hopes for a socialist Germany have been dashed. She has become an anachronism moving across the landscape with nowhere to go. This book is much lighter in tone, a series of good-humored irony-laden essays about life in Germany in 1989 and 1990 in the absence of the legendary Wall. Schneider points out various paradoxes such as West Berliners becoming less enthusiastic about the Wall coming down as the probability of its demise approaches. Also, the book is full of interesting historical footnotes, such as that most of the Wall has disappeared as people have hacked off bigger and littler pieces of it as personal momentos and much-in-demand tourist items. For someone as little aware of recent German history as me, this book was very informative and leaves me wanting to read more about recent German history to find out what has happened since 1991.