Love in Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin [Hardcover]

Edith Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 25, 1999

A moving chronicle about dreams of political triumph and personal happiness gone wrong.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

During the heyday of the American Left's flirtation with Communism in the early decades of the 20th century, many radicals talked the talk but stopped short of walking the walk--rarely did one of them leave the West to live out the socialist dream in the Eastern Bloc. One of the few who did was Edith Anderson, a Jewish American married to an East German with whom she emigrated to Berlin shortly after the end of World War II. In Love in Exile, Anderson writes of her first decade in East Germany--a time marked by the dawn of the cold war and growing political repression.

Though Anderson and her husband, Max Schroeder, lived a life of relative ease--as members of the intelligentsia, they were entitled to better housing, access to cultural events, and the opportunity to travel abroad--eventually the government began cracking down on Germans who had spent the war years elsewhere. Schroeder barely escaped punishment, and the anxiety under which he had lived contributed to his alcoholism. Anderson herself had a nervous breakdown. Her marriage crumbling, she found relief in an extramarital affair. Max Schroeder died in 1958 and Edith Anderson ends her memoir in 1960. She continued to live in East Germany and raised her child there, despite her outrage at government persecution and party corruption. At the time, she hoped that these were problems the party could fix; it seems events since then have proved her wrong.

From Publishers Weekly

Anderson tells how, as an "East Bronx plebeian," she left America in 1947 to share her German husband's life in Allied-occupied Berlin. When they met during WWII, Max Schroeder was a left-wing German exile and survivor of a concentration camp in Vichy France, editing an anti-Nazi periodical in New York. Anderson, cultural editor of the U.S. Communist Party's Daily Worker for a brief stint, had a conservative Jewish upbringing and joined her nominally Protestant, Communist husband in Germany with some trepidation. Her portrait of a Germany in ruins, eager to forget German war guilt and the massacre of at least 11 million people, is chilling. En route to Berlin, her stopover in Paris provides tantalizing glimpses of exiled novelist Richard Wright, Bertolt Brecht and Simone de Beauvoir. In Germany she and Max?theater critic at night, editor-in-chief of a literary publishing house by day?consorted with a lively circle of writers, painters, intellectuals and activists. In 1950 the couple moved to Soviet-controlled East Berlin. With 20/20 hindsight, Anderson charts her disillusionment with her Marxist faith and records the arrests, disappearances and suicides of associates while, over in West Berlin, "denazified" individuals and families got a boost from the Western occupying powers. Her marriage survived multiple strains?her husband's workaholism and abuse of alcohol, her own homesickness and sexual affair with a married neighbor, juggling her career as a translator and writer with raising a daughter?and she movingly describes Max's battle against cancer, to which he succumbed in 1958. Anderson, who still lives in Berlin, is a wonderfully perceptive observer of people, events and places, making this a memorable Cold War chronicle. Photos.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 404 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth Pr; 1st edition (March 25, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883642671
• ISBN-13: 978-1883642679
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,024,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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