Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany [Hardcover]

Joel Agee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1981

Joel Agee, the son of James Agee, was raised for twelve years in East Germany, where his stepfather, the novelist Bodo Uhse, was a member of the privileged communist intelligentsia. This is the story of how young Joel failed to become a good communist, becoming instead a fine writer.

"A wonderfully evocative memoir. . . . Agee evoked for me the atmosphere of postwar Berlin more vividly than the actual experience of it—and I was there." —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

"One of those rare personal memoirs that brings to life a whole country and an epoch." —Christopher Isherwood

"Twelve Years consists of a series of finely honed anecdotes written in a precise, supple prose rich with sensual detail." —David Ghitelman, Newsday

"By turns poetic and picturesque, Agee energetically catalogues his expatriate passage to manhood with a pinpoint eye and a healthy American distaste for pretension. . . . Huckleberry Finn would have . . . welcomed [him] as a soulmate on the raft." —J. D. Reed, Time

"A triumph. . . . Unfettered by petty analysis or quick explanations, a story that is timeless and ageless and vital." —Robert Michael Green, Baltimore Sun

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One of the "Top 10 Books about the Berlin Wall."

(Guardian )

“One of those rare personal memoirs that brings to life a whole country and an epoch.”

(Christopher Isherwood )

“A triumph. . . . Unfettered by petty analysis or quick explanations, a story that is timeless and ageless and vital.”

(Robert Michael Green Baltimore Sun )

“By turns poetic and picturesque, Agee energetically catalogues his expatriate passage to manhood with a pinpoint eye and a healthy American distaste for pretension. . . . Huckleberry Finn would have . . . welcomed [him] as a soulmate on the raft.”

(. J. D. Reed Time )

“A wonderfully evocative memoir. . . . Agee evoked for me the atmosphere of postwar Berlin more vividly than the actual experience of it—and I was there."

 

(Christopher Lehmann-Haupt New York Times ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Joel Agee has translated numerous German authors into English.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 334 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st edition (May 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374279586
• ISBN-13: 978-0374279585
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,258,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book that touches You, December 6, 2000

By 

Thomas Kraemer-Badoni "Kraemoni" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (Paperback)

I read Joel Agee's book "Twelve Years. An American Boyhood in East Germany" in German and in English and tried very hard to get a used copy of his first american edition - without any success. Finally, he is back again with a new edition, and allthough my english is not as good as it should be, I just want to write down some words abaout this book. For me who always lived in Western Germany it is one of the most interesting books about the communist part of Germany, the GDR (in german it's DDR). It was not meant to be a political book, but it has become one anyhow. The reader is not only enabled to follow a very private story of growing up as a boy (including all the problems most man - since they have been boys - know and prefer not to talk about it), but to understand how culture and everyday life had been transformed by the communist ideology in a way that could be critizised only by children: some simply laughed about it and learned, that even only to laugh could have negative consequences. And getting some idea of how adults did discuss the political penetration of everyday life makes you feel glad to be grown up in a non communist state - but still you can understand that this adults they had their living like others had, and that they were fathers and mothers having everyday problems like others had. This book indeed touched and pleased me. It is a marvellous written autobiographical kind of literature. If you'll read it, it will take a part of your heart and your intellect to. You'll have to love it.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two wonderful books, June 28, 2000

By 

Philipp Rothmaler (NY, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (Paperback)

This is a timely reprint of the author's fascinating recollections of his youth spent from 1948 to 1960 in East Germany.

Together with his mother and his younger brother, the son of a famous American writer followed her second husband, his stepfather, a well-known communist German writer, from his exile in Mexico to East Germany. The circumstances were peculiar, yet the faithfulness to memory and the facts, and the careful choice of language make this book a wonderfully personal and universal piece of literature, capturing `atmosphere, conflicts, and hopes' of adolescence and life in an ideologized society of the Cold War Era.

Interesting complementary reading: `Always Straight Ahead : A Memoir' by Alma Neuman (Joel Agee's mother)

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Written Memoir, February 21, 2005

By 

Beth Fox "Beth A. Fox" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany (Hardcover)

"Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany" is a fascinating memoir. Eight-year-old Joel Agee was brought by his mother and stepfather to the Soviet zone of Germany (what would become East Germany) in 1948 and lived there for the next 12 years. As Agee's stepfather, Bodo Uhse, was a prominent Communist, Agee had the best that East Germany could offer: a villa with servants, summers at the Baltic Sea, and numerous opportunities to recover from his dismal performance at school. Agee does provide an insight as to how the Communist intelligentsia in that country thought -- their explanations for the closed border, their view of the Stalinist (and Soviet-bloc) purges in the early 50s, and their conflicting views of Khruschev's revelations. This memoir is also a coming-of-age story, filled with teenage angst and sexual frustration. What distinguishes this from many other memoirs is that it is exceptionally well-written. Although Agee was never able to get his bearings in the East German school system (or was, as we would say today, a "slacker") his descriptions are almost poetic. Well worth reading.