A book, I read one!

I've had a copy of After the Wall (Jana Hensel) for years now, and never got around to reading it. It's a personal memoir of childhood in the German Democratic Republic and teenage/young adult years adjusting to reunited Germany. It's... interesting. It rings with a sense of loss: not for the conditions of socialist East Germany, per se, but for the past and sense of identity which went with it. Hensel sees herself and her peers as immigrants in a country which came to *them* instead of the other way around.

I don't know. It was interesting, and moving, and reminded me of the interest I used to have in modern German history. My historian-brain doesn't quite know what to make of it, though. On the one hand, nom nom nom, primary sources. On the other, I'm inherently suspicious of Hensel's binary constructs. I can't believe that all West German youth of her generation grew up on great terms with their parents, or that all East German university students in the late 90s isolated themselves from their parents, found their parents' experience so irrelevant as Hensel describes. (Just to take one example.) But it's... intriguing that she understands things in this way. And that construction appeals to others, too, if the popularity of the book in German is any indicator.

In many ways, I think I would have preferred the dry sociological study which the translator happily proclaims this book not to be: something with case studies and surveys and control groups and statistics.

I swear I'm a literature person. I'm all about the subjective constructions of social realities. Really I am.