Here we are heading towards the end of November and reading has been going on all month for the tenth annual German Literature Month already, so I am very tardily going to share a stack of books that might be read now (or later in my case). I am reading one of the books with my sights set on another one to sneak in before the end of the year. But the beauty of a pile of books is that they can be read and enjoyed anytime.
My current read from this pile is After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next by Jana Hensel. I have been interested for a while now in the former GDR and this is proving a really interesting read. So many of us can look back fondly on childhoods spent elsewhere and maybe even return to the locale and still feel a sense of what came before. Hensel's childhood has all but disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As a companion read I cam across and have borrowed from the library Savid F. Strack's Letters Over the Wall: Life in Communist East Germany. Strack was a German language teacher who kept up a decades long correspondence with four East Germans. I can't wait to dig into this one.
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann -- "In Malina, Bachmann uses the intertwined lives of three characters to explore the roots of society's breakdown that lead to fascism, and in Bachmann's own words, "it doesn't start with the first bombs that are dropped; it doesn't start with the terror that can be written about in every newspaper. It starts with relationships between people."
Gilgi, One of Us by Irmgard Keun -- "Gilgi knows where she's going in life: she's ambitious, focused and determined, even when her boss tries it on with her, even when her parents reveal a terrible secret on her twenty-first birthday. Then she meets the charming but feckless Martin and, for the first time, Gilgi finds herself bewilderingly and dangerously derailed. Irmgard Keun's electrifying debut was an instant sensation in Weimar Germany, with its frank, fearless exploration of sex, work and love."
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder -- "Funder delivers a prize-winning and powerfully rendered account of theresistance against East Germany's communist dictatorship in these harrowing, personal tales of life behind the Iron Curtain--and, especially, of life under the iron fist of the Stasi, East Germany's brutal state security force." A very different perspective on life behind the Wall.
The Have-Nots by Katharina Hacker -- "Jakob and Isabelle meet at a party on September 11. They marry and move to London, where Jakob takes the post of a colleague killed in the World Trade Center attack. But the couple's relationship, like the world they once knew and the happiness they once shared, proves more fragile with each passing day."
And a recent find and perhaps one (along with the book of correspondence) to read for my December prompt! I Have No Regrets: Dairies 1955-1963 by Brigitte Reimann -- "Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany. With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author's love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state's call for artists to leave their ivory towers and engage with the people, moving to the new town of Hoyerswerda to work part-time at a nearby industrial plant and run writing classes for the workers. Her diaries and letters provide a fascinating parallel to her fictional writing. By turns shocking, passionate, unflinching, and bitter--but above all life-affirming--they offer an unparalleled insight into what life was like during the first decades of the GDR."
Any good books about the GDR or just interesting novels or nonfiction about Germany that you have read recently?