Product Description

This is the bittersweet memoir of a young East German woman, searching for her country and herself.Jana Hensel was thirteen on November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell. The moment it happened, everyone proclaimed it a Great Historical Event. The Cold War was over! Freedom was at hand! But in all the heady celebration, no one stopped to think what it would mean for Jana and her generation of East Germans. These were the kids of the seventies, who had grown up in the shadow of Communism with all its strange comforts: the Young Pioneer youth groups, the cheerful Communist propaganda, and the comforting knowledge that they lived in a Germany unblemished by an ugly Nazi past and a greedy Capitalist future. This had been her life.Suddenly it was gone. East Germany disappeared, swallowed up by the West. And everything that Jana knew, loved, and respected disappeared with it. Her country, its politics, history, and culture were wiped clean from the slate. In its place was the West with its big cars and fancy clothes, its endless TV channels, and its supermarkets overflowing with exotic fruits and vegetables she had never dreamed of. Here was everything her generation had coveted for so long - Coca Cola and pop CDs, Hollywood movies and magazines. In their desperation to get with it, Jana and her friends acquired every possible Western product and mannerism. They changed the way they talked, the way they walked, what they read, where they went. They moved to Berlin. They cut off from their parents. They wore Levi's jeans, took English lessons, and opened bank accounts.They spent a decade trying to assimilate. Now they looked right, talked right, and walked right, but who were they? They were always fighting to catch up. But where were they going? In "After the Wall", Jana Hensel tells the story of her generation, a lost generation of East German kids forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future. It is a bittersweet story of loss and discovery, of growing up fast in a strange world that your childhood had never imagined.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80659 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
Jana Hensel was a young girl growing up in East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. The oppressive communist system disappeared in a puff of smoke and the former citizens of the German Democratic Republic got drunk on freedom. Then the hangover set in. How do people who have only ever had one brand of butter or one make of jeans adjust overnight to the profligacy of Western consumerism? And how does a people raised on the myth of communist superiority come to terms with finding itself on history s losing side? Hensel s reminiscences of her fractured life help explain why nostalgia for the bad old days is growing in eastern Germany. --Mail on Sunday

This is a moving and bittersweet memoir that tells the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall from a new perspective... A poignant and touching tale of what life has been like for a member of the last generation of East German youth. --Sunday Express

(Jana Hensel) shines a fascinating light on the social and emotional consequences as the euphoria dissipated and was slowly replaced by a sense of disenfranchisement, disorientation and confusion... Surprisingly for someone who makes her living as a journalist ... her prose is simple and at times almost guileless. Yet far from detracting form her story, this quality actually enhances the honesty and integrity that runs through her fascinating narration of a changing world. --Tribune

About the Author
Jana Hensel was born in Leipzig, GDR, in 1976. She studied in Leipzig, Marseille, Berlin, and Paris. She is currently a journalist for Der Spiegel, living in Berlin.

Customer Reviews

one to avoid
If you can read German, buy the German original, "Zonenkinder". This is an American translation and it's terrible. I found the author too full of self-pity and after a while this begins to annoy. The Americanisms in the translation were more annoying though.

better than any history book!
This book is a very valuable approach to recent German history and is not only educational, but very entertaining and funny. Jana Hensel gives an insight into her life, representative for the one of many East German people of and around her age, thereby unfolding history into personal relations and experience, making it all the more credible and accessible. It is interesting for anyone; those who can relate to it because they experienced something similar, as well as those for whom this is an insight into a completely new and different world. I highly recommend it. If you want to know something about the GDR, don't skim through the history books, read this!

What I read
Easy read. The writter tells quickly and easy what makes more confortable read it. About the GDR, she tells in her point of view, maybe not objetive, but its a real view before and after the wall. I liked to much know how they lived, and what was really bad in a comunist societ and what not. I found out how was the life (or part of) in GDR.