Jana Hensel: After the Wall
"My childhood ended one evening when I was thirteen years and three months old,'' begins Jana Hensel in "After the Wall", a deceptively simple memoir that became an instant and controversial bestseller when it appeared in Germany in 2002 as "Zonenkinder". Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Germans have been through elation and disillusionment over their country's reunification. The past proved harder to obliterate than expected. But for most of us outside Germany it is difficult to imagine anyone feeling nostalgia for the deprivations of life in the German Democratic Republic. Hensel writes about that life with a profound but unsentimental nostalgia and a rare perspective.
Born in Leipzig in 1976, she is old enough to have imprinted her childhood in the GDR before it vanished. Her teenage and adult years have been spent entirely in the Federal Republic of Germany, with freedom and opportunities she could never have foreseen. Young enough to adapt, she has studied French and German literature at Leipzig University, lived in Marseilles and Paris, where she began this book in 2002, and is now a journalist for "Der Spiegel" and an internationally acclaimed author. She readily acknowledges her good fortune, and yet she is angry. It was in 1998, when she was at university in France, that she felt the first sharp pangs of loss. While her friends from Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Austria shared memories of childhood entertainment and heroes, she laboured to explain the closed museum of East German popular culture. When she took friends to the modernised and almost unrecognisable Leipzig, they wanted to see the Stasi Museum and St Nicholas Church, where she had attended protest meetings under the eye of surveillance cameras. But that was not how she remembered the city.
On a visit to Berlin in 2003, I met Hensel for an interview in a fashionable cafe in the old East, where she was living. Wearing jeans and T-shirt, drinking cafe latte and Coca Cola, and puffing cigarettes, she was indistinguishable from other young women of Western Europe. However, she still burned with intensity and spoke through an interpreter, though she understood more English than she admitted. She wrote her book, she said, ``because there was a gap in German literature that has to be filled about how young people feel about what is happening...Our world changed from one day to the next. The first time I went home I started to search for the old places. When I saw there was nothing there, I felt disorientated and homeless.''
"After the Wall" recaptures that lost world in a series of everyday vignettes, illustrated with old photographs and mementoes such as a school essay and her swimming certificate. Hensel's skill is in preserving the purity of her childish experience and writing with the minute, visual detail of a snapshot. She remembers her favourite meal of fried bologna and macaroni, her letters imploring Erich Honecker to convince the Americans to put away their bombers, her mother baking cookies for Womens' Career Day. Naivety does not, though, mean blindness. She also remembers how she was trained to be suspicious of single-parent families or children who had Western bananas in their lunchbox. She recalls that people dropped in on each other because telephones were rare, supposedly a sign of a warm-hearted society but really an irritating invasion of privacy.
Short and loosely structured, moving between anecdote and analysis, the book opens with Hensel and her mother sneaking out to the pro-democracy demonstrations that began in Leipzig in 1989. She knew only that ``something big'' was happening. Then, suddenly, the pictures of Lenin and Honecker disappeared from her classroom and all the state-run activities - dance fitness, chess club, Young Pioneers, Spartacus Track and Field Competitions - disappeared. Language changed just as quickly. The consumer depot became the supermarket; nickies became T-shirts; apprentices became trainees; the Polylux machine was now an overhead projector. Games she had played, books and TV shows she had loved, all disappeared. Her parents reacted to freedom by splurging on unneeded and tasteless consumer goods in a way that shocked Hensel. In fact, the saddest aspect of her story is the gap that opened up between the generations. Parents could not advise their children on the new world and simply became an embarrassment. They were "history's losers'' as Hensel and her cohorts surged into the future with huge expectations on their shoulders.
Hensel has made the transition successfully but she doesn't want to forget – or let us forget - her ambivalence. She wrote her memoir-cum-social history partly in reply to "Generation Golf", the West German bestseller by Florian Illies that summed up life for young people born on the other side of the Wall. But she also had to defend herself against criticism from some of her own peers, who thought she was presumptuous in arguing for them. They were happy to let go of their dismal childhood. Non-Germans will perhaps be surprised that Hensel's childhood was not overshadowed by the fear we have seen in endless movies and read about in recent English languages accounts of the GDR, such as the English novelist Nicholas Shakespeare's "Snowleg" and Australian writer Anna Funder's "Stasiland". Hensel is not starry-eyed, so we can only believe her and consider her lucky.
The English edition of "After the Wall" includes a helpful timeline of the GDR and Hensel's life and a note from the translator, Jefferson Chase, which puts her book into context. Non-Americans will find his translation irritating in places because it is unapologetically American and loses Hensel's voice among its references to ``Mom'' and ``date books'' and ``public transportation systems''. Sometimes, too, the language is just clumsy and lacks the conversational ease I imagine in Hensel's original. However, it is worth overlooking the imported flaws and enjoying an intelligent, entertaining and sometimes disquieting journey into a past that we should all remember.
The Book
Hensel, Jana: After the Wall /translated by Jefferson Chase. - New York : Public Affairs, 2004. - 224 pages
ISBN 1-5864826-61
Original title: Zonenkinder (German)
