After the Wall

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 [...]
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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.