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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £8.54
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: PublicAffairs
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9781586485597
ISBN: 1586485598
Label: PublicAffairs
Manufacturer: PublicAffairs
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 192
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Studio: PublicAffairs
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Editorial Reviews:
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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
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: one to avoid
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: better than any history book!
Comment: 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!
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