Red Love

March 1, 2014
A prize-winning German journalist's account of how he revisited his family's socialist past to find answers about his parents' relationship to him and to each other. The self-proclaimed "bourgeois" of his family, Berliner Zeitung editor Maxim grew up in East Berlin. His parents, Anne and Wolf, were rebels who often made him wish "they could be as normal as all the other parents I knew." Part of what made them different was that Anne was from West Germany and Wolf, from the East. Gerhard, Anne's father, fought with the French Resistance and then returned home after the war to build the East German state. By contrast, Werner, Wolf's father, was a French prisoner of war who returned home a broken man who found his balm in East German socialism. Following the idealism of her father, Anne developed a desire to "put her life at the service of the [Socialist] Party" and became a journalist like Gerhard. Eventually, she abandoned her career when she could not tolerate the censorship she witnessed or the outright lies she saw published, and she retreated into university life. Yet, however disenchanted she was with the East German state, "she remain[ed] a Socialist deep down." Wolf had a more openly critical attitude toward prevailing political ideology. An artist, he expressed his opinions through his work, nervously aware of the tightrope he walked between ideological conformity and resistance. When change finally came to East Germany in 1989, Anne was able to distance herself from the "unhappy [socialist] love of her youth" thanks to her academic training. But Wolf "missed the security he had previously found so constricting," and the "long love and long argument" that had been his marriage to Anne finally came to end. In this winner of the European Book Prize, Leo not only produces a moving family memoir, but also a probing exploration of the human need to believe and belong.

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March 15, 2014
Leo's memoir of family life under the German Democratic Republic begins in the hospital room of his maternal grandfather, Gerhard, a Berlin-born Jew, French Resistance hero, and stern GDR loyalist. Gerhard has had a stroke; what thoughts he can express come out better in French. But for the first time that Leo can remember, his grandfather is able to express emotions, a helpless, loveable man who was happy to see him. And for the first time, Leo wishes that he could go back to the GDR so that he could understand it as he never could before. Opposite Gerhard is Leo's paternal grandfather, Werner, the Wehrmacht soldier who returned from the war broken and ready for something new to believe in. For his grandfathers, says Leo, the GDR was a kind of dreamland in which trauma turned to dream and the past could be eclipsed. The family portrait gets more complicated when we meet Leo's father, Wolf, an artist who defines himself against, but does not truly reject, GDR orthodoxy, and his mother, a journalist whose disillusionment with the state only strengthened her love for the ideals to which it aspired. Viewed together, their stories present an uncommonly nuanced look at a nation that no longer lives but continues to exist, like a ghost that cannot find peace. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)