What was the DDR? A country that only existed for less than half a century, like a hangover from a 19th century Europe where the borders were constantly shifting. A state founded with counter-fascist ideals that soon became almost as repressive and fascist as the state it sought to replace. The birth and death of the communist ideals within Western Europe. Leo’s book is an account of the state he was born into, one that didn’t exist when his parents were born and wouldn’t exist when his children were born. A brief, melancholy state, which was also a state of mind. Using his family history, he investigates how the DDR came to be and what it represented for his grandparents’ generation, and then his parents’. His parents, Wolf and Anne, come across as beautiful children of the post-war generation, their struggles every bit as romantic as those of their contemporaries through the sixties and seventies in the west. (My father’s original first name was Wolf, and the account of Leo’s father’s young life in the immediate post-war Berlin might echo that of my father’s.) By the time Leo himself reaches adolescence, the dream has well and truly died. Although his father was a committed doubter, his mother sought to kept the socialist flame alive. But Leo belongs to a generation that is in thrall to the west, and in his account the collapse of the wall and the DDR has such an inevitability to it that the ultimate experience of its end is almost mundane. There is still, to my mind, a sense of urban quiet to the leafy streets of east Berlin. As though, no matter the political state of the nation, this strange tranquility will always predominate. Leo does not appear to mourn the loss of his birth country, but perhaps, even in the act of writing about it, of excavating that past, there is a latent nostalgia, even if this is a nostalgia for something that never really existed.
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