After The Wall - Couverture souple

Hensel, Jana

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1586485598 ISBN 13 : 9781586485597

Editeur : PublicAffairs, 2008

Synopsis

After the Wall A memoir of a young East German woman, searching for her country and herself. It tells the story of a lost generation of East German kids forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future. Full description

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Jana Hensel was thirteen on November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell. In all the euphoria over German reunification, 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 hokey 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 callous capitalist future.

Suddenly everything was gone. East Germany disappeared, swallowed up by the West, and in its place was everything Jana and her friends had coveted for so long: designer clothes, pop CDs, Hollywood movies, supermarkets, magazines. They snapped up every possible Western product and mannerism. They changed the way they talked, the way they walked, what they read, where they went. They cut off from their parents. They took English lessons, and opened bank accounts. Fifteen years later, they all have the right haircuts and drive the right cars, but who are they? Where are they going?

In After the Wall, Jana Hensel tells the story of her confused generation of East Germans, who were forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future. Now as they look back, they wonder whether the oppressive, yet comforting life of their childhood wasn't so bad after all.

Revue de presse :

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

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: PublicAffairs
• Date d'édition: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1586485598
• ISBN 13: 9781586485597
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 191