What is is
like to grow up in a totalitarian state?
A state that decided for you if you
could study or not or what profession you could have.
A state that kept a close
eye on its people and where everything could be reason to be arrested.
A state
that kept its people prisoner and told them it was for their own safety.
A
state that distorted the truth and told its people that was freedom.
Maxim Leo grew up in the socialist state of East
Germany. His mother Anne was a party member and believed in the ideals of the
socialist state. This was due to her father who was one of the leading members
in the state. Only when she found out as a journalist how she has to compromise
with the truth she began to have doubts, although she was not ready yet to give
up all her beliefs.
His father
Wolf was an artist who did not believe in the DDR and who tried to find his own
path within the system. This caused many arguments with his father in law.
When he was
young, Maxim wanted nothing more than to be a West German. One of his favorite pastimes
with his friends was to walk through East Berlin in their western jeans, with a
map in their hands saying things like: ‘gosh, this does look different than on
our side’.
When the
Berlin wall fell the first thing he did was to make sure he had a passport of
West Germany, so he would have no problems if the wall would close again.
Maxim
became a journalist, just like his mother and grandfather and gradually he had
questions.
What
happened to his grandfather Gerhard that he believed so strongly in the DDR?
How did his other grandfather switch from being a national-socialist to a
communist? How did his mother and father cope within the system? Maxim decides
to talk to his familymembers to get the whole story.
I do not
know what the Dutch and English publishers thought when they translated the
German title into Red love, it
sounds like soft porn from the seventies. Luckily I found out what the book was
really about, and when I went to Berlin it seemed like a good moment to read
the book.
 |
| The Berlin wall is gone, but sill visible in many ways |
Red love is a very interesting story about recent
history, that somehow seems so very far away already. I remember being 14 yo
and sitting in front of the television when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. It
was an impressive historical moment.
Reading
this book while I was in Berlin made it extra special, because I recognized
things.
Red love is a very good book about the DDR and the
people who lived in it, and a must read for everybody who is interested in
European history.
Original
German title: Haltet euer Herz bereit
Published
in 2009
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