After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next

Description

Jana Hensel was thirteen on the night the Berlin Wall fell. The moment it happened, everyone proclaimed it a Great Historical Event. The Cold War was over! Freedom was at hand! But in all the heady celebration, 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 greedy Capitalist future. This had been her life. Suddenly it was gone. In After the Wall, Jana Hensel 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. It is a bittersweet story of loss and discovery.

Jana Hensel was born in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1976. She is currently a freelance journalist living in Berlin. After the Wall, published in German under the title Zonenkinder, was a major bestseller in Germany. Jefferson Chase has previously translated The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Death in Venice and Other Stories by Thomas Mann. A journalist and writer, he lives in Berlin.

"Publishing News" "Thirteen when the Berlin Wall came down, Hensel describes what it was like for her generation, growing up with the certainties and strange comforts of a totalitarian regime which was suddenly swept away. Her memoir is of a childhood suddenly truncated, life changed forever as she and many like her try to absorb all the experiences they had missed, behind the wall." "The International Herald Tribune" "[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."