German novelists on the fall of the Berlin wall: ‘It was a source of energy we lived off for years’

By Dilip -
Thirty years ago, the people of Berlin brought down the wall that had cut through their city since 1961. Here five writers, from both sides of the divide, recall those heady days and assess their legacy

Heike Geissler was born in 1977 in Riesa in the former German Democratic Republic. She is the author of four novels, most recently Seasonal Associate, a highly acclaimed fictionalised account of a period she spent working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig.

Oh, it’s all so long ago, isn’t it? When the wall came down I was 12 years old and crazy about belongings and about the world. I was embarrassed about coming from the GDR. I was embarrassed about going into shops in West Germany and being a grey and dark-blue complex of drab timidity amidst all the colours. With my first western money I bought myself a neon-coloured rucksack and a cassette recorder. I was already more colourful when I travelled with my mother in a packed train to Oberhausen in West Germany to see the acquaintances who had for years been sending us parcels for feast days and birthdays. I ate yoghurt for the first time, and liked it, and I draped myself in colours. Autumn colours were chic at the time: purple, ochre, etc.


Maybe I’d just lost interest in politics. If only I knew. At any rate Ernst Thälmann (the leader of the Communist Party who was later shot in Buchenwald) had recently been my hero, I’d wanted to be like him, and I’d thought about how he had managed to fashion a little inkwell with the bread that a prison warder had given him, fill it with milk and thus have a source of invisible ink that he could eat straight away if he had to. I wondered about that, and a moment later I wondered what it would be like to live with Martin Lee Gore (of synth-pop band Depeche Mode). I papered my room with posters of him, I dreamt about him, I was, even though I wasn’t quite a grown-up, Martin Lee Gore’s wife..... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/03/berlin-wall-30-years-on-five-german-writers-assess-bernhard-schlink-franck-geissler-ohler

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