"Unheard-of Eastern women", "Problem zone Eastern man?" and "The GDR is sustainable" - humorous reading
East Germans have their own identity. This insight is based on over 80 narrative interviews in which men and women report on their lives in the GDR and the Federal Republic.
Uta Mitsching-Viertel and Ellen Händler evaluate these life reports, about the understanding of democracy, education and work in the East, career breaks after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the family image, and draw a convincing mosaic of the typical East German identity. They show what makes people in the East special and how their experiences under socialism continue to have an impact today. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand East Germany.
With their books Unerhörte Ostfrauen (2019) and Problemzone Ostmann (2021), the authors, both born in 1948, have given a voice to the women and men of East Germany. With the third volume, they go one step further: they analyze the multi-layered experiences they have gathered in their previous works and place them in the current discourse on the East.
The authors take the reader on a journey through eighty years of German history, warmly told, sometimes tragic, but particularly worth reading.
