Great Reading!

Yes, I have had a great time reading but that hasn't been why I haven't written for so long...the motherboard on my regular computer has failed and left me waiting for a new computor to be installed. This is being written on a very old comp. I have managed to put together using various bits and pieces lying around the house.
So I managed to read one of my Xmas presents...All that I am... by Anna Funder and guess what? I raced out to buy her original first non-fiction book...Stasiland. 'All that I am' hooked me in because for once it was a book written not only in the Nazi Era but in the early 20th century...the years of my mother's growing up. Berlin featured strongly as it did in Stasiland. In both books, my mother's experience came to bite me on the nose. Interesting how some of these books can help us to understand our family's role in those years.
  In Stasiland, in particular, I was taken back to the years of my visits to Berlin, Leipzig and Weimar, at first when the wall came down and then in 2001. I discovered the existance of my mother's first cousin, a famous artist and teacher, a member of the "Vertriebenen", the artists who had been forced out of Prussia to live elsewhere in East Germany. In his instance, he took his family to live in Weimar. And it was in his presence when we stopped on the stairs long enough to peer at the enquiring stare of his neighbour. We witnessed, what must have been a very upsetting time for our relative, as he abused his neighbour unremittingly. This man, his neighbour, had been an informer during the GDR years and had obviously not given up his old habits of spying on our cousin.
My second cousin, who now lives in Leipzig, but had been brought up in Weimar started to tell me of her experience...as a brilliant student she was not allowed to enrol in the school of her choosing...she was forced by the establishment to attend a boarding school a long, long way away from home. Did she need her thoughts re-arranged? This experience she has not forgotten, yet she complained to me that when the wall came down and the GDR became non-existant, she was robbed of her nationality. "We all had jobs in the GDR, there was no unemployment as there is now. And there was no homelessness." Her attitude amazed
me. Her husband thought differently. "Yes, everyone had jobs...with nothing to do. At least now we all have career structures." And that was all I could hear. Subject closed. Anna Funder, on the other hand, opened the doors on these years in a well-researched book...another set of books I couldn't put down.