This has been on my radar for a long time despite not being a type of book to which I'd typically be drawn, and I felt in safe hands from the opening epigraphs - one from The Member of the Wedding, another from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the other from an unfamiliar source, namely The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist by Breyten Breytenbach: "The two of you, violator and victim (collaborator! violin!), are linked, perhaps forever, by the obscenity of what has been revealed to you, by the sad knowledge of what people are capable of. We are all guilty."
The writing is good and so is the story-telling; I felt that I learned a lot from reading it, about life in East Germany while the Berlin Wall stood (1961 to 1989), and about people. In some ways what was most striking was the banality of it (not necessarily wholly in that Arendt sense, but maybe partaking of some of it), and the way that the real horrors of life during that period existed despite the worst excesses of, say, Stalinist Russia being absent - i.e. the way that day to day life continued under the surveillance of the state but without the ultimate sanctions of death or indefinite imprisonment seemingly being likely, given the bureaucratisation of the state and nominal adherence to the rule of law.
The writing is good and so is the story-telling; I felt that I learned a lot from reading it, about life in East Germany while the Berlin Wall stood (1961 to 1989), and about people. In some ways what was most striking was the banality of it (not necessarily wholly in that Arendt sense, but maybe partaking of some of it), and the way that the real horrors of life during that period existed despite the worst excesses of, say, Stalinist Russia being absent - i.e. the way that day to day life continued under the surveillance of the state but without the ultimate sanctions of death or indefinite imprisonment seemingly being likely, given the bureaucratisation of the state and nominal adherence to the rule of law.
