Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall

In 1975, West German authors Barbara Bronnen and Franz Henny crossed the border into the German Democratic Republic to interview people about their everyday lives. Bronnen and Henny were not alone. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s East and West Germans with varying agendas and backgrounds undertook similar research projects. Their results were published in so-called Protokolle , an edited form of interview book. The fascination with everyday life in the GDR did not end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Over the last decade, a growing number of historians of East Germany have conducted their own interviews, used those published in the Protokolle and consulted a number of other sources to explore a wide variety of topics related to the life of ordinary East Germans. Hester Vaizey’s latest book, Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall , is an engaging example of such a history. Based on interviews and mainly focused on the last two decades before the Wende , Vaizey tells the stories of eight people who grew up in the GDR, experienced the opening of the Wall and then had to adjust to life in the new Federal Republic. Their experiences were far from similar. Indeed, one of Vaizey’s objectives with Born in the GDR is to show that the ‘two extreme characterizations of East Germany’ (p. 161) that have come to dominate the popular consciousness after the fall of the Wall are not always good guides for our understanding of what it meant to live under Socialism.