num_pages: 167
description: Beer-swigging punks in the church balcony, rock-throwing demonstrators, evicted squatters, gun-toting Communist border guards -- Eloise Schinder saw it all from 1982 to 1986 when she and her German-born pastor husband lived at the Berlin Wall in the bohemian district of West Berlin called the Kreuzberg Kiez. Schindler describes the no-man's-land corridor she see from her third-floor balcony; the Kiez alternative scene; a punk squatter tent city on church property; car trouble on the transit autobahn and inside East Germany. She tells of her husband's need for Heimat -- Home with a capital H -- that nearly destroys their marriage. After a return to the newly unified country in 1991, she concludes that a number of outdated cultural attitudes must be discarded before Germany can become the true leader among nations it aspires to be. Eloise Schindler is the pen name of an American writer, translator and composer. A graduate of Drake University, she lives with her pastor husband in Pennsylvania.
language: English
title: A Mighty Fortress was the Berlin Wall
titlecomplete: A Mighty Fortress was the Berlin Wall
publisher: Xlibris Corp