Red love
Subtitle: the story of an East German family
By: Maxim Leo ; translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
Contributors: Whiteside, Shaun, translator
Publisher: Pushkin
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781908968517
Subjects: Social conditions; Family; Journalists; Biography
Work titles: Haltet euer Herz bereit
Description: The gripping story, lovingly told, of what held East Germany together - and what, in the end, destroyed it. Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets, and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say. Now, married with two children and the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the questions he couldn't ask. Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother end her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals, but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the German Democratic Republic would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart.
Notes: Translation from the German of: Haltet euer Herz bereit: eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschiche