The politics of memory

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kramer (The Last Cowboy), a writer for the New Yorker since 1964, is a highly skilled journalist who has a deep passion for her subject and obviously knows her stuff. In these articles collected from the New Yorker and devoted to such topics as Berlin, the Stasi (East Germany's secret police), skinheads and other subjects, she ruminates on the attempts of the Germans from both sides of the Wall to come to terms with their collective past. One problem with this kind of collection is that some of it dates rather rapidly. For example, she goes on about Berlin's "so big, and so conspicuously bombed out" Potsdamer Platz, which is now being rapidly developed by major corporations. Still, her observations can be trenchant: "[W]ith three hundred thousand informers, the Stasi was not so much a mirror of East Germany; to a large extent, it was East Germany." If Kramer could rein in the verbiage, her essays would be compelling. (Oct.)

Library Journal

Journalist Kramer has expanded six long essays on the "new" Germany, originally published in The New Yorker. Instead of reporting on the outward political events of German reunification, Kramer examines the consequences of reunification upon the lives of a diverse group of modern Germans. She shows that younger Germans are trying to forge a new German identity in which Germany is "guilty, forgiven, and absolved." Both moving and insightful, these essays survey the moral landscape of Germany. Many images linger in the reader's mind: a lost boy "without history" returning home in the Eastern half of the country, a poet who had been an informer for the notorious Stasi reflecting on literary politics and betrayal, the sudden, arbitrary violence of right-wing skinhead groups. Kramer also chronicles the profound psychological impact of moving the capital back to Berlin. Highly recommended as a guidebook to the new Germany for all large public and academic libraries.Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, Pa.

Kirkus Reviews

In her latest collection of her "Letters from Europe" for the New Yorker, Kramer (Whose Art Is It?, 1994, etc.) ponders the fate of post-Wall Germany.

In six long essays from November 1988 to August 1995, Kramer offers snapshots of a nation struggling through a difficult transition, evolving from the divided Germany of the Cold War to the uneasily reunified Germany of today. The Germans, she writes in her introduction, "discovered that it was hard to be ordinary folks . . . when you had a Holocaust in your history." But the presence of the Holocaust is only implied in all but the last two pieces, one on skinhead violence in the city of Ludwigshafen and the other on Berlin's debate over how to memorialize the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. In the first four essays, the dilemma hangs like an unidentified cloud over Germans who strive to be "ordinary." However, the most visible presence in all six pieces is the Wall and its ghosts. In her November 1991 piece "Berlin," Kramer treats the German capital as a city in which East and West are still clearly demarcated. In "Peter Schmidt" and "Stasi" she reveals the problems that the former East Germans have brought to the unification party, particularly an odd, troubling passivity. Kramer is not a scintillating prose stylist, but she is an excellent reporter. Equally important, she has a sure grasp of the architecture of the long feature piece; the six essays in this volume are superbly structured. It would have been nice, however, to know what happened to the principal players here in the years since the articles were written.

Thoughtful, insightful writing, a convincing portrait of contemporary Germany, and a forceful cautionary tale: After all, every time the Germans have had a "German problem," it has become as a problem for everyone else, too.