Remembering East Germany is a memoir focused on experiences Richard A. Zipser had while travelling and doing research in communist East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. The memoir is based primarily on a 396-page file the East German secret police--the Stasi--compiled on him with the help of at least ten informants over a twelve-year period. The reports in the file provide a kind of factual foundation for the memoir, as do reports about Zipser found in the Stasi-files of other persons, various printed materials, letters he wrote and received, and some memories as well. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, Zipser was able to obtain a copy of his Stasi-file, a process that took seven years from beginning to end. His memoir provides unique insights into a society and literary scene that no other Westerner was able to experience so intensely. It reflects, on several levels, how he experienced communist East Germany and how it in turn experienced him. This fascinating book transports its readers back in time to the chilling Cold War days of yesteryear.

The German Democratic Republic, commonly referred to as East Germany, was neither democratic nor a republic. It was a repressive dictatorship. "Memories of Life in East Germany: Snapshots" is a memoir comprised of 58 short prose texts focusing on experiences Richard A. Zipser had or things he observed while traveling and doing research in communist East Germany during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. This book is a companion piece to his first memoir, "Remembering East Germany," which he published in 2021. Like its predecessor, Snapshots offers readers the unique perspective of an American who, as an outsider living in East Germany, gained unusual insider knowledge and experience of that totalitarian society. Through the snapshots which capture telling moments, people, events, and encounters, Zipser partially recreates the bygone world he experienced firsthand as a young professor, for the benefit of English-speaking readers today. This fascinating book, like its "sibling" memoir, provides unique insights into a closed society behind the Iron Curtain that no other Westerner was able to experience so intensely. It reflects, on multiple levels, how Zipser experienced communist East Germany and how it in turn experienced him. His book will transport its readers back in time to the chilling Cold War days of yesteryear and East Germany, a country that in 1990 suddenly and unexpectedly vanished. Richard A. Zipser is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Delaware. His field of specialization is literature of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). He is the author of several major books on different and very important aspects of East German literature and cultural policy.

In English translation. One of the most talked-about works ever published in the German Democratic Republic! This innovative novel by an East German writer is a worthy companion to the classic it parodies and parallels: Goethes The Sufferings of Young Werther. Goethe and J. D. Salinger were the two greatest influences on Edgar Wibeau, Young W. Edgar is a 17-year-old with the frustrations of teenagers all over the world, living with the added pressures of an East-bloc state. A model all-GDR boy, the son of a factory director, he suddenly drops out. But not from socialism per sejust from conformity, picky regulations, and official disapproval of jeans, the blues, and girls. Hiding out, he finds and devours an old copy of The Sufferings of Young Werther. From then on he wards off reality with Goethe texts, and young Wibeaus fate is superimposed on that of Werther like a transparent overlay. It is an ironic and revealing linkage.

Faced with an accusation from the US Army's highest legal authority in 1952, Grossman left his unit stationed in Bavaria and swam the Danube to East Germany. He traces his childhood and experiences as a student, worker, and soldier; then describes life in his new home among a surprisingly large community of defectors. There is no index. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl was one of the leading scholars of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in central and eastern Europe. From her pathbreaking ethnography of a former East German border village in the aftermath of German reunification, to her insightful analyses of consumption, nostalgia, and citizenship in the early 21st century, Berdahl's writings probe the contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities of postsocialism as few observers have done. This volume brings together her essays, from an early study of memory at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., to research on consumption and citizenship undertaken in Leipzig in the years before her untimely death. It serves as a superb introduction to the development of the field of postsocialist cultural studies.