Maxim Leo - Red Love: The Story of an East German Family

London: Pushkin Press, 2014

Why is this book on the bedroom floor?: I’m a sucker for anything set in the former East Germany. Mainly because I’ve been planning to write a book set there for about fifteen years, but now it’s also a “thing” of mine. Well, y’know, some people have got Love Island.

About the Author: Maxim Leo is a German journalist who trained as a laboratory assistant in the GDR before swerving completely into political science when the Wall fell. He’s worked for the network RTL and writes regularly for the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. It also appears he’s a screenwriter in Germany. Red Love is published in his homeland as Keep Your Heart Ready, which I think while it doesn’t make any sense in the context of the translation is quite nice. My translation is courtesy of Shaun Whiteside.

Plot: Leo delves into his family’s history, pulling apart the thoughts and actions of his parents and grandfathers, and their worth to the socialist state. What he finds is not necessarily the stuff of cliché.

Review: In her collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion summed up the experience of youth thus: “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” In context, Didion was referring to her time in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, drawn to the epicentre of the counterculture in a search for personal meaning. It’s actually quite an opaque quotation: is it a positive act of personal change from the frustrations of youth, or is it a criticism of the process of reflection, shedding those crying, sleepless nights of horror and disappointment to justify the wrong choices we take?

In Didion’s case, her reflections of Haight Ashbury and 1967-8 were generally negative, recognising the aimlessness and exploitation of fellow people looking for their place in the world. But I think that that piece of writing sums up the personal passage of time extremely well, particularly the disconnect between youth and middle age, where the white heat of want and ambition starts to cool and frantic energy disappears, given over to long days in an office or running around after children.

Most people, then, live their lives in a low-key, personal way. For every famous (or infamous) person, a million more see out each day with very little incident, reporting variations of interpersonal conflict or tiny little triumphs. That might be the key to understanding the human condition: we are destined to be submerged by time, and only a very few break its surface.

For the longest time, our histories were oral, be it the epic poems of Homer or the folk songs of slaves. These histories were our videotape or our Facebook feeds; little lives told in a big way. Only the notable or the rich made it into print or into bronze, and we have seen recently how volatile changing values can be for personal histories. Famously (if mythically), Alfred Nobel established his titular prize after shamefacedly reading his own obituary, which damned him for the invention of dynamite and its subsequent role in shattering conflicts. And so we return to Didion on her Californian voyage of enlightenment - we are the least reliable people to tell our own tales, and if somebody else does it for us, we don’t necessarily get the history we hoped for. But all we are is stories: stories we tell ourselves, stories we have been told, stories we would like to hear told about us.

Sometimes the small history of you and the big history of record intersect. Often, this is simply an “I was there” moment, in which attendance itself becomes the thing of note: the thousands watching Live Aid in Wembley Stadium; the millions watching the second tower. Particularly online I am beginning to see questions such as ‘Those who were alive before the internet, what was it like?’, which, despite its depressing implications for me, is a valid question: as late as 1999, I had a drunken conversation about which Wilson brother from The Beach Boys was dead, and had to phone somebody to corroborate my stance. We often travel through different lives without moving.

Famously, political economist Francis Fukuyama referred to the end of the Cold War as ‘the end of history’, which in his terms took the superseding of totalitarian Communist regimes in exchange for forms of liberal democracy as an end point for humanity’s cultural evolution. Fukuyama argued that there was no need for further progression to other political systems, since democracy is fundamentally a better system than anything else. Of course, things will still be recorded as history, but as societies feel the benefits of liberalism and democracy, any moves from it will eventually return to it, even if it takes generations.

Looking back at 1989-91, there seems real evidence to suggest that the world was choosing to actively participate in its progression, particularly with the footage from East Berlin, Prague, and the Austro-Hungarian border. Music seemed slightly less polished; the horrors of Hillsborough demanded an adult response; people took to the streets to protest the Poll Tax. At the time, I had yet to reach double figures, and events and iconography like this meant nothing to me other than input. If this was the end of history, its full stop is a blurry one.

However, I do remember the vivid images of the Berlin Wall being opened. In my memory I watched it live, but there was no way I could have done; the massing of GDR citizens at crossing points occurred in the later hours of a Thursday. What I’m remembering is news footage on constant loop in the days that followed. What I do remember was people happy for a reason I didn’t understand, in a country I didn’t know of, and the sliver of red plastic hanging from the barrier on the Bornholmer Strasse crossing point.

In the decades since, there has been a slow trickle of commercial history originating from the eastern sector, which broadly bisects the German Democratic Republic into two further communities: the likes of Anna Funder’s peerless Stasiland paint East Germany as a paranoid, dingy police state; Jana Hensel’s After The Wall offers a kooky, inclusive and largely benign one-party protector. In a sense, the state was no motherland, more a mismatched uncle and aunt, who could be severe, distant, caring or open-handed whenever they unexpectedly dropped in.

One of the few approaches our general discourse about the Eastern Bloc’s show state lacks is a voice closer to the centre of government. It may be possible that German bookshops overflow with confessionals by Egon Krenz or Erich Mielke, but back in Blighty we’re restricted to spymaster Markus Wolf’s Man Without A Face. Who knows why this should be? Maybe it’s all still too raw, or (in my personal view) the state was discredited and ended as a museum piece, sealed in plastic bubbles and sold on novelty postcards.

So Red Love: The Story of an East German Family seems as close as a non-German speaker may get for now. Maxim Leo was born in East Berlin in 1970, making him 18 when the Wall fell. However, at the time, he was disinterested in questions of the past, preferring to explore his new-found freedom. So far, so cheap cash-in.

But beyond the personal biography, Maxim’s tale centres largely on four others: his father Wolf, mother Anne, and grandfathers Werner and Gerhard. What makes this East German family unique is their personal involvement in the promotion of the state itself. Wolf, an artist, became government-approved and allowed to exhibit in West Berlin; Anne worked as a journalist for party publications, following in her father Gerhard’s footsteps, while Werner spent his life as a headteacher.

Of the two parents, it was Wolf who was the natural rebel, his apoliticism and small-scale resistance enough to land him an internal banishment to Leipzig, for the crime of airbrushing a picture of leader Walter Ulbricht. At the time, Wolf danced openly and communed with multiple young people, both huge no-nos, and the less said about his velvet trousers and haircut the better. After a spell in the National People’s Army, Wolf returned to Berlin, and one night visited his friend Hansi, where he met Anne.

Anne was born into privilege, or what counted for it in a socialist utopia. A westerner by birth, the daughter of a respected journalist for Neues Deutschland, Anne held the enviable position of being able to experience the west. In all respects she matures in a household coloured red, her strong beliefs in the state’s mission even alienating her from her peers. But Anne is no mere apparatchik, having a natural inclination to question. There is more than a suggestion that this quality opened the doors of her heart to the scruffy, unpromising man in Hansi’s living room.

But the world into which both children were born was one created by men like their fathers - socialist pioneers and refugees from Nazism. Anne’s father Gerhard, who has a story Marvel Studios would probably kill for, earned his SED party badge the hard way. Born of Jewish heritage, he was encouraged to leave for France at the earliest opportunity after Hitler took power, and when Paris was invaded, the teenager (at the time, Gerhard was sixteen years of age) was pushed further south into Vichy territory, where he was enlisted into a partisan group.

Having been issued a false identity, Gerhard had to train himself to speak his German in a French accent in order to work alongside the local Wehrmacht command. All the time passing information about the deportation of French Jews from Drancy, Gerhard’s own noose was tightening, until one day he was taken in for questioning and sentenced to death.

What follows is nothing short of miraculous: a soft word here from a friendly face, a train bombed by the Resistance and a shootout to the death. Emerging unscathed from certain doom, Gerhard absorbed the lessons of his socialist saviours and returned to Germany as a believer.

Werner, on the other hand, was a late recruit to the failing Nazi war effort and was captured in the dog days of the conflict post-Market Garden. His is a tale of capture, privation and disease, whereupon the victorious allies forced their captives into fields, surrounded them with barbed wire and offered thin soup and a single tap. There was no shelter, no medical care, and it became a lottery as to who would survive these days of peace. Werner scraped through, finding tough work on a French farmstead, before returning home a taciturn and crumbling man.

What saved Werner turned out to be his conviction. A previously carefree youth, his growing self-possession turned him towards the power of the state as an organ for his expression, and this same fervour helped to rebuild his shattered psyche, in the form of his belief in the men building the socialist dream. He became a woodwork teacher and worked his way to the top, helping to press the importance of contributing to the state.

The story would be fairly predictable were it not for the fact that real life allows for finer detail. Not simply a picture of a career-minded idealist and a non-conformist, Red Love dusts off the decades of accumulated cliche. Wolf may have kicked against the pricks, but the first thing he does after the Wall comes down is buy the whole family thermal underwear, in case there are rapid changes in fortune. Anne’s exalted status is shown to be a sham: there is an appalling story from her formative career when Soviet tanks invade Prague; she and other colleagues raise their objections, and those same colleagues are forced to issue apologies and then ostracised, their working lives over. As the scales fall from Anne’s eyes we see through them the pettiness and spite which characterised the worst excesses of the socialist purview, which tried to be immune from all criticism and ended up infected with paranoia.

As Maxim’s investigations develop, those threads begin to entangle his forebears, leading to surprise revelations. Werner, so loyal to his choices, leaves his wife and family home on Karl-Marx-Allee to start a new one, having another daughter, Karola. But signs of the damaged Werner remain, demanding his child refrain from wearing Western jeans in a vain attempt to hold onto his core values.

In 1987, Gerhard takes Maxim on his first overseas trip. Of course, the boy has no hesitation in taking the opportunity to go west, as he has spent a large part of his teenage years mooching around East Berlin pretending to be a snooty Westerner in an attempt to liven up his drab life. Inspired by the window on freedom, Maxim applies to the authorities to marry a westerner (a popular route out of the Communist bloc), to be advised, quite deliberately, to keep his powder dry.

Lo and behold, Maxim’s tale of a society built and betrayed ends more or less on the night the Wall is finally breached. In true personal history style, his parents, having resented or questioned the system for their entire lives, miss the momentous event, having gone to bed. In the weeks that follow, Maxim overdoses on trips to the west, his only fear that a system with nothing to lose might not let him back to see his family.

As short as Red Love is, it’s a densely packed saga that is handled with no little skill. In the hands of a lesser writer the more mundane details of GDR life (those first days at school; the everyday trips to swim in the lake) could become a succession of snapshots that very quickly tire, but Leo is careful to ensure that he focuses on core characters. It’s very rare in a memoir that one becomes a supporting cast member, and rarer still that the padding that usually bogs them down is chopped away to something leaner. Red Love’s short, incisive chapters speed the story along to the major events in his family’s history and the book is much the better for it.

I also think non-German readers will appreciate the lack of spoon-feeding in Red Love if they’re looking for an alternative perspective on life in the GDR. This is not a book that’s draped in rayon or pervaded by the choke of brown coal. These lives are real, set in the context of what is and what isn’t permitted; all the Sandmen and Pioneer meetings in the state aren’t going to make any difference. A mature exploration of personal growth and disillusionment is Red Love’s goal, and it succeeds with quiet confidence.

Having said that, while you cannot exactly beat Leo for his family’s circumstances, the prospective reader must also realise that in the land of the workers and peasants, it is not every teenager who can wonder about the west and a short time later find himself mooching about on the French Riviera. Certainly on his mother’s side, there is a sense of privilege left unsaid and still less unexplained. Even if she is eventually pushed from her career following a provocative article, she is still able to eventually establish herself as a freelance journalist with a modicum of independence. This part of her life is echoed in the treatment of her father Gerhard, who similarly was able to criticise and yet was protected by some Samaritan, being quietly shunted off as a foreign correspondent.

This last is perhaps why East Germany holds such fascination. The Nazi state was brutal towards its enemies, but the SED was quietly and relentlessly vindictive without really telling you why. On the correct side were the likes of Anna and Gerhard, who were kept at enough distance to criticise. In a sense theirs was a life wasted: reformers with their hearts rooted in the love of the state, but that state preferred to spend its energies persecuting those without influence.

In the end, maybe that is the lesson that Red Love offers, not just about the German Democratic Republic but about our role in our own history. Maxim Leo’s family might have built, supported, criticised and been shaped by the socialist system, but what we remember is the throng on the Bösebrücke which overwhelmed it. Ultimately this story is one of family, not ideology, and that story is worth telling, even if the colour isn’t quite as vivid as it was on the flags that flew above them.

Will I keep this book on the bedroom floor?: It’s quite small and unobtrusive, and there’s a slender gap between Along the Wall and Watchtowers by Oliver August and The File by Timothy Garton Ash that’s crying out for a bit of crimson affection.