Chukovskaya, Lydia "Going Under"

Chukovskaya, Lydia (Чуковская, Лидия Корнеевна) "Going Under" (Russian: Спуск под воду/Spusk pod vodu) - 1972

I found the translation of this book in a German bookshop. The reason I picked it up at first was the cover picture, a birch forest in winter. (see below). I love birches, they have a certain something.

And since I love Russian literature, I was curious about this author who was completely new to me.

"Going Under" takes place in a Russian sanatorium. The first-person narrator has lost her husband through the Soviet regime and tries to find out what happened to him.

The author must have been really courageous. As a fearless critic of the regime, she couldn't publish her autobiographical book in the USSR but it was done in a New York publishing house years later. This led to a professional ban. Very brave.

If you're interested in history, in Russia, in the Stalin regime, the USSR, this is a story that rings true.

From the back cover:

"In the winter of 1949, Nina Sergeyevna spends weeks in a sanatorium for artists on the countryside. Here everything is focused on forgetting. But she wants to know more about the past, about her own suffering, and that of her fellow human beings.

When she met Bilibin, who was in the same labor camp as her husband, she was looking for his closeness. There is a tender affection between the two, but disappointed, she turns away, as Bilibin seeks not the truth but repression and forgetfulness."

Wolf, Christa "They Divided the Sky"

Wolf, Christa "They Divided the Sky" (aka "Divided Heaven") (German: Der geteilte Himmel) - 1963

I grew up with the "Iron Curtain". And just as those on the East side of the curtain couldn't come to us, we in the West couldn't go there. Mind you, we always considered ourselves the lucky ones and I remember the day the curtain was torn down, the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that, as if it was yesterday.

The author Christa Wolf grew up in the East, she was a big supporter of socialism but not the regime in her country. I can understand that quite well, I would probably say that my political views are similar to hers.

In this novel, one of her first, we meet Rita and Manfred, a young couple living somewhere in East Germany shortly before the wall was built. We learn about their problems in the new state, their different views about what can be done and what they do themselves.

They are torn between their relief of having survived the war and their desire to move on. But what is better? Capitalism or socialism. A difficult question, even today.

A brilliant book that describes how Germany was divided in two halves for almost half a century. For those of us growing up with it, a reminder of what was and what could have been. An insight into the other side. For those who were born later and/or don't remember it themselves (or haven't lived in Germany), a good history lesson.

From the back cover:

"First published in 1963, in East Germany, 'They Divided the Sky' tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961.

The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in West Germany, or escape the political ideology of the new country that promoted the "farmer and peasant" state over a state run by intellectuals or capitalists. The construction of the Wall put an end to this hemorrhaging of human capital, but separated families, friends, and lovers, for thirty years.

The conflicts of the time permeate the relations between characters in the book at every level, and strongly affect the relationships that Rita, the protagonist, has not only with colleagues at work and at the teacher's college she attends, but also with her partner Manfred (an intellectual and academic) and his family. They also lead to an accident/attempted suicide that send her to hospital in a coma, and that provide the backdrop for the flashbacks that make up the narrative.

Wolf's first full-length novel, published when she was thirty-five years old, was both a great literary success and a political scandal. Accused of having a 'decadent' attitude with regard to the new socialist Germany and deliberately misrepresenting the workers who are the foundation of this new state, Wolf survived a wave of political and other attacks after its publication. She went on to create a screenplay from the novel and participate in making the film version. More importantly, she went on to become the best-known East German writer of her generation, a writer who established an international reputation and never stopped working toward improving the socialist reality of the GDR."

Grass, Günter "My Century"

Grass, Günter "My Century" (German: Mein Jahrhundert) - 1999

Günter Grass is not really one of my favourite authors, not one of my favourite German authors or one of my favourite Nobel Prize authors. However, he is growing on me and has shown why he really deserved the Nobel Prize with this work. One hundred years in one hundred stories, told from different perspectives, from the rich and the poor, the left and the right, those that left and those that stayed. Men, women, children, everyone got the chance to tell their story that is so particular for that part of the century. If you want to understand what Germans went through and achieved in that time, this is a good point to start.

This is not the BIG book about the century, the book that tells us all how things happened, no, these are more little glimpses through the keyhole into the living rooms and into the hearts of all those Germans that lived in the 20th century.

I am not a huge fan of short stories, either. But this is so much more than just a collection of short stories. Many of them sounded familiar to me, either because I myself have lived or seen them, after all, I have seen almost half of that century, or because I have been told them by my parents and grandparents (some of them were even born in the century before). You cannot possibly agree with every single story because they are too different, they show a broad overview over every aspect of life, every political party, every personal viewpoint.

Certainly, there are stories that might need more explanation to someone who knows nothing about German history (besides that they started THE war) but I still believe that this book teaches us something, at least wets the appetite to know more about certain parts of the history.

Some stories are also personal, they are almost like a mini-biography of the author. If you know nothing about him, that might be hard to understand, just see it as part of the trial to bring one country's century into one book. Not an easy task but Günter Grass managed it quite well.

I read the German original of this book.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2026.

From the back cover:

"In a work of great originality, Germany's most eminent writer examines the victories and terrors of the twentieth century, a period of astounding change for mankind. Great events and seemingly trivial occurrences, technical developments and scientific achievements, war and disasters, and new beginnings, all unfold to display our century in its glory and grimness. A rich and lively display of Grass's extraordinary imagination, the 100 interlinked stories in this volume-one for each year from 1900 to 1999-present a historical and social portrait for the millennium, a tale of our times in all its grandeur and all its horror."

Günter Grass "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Mak, Geert "In Europe. Travels through the twentieth century"

Mak, Geert "In Europe. Travels through the twentieth century" (Dutch: In Europa: Reizen door de twintigste eeuw) - 2004

The 20th century. What a century it was. If we are older than 20 years, we might remember part of it. I remember the last half. The better half I would think, the peaceful half, the one where war only loomed around the corner but was never present. At least not in the part of the world where I lived.

Geert Mak is an excellent Dutch journalist who has written several non-fiction books about life in general and in particular in this part of the world (I reviewed "Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in late 20th Century" here.)

With this work he has excelled himself. He travels through Europe (not just in the book but also in real life) and describes every decade through the country he is just visiting. Some of them he has to visit several times, of course.

In any case, he gives a brilliant overview about the century that changed everyone's life (and not just that of the Europeans) forever. Let us learn from the mistakes made in the past. Reading a book like this one could help us all understanding those mistakes better and trying to avoid them for a better and more peaceful world.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"From the First World War to the waning days of the Cold War, a poignant exploration on what it means to be European at the end of the twentieth-century. Geert Mak criss-crosses Europe from Verdun to Berlin, Saint Petersburg to Srebrenica in search of evidence and witnesses of the last hundred years of Europe. Using his skills as an acclaimed journalist, Mak locates the smaller, personal stories within the epic arc of history-talking to a former ticket-taker at the gates of the Birkenau concentration camp or noting the neat rows of tiny shoes in the abandoned nursery school in the shadow of Chernobyl. His unique approach makes the reader an eyewitness to a half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Sweeping in scale, but intimate in detail 'In Europe' is a masterpiece."

In the meantime, the author has written a follow-up:
"The Dream of Europe" - 2019

Alexievich, Svetlana "Voices from Chernobyl"

Alexievich, Svetlana "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" (Russian: Чернобыльская молитва/Černobylskaja molitva) - 2006

I knew about Chernobyl. We all do. We have all heard of the nuclear disaster in 1986. We have all heard about the dangers we all have been put in by nuclear power plants. And not just since Fukushima 2011. For us Europeans, it started a lot earlier.

We also knew that the Russians tried to hide the fact of the accident to the foreigners for as long as possible. What we only knew from hearsay was the fact that they even hid it from their own people, that they sent their own people into harm's way. Firefighters and other "volunteers" who were sent into the danger zone to clean up. And not just for a couple of minutes. Most of them are dead now and if it hadn't been for Svetlana Alexievich and a lot of heroic people telling their stories, we still wouldn't know what exactly happened in Chernobyl and its surroundings.

If you are at all interested in the future of our planet, in the environment, you should read this harrowing account of what money can do to people. Because that's what it's all about: money and power. Every war is fought over it and every decision in business is made over it. And who pays the price? We, the "little people".

A very powerful story that everyone should read, especially those who still think that nuclear power is the "cheapest" and "best" form of energy.

This book is a strong reminder of the quote "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children" (probably by Moses Henry Cass - according to Quote Investigator but attributed to many other wise folks and people).

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"'Voices from Chernobyl' is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened on April 26, 1986, when the worst nuclear reactor accident in history contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Svetlana Alexievich a journalist who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown. Their narratives form a crucial document revealing how the government masked the event with deception and denial. Harrowing and unforgettable, 'Voices from Chernobyl' bears witness to a tragedy and its aftermath in a book that is as unforgettable as it is essential."

Svetlana Alexievich received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time" and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (Friedenspreis) in 2013. 

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Pausewang, Gudrun "The Last Children"

Pausewang, Gudrun "The Last Children" (German: Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn oder … sieht so unsere Zukunft aus?) - 1983

A youth book from the early eighties. When we were in the middle of the Cold War. When our biggest fear was the nuclear bomb. This book shows the worst case scenario. Several bombs over several European cities. The first casualties. The aftermath.

I read this book a couple of decades ago but it is one that has remained with me for all this time. I don't think it's out of date, we have a lot of other problems and fears today but the nuclear threat is as alive now as it was back then.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Germany on Day X: an atomic bomb explodes. When the bomb falls, nobody is prepared for it. Fulda and Frankfurt no longer exist nor, as far as people know, anything in the vicinity of those cities. Roland, together with his parents and his two siblings, are at the moment on their way to spend vacations with their grandparents in the little town of Schewenborn.

The blinding flash of the explosion puts an end to those plans. There is no more connection to the world out there, no radio, no TV, no newspapers. The water is contaminated, the crops die in the fields, food gets scarce. The hospital in Schewenborn is overflowing with injured people. Those who don't die from burns and radiation perish from epidemics, starvation, and the cold. It is a time of slow, painful wasting away and waiting. Roland's family is no exception - all is uncertain and survival is a matter of fate.

Nonetheless, this dangerous existence finally turns into a kind of everyday life. The last children of Schewenborn even have to go back to school. Roland is teaching them - at the age of seventeen. But what is he supposed to teach? To learn how to live without looting, stealing and killing? The children have to learn to talk with each other again, to feel responsible for one another, to like and love one another. Their world has to be made a world of peace, however shortlived it might be."

In 1984, Gudrun Pausewang received the Gustav-Heinemann Peace Prize for children and youth books.

Tellkamp, Uwe "The Tower"

Tellkamp, Uwe "The Tower" (Der Turm. Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land) - 2008

I loved this book and couldn't wait to recommend it to all my friends. Now it was translated! Go, read it.

Uwe Tellkamp describes life in East Germany in the 1980s. I grew up in the Western part of the country and - as most of us - didn't have any contacts to the East. Which means I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the lives depicted. But I do have a feeling that it's pretty close, yet, not for everyone, only those who lived a more privileged life because of their jobs.

The length of the book enabled the author to go into so many details of so many different characters. Without that, he would have had to restrict himself to fewer characters or a more superficial description.

Of course, Christian Hoffmann was the protagonist, and I loved his portrayal. But my favourite character was Meno Rohde because he seemed the most "alive".

I certainly want to read more of this author and more of other GDR authors.

I read the original German edition of this novel.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2024.

From the back cover:

"In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989."

Müller, Herta "The Appointment"

Müller, Herta "The Appointment" (German: Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet) - 1997

We were lucky to be able to discuss this book with our Romanian book club member who could give us some firsthand information.

In this novel, Herta Müller describes the way of a Romanian woman to an appointment with the "Securitate", the secret police. The whole book takes place in the 90 minutes she needs to get there. While driving on the tram, she reflects on her life and what has happened before.

Of course, not everyone in Romania had the same experience, especially the younger generation. Some of the worst parts for everyone was the rationalization of food, waiting in line for basic needs, the dreams about going on trips, censorship. There were mainly classical books to read, or nationalistic ones, everything that was sold was Romanian anyway. Even movies were forbidden. If you were lucky and had a relative or friend who would get around, you might get coffee etc. The "Securitate", the secret police, knew everything. You would be trained to cooperate People would get under pressure a lot. You were made a member of the communist party. There didn't seem to be much of an underground. The files of the secret police were opened 4-5 years ago.

Most of us really wanted to read this book. The message was to love yourself and that is so important.
We liked the style, even though some found it difficult to read, to understand that the whole book was about a short train ride.

Some of our readers' comments: The author sees the world through a kaleidoscope, nothing is connected, there is no national mourning. This is a wonderful exposé about the inhumanity, the irresponsibility of that regime, very powerful. It's little moments.
They were all victims. We thought this was very educational.
The author describes a dark depression, it gives you a lot to think about.
Never read anything with such a sense of hopelessness. There has to be a redeeming quality.
In their lives everything is about self control. It's the compulsive/obsessiveness that is the only control in her life.
This was a perfect way of showing that she became crazy. Very important to write about dictatorship.

From the back cover:

"'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective.
Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime."

We discussed this in our international book club in December 2010.

Herta Müller grew up in the German speaking part of Romania. She left for Germany in 1987 but her books were not published in Romania at the time.

Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2023.

Müller, Herta "The King Bows and Kills"

Müller, Herta "The King Bows and Kills" (German: Der König verneigt sich und tötet) - 2003

Herta Müller grew up in the German speaking part of Romania. Everything anyone in the German minority owned before World War II was confiscated, her grandfather had been a rich landowner and merchant, her father worked as a truck driver. When Herta Müller started writing about her life and the repressions imposed on the people in Romania, she became a case of the “Securitate”, the secret police. She left for Germany in 1987 where she continued publishing further books which were not translated into Romanian and not available in Romania.

This book is a collection of several essays and it draws a picture of a life in a dictatorship. It is probably the closest to an autobiography that the author has written.

From the back cover:

"Herta Müller is one of the greatest writers and most powerful narrators of contemporary German literature, and books such as 'Herztier' and 'Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jäger' have earned her international fame, too. With 'Der König verneigt sich und tötet', Herta Müller examines the political and historical conditions of her own art. Until she emigrated to Germany, her linguistic and political consciousness was formed in the Romanian dictatorship of Ceaucescu. Language is at the centre of all her reflections: language as a tool for exerting power and suppression but also as a means of resistance and self-assertion against totalitarianism.

Her reflections, however, also include memories of childhood and the family where German was spoken. An impressive, sharply contoured picture of a life under absolute control emerges - to which Herta Müller responded by choosing the freedoms of literature."

Herta Müller "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2023.

MacDonald, Ann-Marie "The Way the Crow Flies"

MacDonald, Ann-Marie "The Way the Crow Flies" - 2003

The second novel of this Canadian author. We read the first one "Fall on Your Knees" in 2002.

Same as her first book, this novel is based on some family history, in this case also on a real life tragedy in the neighbourhood.

Not a lighthearted, nice novel, a lot of tragedy in this novel. Again, the author has a great way of describing the people in this book and I liked it just as much as her first one.

From the back cover:

"The optimism of the early sixties, infused with the excitement of the space race and the menace of the Cold War, is filtered through the rich imagination of high-spirited, eight-year-old Madeleine, who welcomes her family's posting to a quiet Air Force base near the Canadian border. Secure in the love of her beautiful mother, she is unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in a web of secrets. When a very local murder intersects with global forces, Jack must decide where his loyalties lie, and Madeleine will be forced to learn a lesson about the ambiguity ofhuman morality -- one she will only begin to understand when she carries herquest for the truth, and the killer, into adulthood twenty years later."

We discussed this in our international book club in October 2004.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Lewycka, Marina "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian"

Lewycka, Marina "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" - 2005

The story of two Ukrainian sisters, Nadezhda and Vera whose family found refuge in England.

I read this novel with my book club a couple of years ago. I thought there were a lot of topics in this story that you can talk about, immigration, sibling rivalry, generation conflict, Cold War,  jealousy, sociology. It was great having a few East European members in the meeting who could contribute their views.

This was an easy book, fast to read, informative, interesting, enjoyable, powerful. Didn’t think it was very funny, even the author was surprised about this description. She relates tractors to Ukrainian people.  Lots of references and historic value about life in the Eastern European countries before the fall of the wall. The characters were built-up very well, the use of the English language wonderful, the expatriation part was interesting for me being an expat, as well.

There are quite a few interesting characters in the book, the most interesting is probably the difference of the two sisters, one was born in peace, one in war, one is 10 years younger than the other. When discussing this with the book club, we came to the conclusion that sometimes it’s worth carrying on with a book, it might be a great read.

We discussed this in our book club in November 2006.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2021.

From the back cover:

"Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside feuding to save their engineer father from gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths secrets and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget."

I also enjoyed "Two Caravans"