Erika Berroth, associate professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, recommended several readings and movies during her Road Scholars Presentation, "Berlin Stories." Below is the recommended list. Enjoy!

Books

Judith Hermann, Summerhouse, later. Transl. Margot Bettauer Dembo. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.

Stalled communication and the vagaries of memory are the familiar themes woven through the nine spare stories in Hermann's debut collection. Her characters, mostly youngish to middle-aged Berliners, stubbornly insist on living in the past even if it's someone else's past. In "The Red Coral Bracelet," a young woman, trying to sort out her own relationship with an uncommunicative boyfriend, describes to her therapist her great-grandmother's life in St. Petersburg, where the great-grandmother's lover shot her husband through the heart in a duel. An artist in "Sonja" finds that his unusual relationship with a reticent, mousy chain smoker whom he claims not to desire is far more resonant than his love affair with a bombshell. The narrator of "Bali Woman" addresses an absent-lover while out on a restless all-night odyssey among Berlin's art world denizens, and in "Hunter Johnson Music" (one of the two stories in the collection not set primarily in Germany), an isolated man living in a dilapidated New York City hotel gives an unusual parting gift to a neighbor woman who's stood him up for a date. Hermann's characters are restless, their desires oblique and unfocused, their memories more real than their raucous real-life encounters. Yet in spite of some sharp observations of contemporary German manners and mores, and her generally elegant prose, Hermann's stories often don't transcend the melancholy self-absorption of her characters. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Jana Hensel, After the Wall. Confessions from and East German Childhood and the Life that Came Next. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York : Public Affairs, 1990.

For the fifteenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: The bittersweet memoir of a young East German woman, searching for her country and herself

Jana Hensel was thirteen on November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell. In all the euphoria over German reunification, no one stopped to think what it would mean for Jana and her generation of East Germans. These were the kids of the seventies, who had grown up in the shadow of Communism with all its hokey comforts: the Young Pioneer youth groups, the cheerful Communist propaganda, and the comforting knowledge that they lived in a Germany unblemished by an ugly Nazi past and a callous capitalist future.

In After the Wall, Jana Hensel tells the story of her confused generation of East Germans, who were forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future. Now as they look back, they wonder whether the oppressive, yet comforting life of their childhood wasn't so bad after all. (Public Affaris Books)

Anna Funder, Stasiland, True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. Granta, 2003

In Stasiland, Funder set out to find out how it felt to live in “the most perfected surveillance state of all time.” She interviewed Miriam Weber, who was imprisoned as a teenager after scaling the Berlin Wall, and Klaus Renft—the East’s Mick Jagger—who was once declared by authorities to “no longer exist.” She also talked to Sigrid Paul, a timid dental technician who found an untapped reservoir of courage when the Berlin Wall separated her from her baby son, desperately ill in a West Berlin hospital. No less fascinating were the men who kept the Stasi machinery running smoothly, and in Stasiland, Funder includes their stories too. After placing an advertisement in a local paper, she was flooded with responses from ex-Stasi officers who, eager to tell their stories, came out of the woodwork to describe the bizarre methods the Stasi used to track their victims. These ranged from planting irradiated pins in suspects’ clothes to collecting “smell samples” from them.

Funder’s careful portraits of the people she meets from “Stasiland” shine a dazzling light on one of the world’s most paranoid and secretive regimes, and its effects on contemporary German society. Nominated for several literary prizes in her native Australia, Stasiland is a lyrical and quirky examination of a country gone wrong. (From World Press Review)

Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Harvard University Press, 1997

This is a superbly researched book. The author has made effective use of the newly opened archives in the former East Germany as well as those in the Federal Republic. His treatment of evolving attitudes toward the Holocaust in the GDR is an especially valuable contribution toward a better understanding of the two Germanys…Herf's book is a tour de force that raises important questions and will do much to stimulate additional research. --Dietrich Orlow, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Jeffrey Herf has written an absorbing and detailed study of how postwar German leaders sought political power by establishing a "master narrative" of the Nazi period...He restores the Jews to their proper place at the center of German history--a place from which it had long been the goal of anti-Semites, and specifically Nazis, to remove them...This [is a] richly detailed, cogently argued and stimulating book...Beyond the scholarly value of the book, a reader also takes away from it a residue of sadness at the loss of what was once a largely symbiotic community of Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. --Henry Krisch, Studies in Contemporary Jewry

Gail S. Halvorsen, The Berlin Candy Bomber. Horizon Publishers, 1997.

The Berlin Candy Bomber is a love story-how two sticks of gum and one man's kindness to the children of a vanquished enemy grew into an epic of goodwill spanning the globe-touching the hearts of millions in both Germany and America.

In June 1948, Russia laid siege to Berlin, cutting off the flow of food and supplies over highways into the city. More than two million people faced economic collapse and starvation. The Americans, English, and French began a massive airlift to bring sustenance to the city and to thwart the Russian siege.

Gail Halvorsen was one of hundreds of U.S. pilots involved in the airlift. While in Berlin, he met a group of children standing by the airport watching the incoming planes. Though they hadn't asked for candy, he was impressed to share with them the two sticks of gum he had in his possession. Seeing how thrilled they were by this gesture, he promised to drop more candy to them the next time he flew to the area.

True to his word, as he flew in the next day, he wiggled the wings of his plane to identify himself, then dropped several small bundles of candy using parachutes crafted from handkerchiefs to slow their fall. Local newspapers picked up the story. Suddenly, letters addressed to "Uncle Wiggly Wings" began to arrive as the children requested candy drops in other areas of the city.

Enthusiasm spread to America, and candy contributions came from all across the country. Within weeks candy manufacturers began donating candy by the boxcar.

In May 1949, the highway blockade ended, and the airlift ended in September. But the story of Uncle Wiggly Wings and the candy-filled parachutes lives on-a symbol of human charity. (Amazon book description)

Margot Theis Raven, Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot. A True Story of the Berlin Airlift and the Candy that Fell from the Sky. Sleeping Bear Press, 2002.

From School Library Journal
Grade 3-5-This outstanding picture book depicts one of the lesser-known aspects of the Berlin Airlift following World War II as seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl. Operation Little Vittles was run by Lt. Gail Halvorsen who, out of the goodness of his heart, began dropping candy in parachutes made from handkerchiefs to the children of West Berlin. This heartwarming story provides not only the historical context, but an epilogue as well. Although the text is slightly wordy at times, it shows, in part, how the Cold War impacted children, and how one child struggled to find hope amid the ruins of postwar Germany. It is also a tribute to the thousands of people involved in the effort. With views of devastated buildings and shrapnel holes in concrete, the full-color paintings elicit a real sense of the war's devastation.

Robyn Ryan Vandenbroek, Elgin Court Public School, St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Films

The Promise (1995) by Margarethe von Trotta

East-Berlin, 1961, shortly after the erection of the Wall. Konrad, Sophie and three of their friends plan a daring escape to Western Germany. The attempt is successful, except for Konrad, who remains behind. From then on, and for the next 28 years, Konrad and Sophie will attempt to meet again, in spite of the Iron Curtain. Konrad, who has become a reputed Astrophysicist, tries to take advantage of scientific congresses outside Eastern Germany to arrange encounters with Sophie. But in a country where the political police, the Stasi, monitors the moves of all suspicious people (such as Konrad's sister Barbara and her husband Harald), preserving one's privacy, ideals and self-respect becomes an exhausting fight, even as the Eastern block begins its long process of disintegration.

Good Bye Lenin ! (2003) by Wolfgang Becker

East Germany, the year 1989: A young man protests against the regime. His mother watches the police arresting him and suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. Some months later, the GDR does not exist anymore and the mother awakes. Since she has to avoid every excitement, the son tries to set up the GDR again for her in their flat. But the world has changed a lot...

The Life of Others (2006) by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

East Berlin, November 1984. Five years before its downfall, the former East-German government ensured its claim to power with a ruthless system of control and surveillance. Party-loyalist Captain Gerd Wiesler hopes to boost his career when given the job of collecting evidence against the playwright Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend, the celebrated theater actress Christa-Maria Sieland.

After all, the “operation” is backed by the highest political circles. What he didn’t anticipate, however, was that submerging oneself into the world of the target also changes the surveillance agent. The immersion in The Lives of Others – in love, literature, free thinking and speech – makes Wiesler acutely aware of the meagerness of his own existence and opens to him a completely new way of life which he has ever more trouble resisting. But the system, once started, cannot be stopped. A dangerous game has begun...

A story from the heart of the East-German regime, The Lives of Others is an intensely gripping thriller and moving love story featuring some of Germany's most internationally celebrated actors.

Source: German Films Service & Marketing GmbH

Berlin, Journey of a City. (1995) A Documentary telling the Story of the City at he epicenter of the Cold War. Bolthead Communications Production.

Berlin’s Hidden History (2002) by Brain Ladd & John Woods

Product Description

Berlin, the capital of reunified Germany, is a city with a glittering present and a dark past. A historian leads the viewer through the new Berlin, revealing the many traces of history in a city that served as Frederick the Great's, Bismarck's, and Hitler's capital before it became the front line of the Cold War and the place where the Berlin Wall was built and destroyed. Learn that there is more than meets the eye at the Brandenburg Gate, Potsdamer Platz, Nazi buildings, Jewish cemeteries, Checkpoint Charlie, and many other places steeped in history.

Writer-Narrator is Brian Ladd, former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and noted author of the book Ghosts of Berlin, published by The University of Chicago Press.