EAN: 9781509559978

BEHIND THE WALL - INES GEIPEL GEBUNDEN

Germany  like many countries  has witnessed the rise of extremist far-right groups and parties
in recent years  and no more so than in the eastern regions. Why have those parts of Germany
that used to be part of the old GDR turned out to be so supportive of extremist groups and
parties and such fertile ground for violence and hatred? To try to find answers to this
question  Ines Geipel  the former East German Olympic athlete  returns to her past in order
explore the matrix of fear and anxiety that shaped the lives of people in the GDR. Spurred on
by conversations at the bedside of her brother as he lay dying of a brain tumour  she probes
into her own family background and discovers a web of secrets and denial that reflected larger
processes of East German society. She finds that her father had worked as a special agent for
the Stasi until the service had no further use for him  and her grandfather had joined the Nazi
party in 1933 and was stationed in Riga at a time when tens of thousands of Jews were murdered
in the nearby forests. Silence and denial within her family was mirrored in the collective loss
of history outside her home  and the repression of ideological non-conformity made it difficult
for a traumatized population to grapple with and come to terms with a brutal past. Instead  a
politics of forgetting emerged which served the ends of an authoritarian state and seeped into
private lives of individuals with deep and lasting consequences. This powerful memoir 
grippingly told  will appeal to anyone interested in the history of modern Germany  in the rise
of far-right extremism and xenophobia and in the historical forces that shape the present.

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