Suddenly Everything Was Different

What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person -- or a nation -- confront such a shock? At an unparalleled moment in German history, Olaf Georg Klein seized the opportunity to engage fellow citizens of the former East Germany in reflection on their lives before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between 1990 and 1993, he conducted almost a hundred interviews of former East German citizens, probing their experiences of the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic, then crafting them into twelve first-person narratives. The result is a literary account woven together from the historical experiences of those caught up in the profound social and political, but also psychological and personal transformations inaugurated by the fall of the Wall. The twelve narrators include representatives from the cities and the countryside, from young and old, from the East German power elite and the resistance, as well as "normal people" who were neither for nor against the system and thus were in a position to be critical of both the GDR and united Germany. The book, which was somewhat of a sensation in Germany upon its publication there in 1994, will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of disciplines: history and political science, sociology, psychology, and literary studies. It includes an introduction and extensive annotations to assist the reader in understanding the East German and unified German contexts. ~~ OLAF GEORG KLEIN's novel Aftermath was published in translation by Northwestern University Press in 1999. ANN McGLASHAN is associate professor of German and Dwight D. Allman is associate professor of Political Science, both at Baylor University.