REVIEWS 389 Vaizey, Hester. Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xiii + 224 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £20.00. OveraquarterofadecadesincethedemiseoftheGermanDemocraticRepublic (GDR), the former socialist state is still commonly represented in a polarized fashion, either as a benevolent welfare dictatorship or a totalitarian Stasi state. While these extremes continue to persist in the public sphere, a growing body of research on the GDR seeks to present a more differentiated image of life in the socialist state, through the examination of concepts such as the ‘everyday’ or ‘normal lives’ within the socialist dictatorship. Hester Vaizey’s Born in the GDR provides a valuable contribution to this scholarship, and suggests a more ‘variegated picture’ (p. 2) of the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in the GDR, as well as during the period of transition from communism to capitalism. She does so by presenting a range of perspectives on, and memories of, the GDR through the stories of eight East German interviewees aged between ten and twenty-eight at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The narratives are accompanied by images of schoolwork, reports, photos and diary entries from the protagonists’ lives, which serve both to illustrate the points made by Vaizey, as well as to encourage a sense of identification with the individuals portrayed. The book contains eight main chapters, each of which focuses on a separate narrative. These are placed in context by an introduction, which provides a broad history of the GDR and associated questions of identity — primarily for readers who are not well acquainted with this history — and a conclusion, which brings the narratives together and explains some of the very mixed emotions amongst GDR citizens after unification. The narratives themselves are selected from a pool of thirty interviews, and chosen on the basis of their ‘particularly striking’ (p. 18) nature. As Vaizey recognizes, the collection does not, thus, provide a representative cross-sample of ‘ordinary’ citizens, but rather chooses to focus on those narratives that provide insight into the wide range of experiences of the GDR and its immediate aftermath. Petra, for example, became involved in politics during the late GDR and went on to become a member of the Bundestag for the Communist successor party, the PDS; in contrast, Carola found the GDR to be too claustrophobic and fled to the West in January 1989, whereas Peggy, aged only ten at the time, experienced few of the negative sides of the GDR, and chose to stay at her school camp in November 1989, rather than visit West Berlin with her family. Inevitably some narratives are more resonant than others, and readers will find it hard to forget Katharina’s experience of growing up as a vicar’s daughter, or Mario’s story of Stasi imprisonment following a failed escape attempt and subsequent psychological damage. Throughout these chapters, Vaizey successfully SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 390 intertwines the personal narratives of her interviewees with the political narratives of the GDR and unified Germany; Katharina’s chapter, for example, contains much information on the church-state relationship in the GDR as well as relations with West Germany, whereas Mario’s narrative provides considerable background to the Stasi, the conditions of imprisonment and the question of the Stasi files in unified Germany. The selection of narratives doubtless succeeds in capturing a nuanced understanding of life in the GDR and its aftermath, and attest to Vaizey’s assessment that ‘there is more than one historical truth’ (p. 21). Interestingly, however, a number of trends also emerge throughout the narratives: the majority of interviewees, for instance, proclaim an anti-materialist outlook on life, express a desire to counter Western stereotypes of the GDR (most commonly the assumption that there was never enough to eat), and feel stronger bonds with former East Germans than those in the West. Most important is the fact that none of the protagonists wish to see the Wall back again, regardless of the difficulties some experienced after 1989 — a clear indictment of the state of affairs in the GDR. Born in the GDR is eminently readable and the narratives are both absorbing and thought...