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Books

What family life — and love — was like in East Germany

Red Love is a compelling biography by Maxim Leo, a natural narrator whose sentences ring with hopelessness when his characters feel empty, and with abandon when his characters feel free

7 December 2013

9:00 AM

7 December 2013

9:00 AM

Red Love: The Story of an East German Family Maxim Leo, translated by Shaun Whiteside

Pushkin Press, pp.266, £16.99, ISBN: 9781908968517

Historians still argue over whether the regime of the GDR can be called a totalitarian one. Some say that the definition reduces the difference between the Socialist Unity Party and National Socialism —that the Nazis left millions dead while the SED left millions of Stasi files. It’s a loaded question, and one that will occur frequently to the reader of Maxim Leo’s startlingly powerful Red Love, a memoir of his childhood in the GDR.

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