A review by ellies_shelf
While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer
5.0
A fascinating look at the collapse of the DDR through the lens of a single narrator's dream-like reminiscences. Daniel Lenz, from East Leipzig, looks back over the years immediately before and immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The novel begins (in Katy Derbyshire's translation):
There's this nursery rhyme I know. I hum it to myself when everything starts going crazy in my head. I think we used to sing it when we hopped about on chalk squares, but maybe I thought it up myself or dreamed it. Sometimes I mouth it silently, sometimes I just start humming it and don't even notice because the memories are dancing in my head, no, not just any memories, the ones of the time after the Wall fell, the years we - made contact?
It's made up of vignettes organised non-chronologically; adjacent memories do sometimes have a sort of dream-association between them - for example, the same one of Daniel's friends might be a main character in a series of vignettes. We get the sense that Daniel is haunted by his teenage memories, populated by his friends and indifferent or downtrodden adults, and is trying in some way to work through a kind of survivor's guilt - not only do all the systems he's accustomed to collapse pretty rapidly around him, but his friends are picked off through one thing or another as the novel progresses.
In the earlier memories, the young people's behaviour is governed by the expectations of the Pioneers, a scout-like organisation for schoolchildren in the DDR. Once the systems of the DDR are removed, there is nothing to replace them; the teenage boys (Daniel, Rico, Paul, Mark, Walter & Stefan) are left to literally play in the ruins. They have no real role models, being surrounded by the violence of 'skins' (neo-Nazi gangs) and offered no protection from adults who are mostly portrayed as drunk or violent or preoccupied with the good old days. There is a hopelessness to the cycle Daniel is stuck in - as much as he often doesn't want to get involved with violence or drugs or other criminal activity, he is drawn in through his loyalty to his friends (although not always - one scene sees Daniel hiding on a balcony as he watches his friends get beaten up).
There are many occasions where Daniel would like to remember something different that happened - kissing a girl, rescuing his friend from a car crash - almost as a repentance for choices that he made. But as readers we see the impossible situation he and his friends are stuck in and Daniel's frustration (increasingly clear in the later vignettes) at the inability of their dreams to get them out of it.
I've thought about the criticisms of this book - that it's too dark, too male-focused, too heavy on violence and objectification of women. But I think it's worthwhile to remember that these characters are, for the majority of the novel, just children - and at the end of the novel Meyer brings us very effectively back to the time of their innocence and shows how they got sucked into the dark side of the society around them. Overall a very real and affecting read.
There's this nursery rhyme I know. I hum it to myself when everything starts going crazy in my head. I think we used to sing it when we hopped about on chalk squares, but maybe I thought it up myself or dreamed it. Sometimes I mouth it silently, sometimes I just start humming it and don't even notice because the memories are dancing in my head, no, not just any memories, the ones of the time after the Wall fell, the years we - made contact?
It's made up of vignettes organised non-chronologically; adjacent memories do sometimes have a sort of dream-association between them - for example, the same one of Daniel's friends might be a main character in a series of vignettes. We get the sense that Daniel is haunted by his teenage memories, populated by his friends and indifferent or downtrodden adults, and is trying in some way to work through a kind of survivor's guilt - not only do all the systems he's accustomed to collapse pretty rapidly around him, but his friends are picked off through one thing or another as the novel progresses.
In the earlier memories, the young people's behaviour is governed by the expectations of the Pioneers, a scout-like organisation for schoolchildren in the DDR. Once the systems of the DDR are removed, there is nothing to replace them; the teenage boys (Daniel, Rico, Paul, Mark, Walter & Stefan) are left to literally play in the ruins. They have no real role models, being surrounded by the violence of 'skins' (neo-Nazi gangs) and offered no protection from adults who are mostly portrayed as drunk or violent or preoccupied with the good old days. There is a hopelessness to the cycle Daniel is stuck in - as much as he often doesn't want to get involved with violence or drugs or other criminal activity, he is drawn in through his loyalty to his friends (although not always - one scene sees Daniel hiding on a balcony as he watches his friends get beaten up).
There are many occasions where Daniel would like to remember something different that happened - kissing a girl, rescuing his friend from a car crash - almost as a repentance for choices that he made. But as readers we see the impossible situation he and his friends are stuck in and Daniel's frustration (increasingly clear in the later vignettes) at the inability of their dreams to get them out of it.
I've thought about the criticisms of this book - that it's too dark, too male-focused, too heavy on violence and objectification of women. But I think it's worthwhile to remember that these characters are, for the majority of the novel, just children - and at the end of the novel Meyer brings us very effectively back to the time of their innocence and shows how they got sucked into the dark side of the society around them. Overall a very real and affecting read.