Love in Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin - Hardcover

Anderson, Edith

3.8

5 ratings by Goodreads

9781883642679: Love in Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883642671 ISBN 13: 9781883642679

Publisher: Steerforth Pr, 1999

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An American woman who fell in love with and married an exile from Nazi Germany at the height of World War II explores the inspiring times that led them back to Germany in the hopes of building a new nation and the disillusionment that followed. IP.

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Review:

During the heyday of the American Left's flirtation with Communism in the early decades of the 20th century, many radicals talked the talk but stopped short of walking the walk--rarely did one of them leave the West to live out the socialist dream in the Eastern Bloc. One of the few who did was Edith Anderson, a Jewish American married to an East German with whom she emigrated to Berlin shortly after the end of World War II. In Love in Exile, Anderson writes of her first decade in East Germany--a time marked by the dawn of the cold war and growing political repression.

Though Anderson and her husband, Max Schroeder, lived a life of relative ease--as members of the intelligentsia, they were entitled to better housing, access to cultural events, and the opportunity to travel abroad--eventually the government began cracking down on Germans who had spent the war years elsewhere. Schroeder barely escaped punishment, and the anxiety under which he had lived contributed to his alcoholism. Anderson herself had a nervous breakdown. Her marriage crumbling, she found relief in an extramarital affair. Max Schroeder died in 1958 and Edith Anderson ends her memoir in 1960. She continued to live in East Germany and raised her child there, despite her outrage at government persecution and party corruption. At the time, she hoped that these were problems the party could fix; it seems events since then have proved her wrong.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A tedious reminiscence of life in postwar Berlin among the Communist intelligentsia in the former East Germany. The author of two books published in Germany, Anderson has now attempted to tell the story of her married life from 1943 to 1957 with the German Communist writer and editor Max Schroeder. The two met in New York City during the war. She became enamored of his intellect and commitment to the Communist cause, and followed him to war-ravaged Berlin to help rebuild Germany. This is the story of her difficult life trying to be a productive writer, a supportive wife, and a devoted mother, all while living in oppressive, materially deprived East Berlin. The author tells of her struggle to adapt to German and Communist ways, especially the strict social proprieties, the bureaucratic officiousness, and the rigid ideological strictures that frustrate her attempts to build a meaningful life. She irritates the reader with a habit of introducing too many characters who inhabited the social and political circles in which she and Max lived, and she switches too abruptly from scene to scene as well, all in an effort to build a suspenseful story. Perhaps the single most glaring problem is the excessive use of vulgar similes (he lay tossing in his heresies like an insomniac in sweated sheets) in an attempt to add literary value to this memoir. Her inconsistent judgments of people, especially Max, result in her portraying few sympathetic characters in this dismal story. She is unable to express what was really significant historically about life in East Germany. Anderson frequently quotes from letters she wrote at the time: they are usually of more interest and contain more real life in them than the other episodes in her narrative. One wishes she had published her letters instead, which would have been more authentic, more visceral, than the obtuse saga that remains. -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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