Susie Dent

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

Maxim Leo's grandfather, Gerhard with his wife, Nora. Photo: Pushkin Press

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. But as the political theorist Hannah Arendt observed, ‘storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it’.

In this case the story is real, and is not one but many, running back and forth over the lives of Leo’s family as they form and re-form their relationship with their country. Leo writes as the genealogist rather than the son or grandson, a position that chimes with his characteristic dispassionateness towards the politics that governed his childhood. As he states from the outset, ‘Society isn’t the main subject of my life. I am’. Yet at the same time he must acknowledge that the East can never be far away: ‘It clings to me. It’s like a big family that you can’t shake off … that’s forever calling you up’.

The real family of his book is just as complex. Born in earlier times, the Party is the main subject of their lives, and allegiances are never straightforward. Leo’s mother Anne was born in the West to a Jewish father who fled Germany to fight with the French Resistance; it is his fervent desire for an antidote to fascism that draws him to the ideals of a new, democratic state. Gerhard’s missions with the Resistance are relayed with novelistic breathlessness, a thudding contrast to the stretch of grey obedience that later awaits him in the East. One of the most moving episodes of Leo’s story comes when Gerhard is permitted by the authorities to take his grandson to the West, to visit the France he had come to love.

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