In the Shadows of a Fallen Wall

by Sanford Tweedie

Overview

Growing up, what Sanford Tweedie knew about East Germany was basically . . . nothing. West Germans were our friends; East Germans, the enemy. In 2000, somewhat better informed, Tweedie took advantage of a Fulbright Scholarship to move his family to the eastern German town of Erfurt for the academic year. Far from home and the familiar, with temporary status and a tenuous grasp of the language, he and his wife were curious to see how they would function shorn of all the rules that governed their daily lives—housing, food acquisition, transportation, and even basic communication. As soon as their taxi delivered them to their grim tan and concrete Soviet-vintage apartment building, they knew their education had begun.

Learning about life in the former East Germany, amid the feverish embrace of Western culture and the tenacious legacy of a totalitarian past, Tweedie comes to understand the deeper cultural assumptions through which Americans view the larger world. Part travelogue, part history, part cultural critique, all thoroughly engrossing, the story of his yearlong experience is one of dislocation and accommodation, making a German town his own and now ours.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803271418
Publisher:	UNP - Nebraska Paperback
Publication date:	05/01/2013
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sanford Tweedie is an award-winning teacher and professor in the Department of Writing Arts at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. He has published widely, including work in the journals College Composition and Communication and Exquisite Corpse.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Walls in Our Heads 1

1 Breaking Down the Wall 15

2 But for the Weather 22

3 Leaving the American Sector 34

4 Concrete Details: Your Guide's Tour of Erfurt 60

5 ALFs, Autos, and Encounters with the Polizei 66

6 Words Fail Me, Yet Again 89

7 Destinations and Wanderings 105

8 Field without Dreams: Baseball in the Former GDR 122

9 The Class That Doesn't Exist in the Country That Once Did 127

10 Whatever You Do, Don't Look Down 147

11 In Former Times 155

Afterword: Echoes of a Fallen Wall 167

Editorial Reviews

Tweedie has achieved what the best memoirs strive for. Beyond telling the story of a year in Germany, In the Shadows of a Fallen Wall is an eloquent argument for trying something novel, learning something new, and embracing discomfort to become a bigger, better, and more compassionate person.”—Julija Šukys, author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė

Julija Sukys

Few Americans these days take the trouble to investigate a country about which they know less than they think. Sanford Tweedie has, and the result is a lucidly written and perceptive account of one family’s experience of a Germany that—though now united—is not yet as one.”—Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Michael Gorra

"In the Shadows of a Fallen Wall is highly recommended."—Jack Mason, Midwest Book Review

Midwest Book Review - Jack Mason

"Tweedie's bravery and persistence in the face of formidable challenges makes for an entertaining and recommended read."—D. Driftless, Readers Lane

Readers Lane - D. Driftless

Before it came crashing down in 1989, the wall that divided East Germany from the West had stood for a generation. Now, a later generation in the East still bears vestiges of that Cold War separation. Courtesy of a Fulbright grant, Tweedie (Writing Arts/Rowan Univ.) took a post teaching English composition for a year in what, in former days, was the heart of the communist German Democratic Republic. He was based in Erfurt, once the regional center of the Stasi secret police. Nearby is a Buchenwald memorial. Today, Western influence has seeped into Erfurt; Tweedie notes McDonald's and American music. The Tweedie family was housed in a dreary concrete prefab apartment. Though he had merely passable language skills, the author nevertheless soon found Germany and Germans to be comfortable and cordial, and he and his family made good friends. Tweedie works hard to find significance in all that happened during the year, from a stolen car to rides on the streetcar. Double beds and dinky Trabant autos serve as analogies for life after the phantom Wall, and there's further importance to Karl Marx kitsch or participation in an acrobatic circus performance. Readers are led down divergent paths with varied narratives, anecdotes and snapshots. Yet, despite imagination and experience, the author acknowledges the lack of a genre, a form on which to draw--thus, perhaps, the stretched metaphors and his tendency to overwrite (for example, the time he "chortled" at a comment). Readers may not relish the country or love the people as much as the author confesses he does, but despite the overblown search for meaning, they may enjoy the trolley ride.

Kirkus Reviews