Wall in My Backyard

Just as most every American of a certain age remembers where they were the day John Kennedy was shot, Germans will remember November 9, 1989-the day the Berlin Wall came down and borders between East and West were open for the first time in 28 years. While the media portrayed that day and the subsequent unification of Germany as overwhelmingly positive, many East Germans are not so sure that their lives are any better for it. The Wall in My Backyard collects 18 interviews with East Berlin women of various professions and backgrounds who relate their experiences before the unification and since. Many women were thrilled with the Wende (the ``turn'' or ``change'') and the first taste of freedom-intellectual, professional and physical-since childhood. Others mourned the lost stability that the GDR provided, the steady work, day care and health care. The editors write of one woman who lost her job in 1990: ``She came to realize that people developed greater self-respect when a government subsidized their employment (as had been the case in the GDR) than when it subsidized their unemployment.'' The compilation will strike a chord within women's studies circles and, with a little more editorial flair, it could have had mass appeal. But by burying some of the most tender quotes and not providing transitions within the body of the interviews, the book seems oddly unfinished. Photos. (Jan.)