Suddenly Everything Was Different: German Lives in Upheaval

What happens when the world in which people have crafted identities for themselves and lived their lives suddenly disappears? How does a person – or a nation – confront such a shock? From 1990 to 1993, at an unparalleled momentin German history, Olaf Georg Klein interviewed almost a hundred fellow former East German citizens, probing their experiences of the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic, then crafting that material into twelve first-person narratives. The result is a literary account whose narrators include representatives from the cities and the countryside, from young and old, from the East German power elite and the resistance, as well as from those in position to be critical of both the GDR and united Germany. The book was a sensation in Germany upon its publication in 1994, and the translation will be of interest to students and scholars in history and political science, sociology, psychology, and literary studies. It includes an introduction and extensive annotations to assist the reader in understanding the East German and unified German contexts.

Olaf Georg Klein’s novel Aftermath was published in translation by Northwestern University Press in 1999. Ann McGlashan is Associate Professor of German and Dwight D. Allman is Associate Professor of Political Science, both at Baylor University.