11 June 2007.
A brief comment, no mission statement. I'm currently working on a new book proposal and need to have that done before I can get into some serious personal communication. I just got back from the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in the beautiful Welsh Borders, where I talked about East Germany with Australian writer, Anna Funder, author of Stasiland, a bestselling memoir about her experiences in Berlin and the former East Germany during the 1990s. Chair was Peter Florence, who started the ten-day festival along with his father twenty years ago exactly and has built it up into an internationally known event. Ex-President Bill Clinton (who appeared there a couple of years ago) described it as "the Woodstock of the Mind", though it must be added that there were no hippies to be seen and everyone kept their clothes on. Anna, a lawyer by training but a linguist and (though she would deny it) a historian by inclination, sparkled about her impressions and memories of post-Wall Berlin. I did more the big-picture historical stuff, though there was a bit of overlap. What happened in the years before 1989 is very personal, as Anna's tesimony showed; it is history, but seems too recent to get a completely objective perspective on -- as a lively discussion about the movie "The Lives of Others", which deals fictionally with the East German Stasi, showed. The film picks out one Stasi officer and shows him being redeemed, changed for the better by his experiences. Improbable, of course, if only because the mechanisms of the way the Stasi worked would have made it impossible for him to do what he does in the movie (no spoilers from me, you notice). Of course, you could argue it's fiction, and it's no more relevant than the question of whether Shakespeare's "Othello" is an accurate representation of diversity issues in the mediaeval Venetian civil service ... but ... it's all less than twenty years ago. People are still suffering from what happened between 1949 and 1989 in East Germany, and to grant even one little fictional Stasi man a degree of absolution, as "The Lives of Others" does (though the other Stasi operatives are shown as complete sh*ts) may be to do it too soon.
Back soon.
-- Fred T