East Germany: Think about the East over champagne and punch

Eastern women let their children scream. On the balcony. Eastern women are mothers and young grannies, they like to work on the excavator or combine harvester. Eastern women have unshaven legs, they are hostile to rock, but not hostile to rock music. The authors Annett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler and Wenke Seemann begin their volume of conversations with these clichés, which has the awkward, ironic title “Three East German women get drunk and found the ideal state”.

The authors see the cliché of the East German woman who spends nights in the kitchen discussing ideals with vodka and a cigarette in her hand fulfilled: they sit together for seven nights, drink champagne, punch or gin and tonic and reflect on their identity as Eastern women today as then, about the GDR and the change from socialism to capitalism. Sometimes in Peggy’s apartment on Mainzer Straße in Berlin-Friedrichshain, sometimes at her dacha north of Berlin, sometimes in a backyard in Prenzlberg, opposite a Vonovia residential complex.

The three women happily associate with each other through the evening. It’s about the role of women and the women’s movement in the GDR, about paragraph 218, identity politics, property and the privatization of housing after the fall of the Wall. The authors remind us that Franziska Giffey and Manja Schreiner are also Eastern women, “who want to sell us the car-friendly owner-owned city as the future in Berlin of the 21st century and, like Giffey, denounce any intervention in the ownership of public services as a relapse into GDR conditions «. The conversations are often funny, sometimes they become melancholic and, towards the end, they often become tipsy. Gröschner warns that it’s better to be sober when it comes to discussions about the AfD and Putin, but of course there’s no getting around that.

One remembers earlier beliefs; Peggy, for example, says that she was an “extremely naive child of world peace” who thought that socialism led “straight to a world community of solidarity.” None of the three women yearn to return to the GDR, but the market economy is also viewed critically. And so, of course, no “ideal state” is founded; rather, the book relies on simultaneous thinking, calls for setting aside moralism, enduring contradictions and thinking openly about how a better life could be possible.

After two bestsellers by Katja Hoyer and Dirk Oschmann last year reignited the debate about the relationship between East and West Germany, referred to in the book as the “Oschmann-Hoyer wave,” now comes the counterpart to the intellectual analyzes and feature debates: a Lively conversation volume that comes across as a colorful mix of anecdotes and memories, peppered here and there with sociological and historical classifications by co-author Wenke Seemann.

In any case, stylistically, the book keeps the promise made by the title: you read about three women who get drunk talking. You have to like the concept of the written podcast, sometimes it seems a bit unstructured and aimless, and the conversations often digress. Sometimes the conversation gets lost and only finds its way back to the actual point a few pages later. You need a little patience and enjoyment of the concept to stick with it. The book can make up for it with its wit and charm as well as Seemann’s occasional factual classifications.

The book would definitely win through more friction and disagreements, which would certainly provide exciting food for thought. Instead, the free women are quite unanimous in all their opinions. In any case, there are no solid theses or finished analyzes and certainly no solutions; the authors don’t even have that claim. Rather, the book can be seen as an encouragement to listen to, think about and approach one another. The tone is consistently loving and constructive rather than problematizing. An attitude that is certainly valuable this year, with three eastern elections in the fall and predicted AfD votes at their highest level.

Conversation volumes as a concept are a matter of taste. Ultimately, however, they live from the content of their conversations. The book “Three East German Women Get Drunk and Found the Ideal State” undoubtedly documents interesting conversations from which the reviewer, who was born ten years after reunification as the daughter of Wessis, was able to learn a lot. The book only reveals one clear weakness: When Peggy Mädler asks whether “Proletarians of all countries unite” is actually still on the front page of the “nd” today, Wenke Seemann replies that she hasn’t had a current issue in her hand for a long time. Of course we cannot approve of that.

Annett Gröschner, Peggy Mädler, Wenke Seemann: Three East German women get drunk and found the ideal state. Hanser Verlag, 320 pages, hardcover, €22.

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