Presented as part of the PEN World Voices—The Literary Mews festival, in this event authors Maxim Leo and Yascha Mounk will read from and discuss their recently published memoirs of growing up in Germany, Red Love and Stranger in My Own Country, with New York historian Atina Grossmann. Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say. In Red Love Leo captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart. Stranger in My Own Country, Mounk's memoir, uses his experiences to shed light on postwar German history and current German politics. What is it like to be a Jew in Germany in the postwar era? What would lead even a handful of Jews to choose to make their lives in the country that was responsible for the Holocaust? And how did the descendants of the perpetrators treat the descendants of the victims? These are the questions at the heart of Mounk’s book, which starts out as a memoir but evolves into something more like a history and a polemic.  

Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union in New York City. Publications include Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920-1950 (1995), and co-edited volumes on Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century (2002) andAfter the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (2009), as well as articles on gender and modernity in interwar Germany, history and memory in postwar Germany, and gender and human rights. Her book Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (2007, German, Wallstein 2012) was awarded the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association  and the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library, London. Her current research, focuses on “Transnational Jewish Refugee Stories: Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India as Sites of Relief and Refuge for European Jews during World War II.”

Maxim Leo grew up in East Berlin. From 1990 to 1995, he studied political science at the Freie Universitaet Berlin and at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. In 1995-96, he worked as a news reporter at RTL. Since 1997, he has been working as a reporter at the Berliner Zeitung. Leo was nominated for the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize in 2002. He received the German-French Journalism Prize in the same year. In 2006, he received the Theodor Wolff Prize. His autobiographical book, Haltet euer Herz bereit, eine ostdeutsche Familiengeschichte, for which he was awarded the European Book Prize in 2011, was published in Germany in 2009. It was published in English under the title Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Pushkin Press in 2013.

Yascha Mounk is a PhD candidate in political thought at Harvard University and the founding editor of The Utopian. He frequently writes for newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Slate, and Die Zeit. His first book, Stranger In My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, was published this January by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

External Link »