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I cried while reading this novel. Tears just kept flowing silently, and there was nothing I could do about it.

If you want to know what totalitarian states do to children, this novel will tell you, - without sentimentality, without blame or anger, without self-pity.

For all those emotions are forbidden ground for a child who was taught the dogma of national socialism and Führer personality cult from the age of 4, who believed in the “truth�� of what she was told in the same way a child taught the “truth�� of Christianity will believe in it, trained to follow the rituals and the patterns, to embrace the cult and its accompanying actions without ever having any choice as no alternatives are presented or accepted.

Waking up from that dream at 16, and realising there are multiple truths in the world, and that the one she has been trained to worship has caused the complete destruction of her own society and immeasurable evil and suffering for millions of innocent people, the narrator loses herself. The words she uses on a daily basis receive a different meaning, the songs she sings are full of ominous hints that she never put into a wider context, her way to greet people with the “German greeting��, referring to Hitler, is not only insulting, it is dangerous as well. Her values turn into vices, but her memory is not adjusted to that. She still thinks in the category of “purity�� when she sees a young man, then corrects her own thoughts in shame and confusion. “Purity��, what is that?

If you believe in the superiority of your own country, race, ideology and biology, if you know nothing outside the narrow path of obedience, if you learn to read and write using the party line as a framework, if you study biology with the ideas of racial distinctions, if you participate in sports events to steel your body and mind to honour the deified person who dominates news and dictates thought patterns, how will your personality be shaped?

As opposed to the parent generation, who knew an alternative to Hitler’s Third Reich, the protagonist Nelly grows up with no comparison until her world falls apart, drastically, suddenly, in her teenage years. What happens to a psyche that has been systematically indoctrinated to believe in a system, and then wakes up to learn that it was pure evil? What happens to childhood memories, filled with songs that make another kind of sense once they can be compared to the evidence of the Holocaust, to euthanasia programs, to total war, to destruction of unimaginable dimensions? What happens to a person who has to ask how it could happen that all those people with whom she grew up embraced evil knowingly, willingly and almost automatically?

What happens when fear and shame are the two most dominant ingredients in your emotional cocktail?

Nelly is a writer, and in 1974, with the backdrop of the Vietnam war and her guilt regarding the suffering that never ends in the world, she sets out to make an account of her childhood years in a part of Germany that later became part of Poland. A couple of years earlier, in 1971, she had taken her husband, her brother and her teenage daughter on a trip to revisit the town she left as a refugee in 1945, and her tale moves between the different times and places, reflecting on the child Nelly, who is “she�� in the account, and the older visitor travelling down memory lane, reconstructing the past, who is addressed as “you��, and her current writing self, hardly present, but an implied “I��.

There are no bridges between the different layers of identity: before and after 1945 cannot be reconciled. Symptomatic for the complete break is a situation in 1946 when Nelly’s mother picks up her father from the train station. He is returning from a mine in Siberia - a broken man, almost starved to death. She doesn’t recognise him, and he doesn’t recognise her either. They walk past each other, as they are not familiar with the patterns of suffering that have left their marks on their respective bodies and minds.

After years of hoping for the return of the father, Nelly’s family finally welcomes a stranger. Nelly herself is a stranger as well, and has to learn that she lived unknowingly in a dictatorship which she thought of as absolute freedom. Meeting survivors from concentration camps means realising that her reality was a fragile illusion, bound to be destroyed at some point.

And it means never ever allowing oneself to mourn the loss of childhood patterns which turn into symbols of the evil regime she believed in wholeheartedly, but which the older self, the historically educated narrator, abhors and fears. Studying maps, reflecting on the geographical locations of the concentration camps, the narrator has slowly formed a new pattern for those years, one that must have existed simultaneously with her enthusiastic participation in the adolescent program of the local Hitlerjugend. Born a few years earlier, she would have been guilty. A few years younger, she wouldn’t have experienced it. A strange generation.

As a mother, a teacher and a person who grew up in West Germany when the Berlin Wall still stood as a monument for the German 20th century catastrophe, I could not read this book without feeling terrified. I was shaken by every single emotion the protagonist went through - most of all the feeling of being split in two. I imagine my own children growing up in an atmosphere of nationalism and hysterical belief in their own superiority, I imagine them having to submit to a pledge of allegiance to the flag every single morning, I imagine them singing patriotic songs excluding the rest of the world from their perfect home country, and I shiver. Children are impressionable and eager to learn. If I lived with them in a regime like that, would I exclude them from the mainstream cult, and thus put our family at risk?

Wouldn’t I think of my family, my job, my home, my life? Wouldn’t I explain away the worst? I don’t know. I do know that the Third Reich has left patterns in the childhoods of many generations long after the war itself was over. I know it because I can’t suffer the nationalist rhetoric that neo-fascist regimes around the world like to use to get crowds cheering. I know it because I can’t stand CROWDS at all. Mass meetings scare me. People who are moved by loud, populist speakers scare me. Symbols of exclusive clubs scare me. I carry the patterns of the childhoods of German children growing up under that evil flag, and I won’t let my children come near any institution that teaches exclusive rights to a special group of people.

Christa Wolf’s book explains that inherited pain. She talks about the identity crisis, the trauma, the split consciousness, and the fear. The GROWING fear.

It could happen to us, so it can happen to anyone - for we were just normal people - that is the message from the novel to the world. Don’t ever believe it can’t happen to you, because after the Second World War, we know that human beings are capable of anything if they are trained and brainwashed in a specific way.

We can even actively decide what to forget!

But patterns of childhood stick, regardless...