The German Comedy: Scenes of Life After the Wall

I started reading this book several months ago and now have slowly wandered my way to the end. It is a book best read an essay at a time. Otherwise it seems to jump around too much. A movie in the Seattle International Film Festival, "No Place to Go (Die Unberuehrbare)" reawakened my interest in the book. In the movie, a leftist writer struggles to discover how to survive after the Berlin Wall has fallen and all her hopes for a socialist Germany have been dashed. She has become an anachronism moving across the landscape with nowhere to go. This book is much lighter in tone, a series of good-humored irony-laden essays about life in Germany in 1989 and 1990 in the absence of the legendary Wall. Schneider points out various paradoxes such as West Berliners becoming less enthusiastic about the Wall coming down as the probability of its demise approaches. Also, the book is full of interesting historical footnotes, such as that most of the Wall has disappeared as people have hacked off bigger and littler pieces of it as personal momentos and much-in-demand tourist items. For someone as little aware of recent German history as me, this book was very informative and leaves me wanting to read more about recent German history to find out what has happened since 1991.