A Sunday Telegraph, Irish Times and Glasgow Herald Book of the Year
"Tender, acute and utterly absorbing" Anna Funder, author of
Stasiland "A wry and unheroic witness... an unofficial history of a
country that no longer exists" Julian Barnes "Beautiful and
supremely touching" Keith Lowe, Sunday Telegraph "Compelling ...
[Leo] is terrific at elucidating the slow, incremental steps by
which people come to lie to themselves... Guile, guilt and
disappointment drip from these pages and Red Love is all the more
affecting for it" New Statesman 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. Now, married with two children and
the Wall a distant memory, Maxim decides to find the answers to the
questions he couldn't ask. Why did his parents, once passionately
in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his
mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather
Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he
unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies,
cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he 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. "Tender, acute
and utterly absorbing. In fine portraits of his family members Leo
takes us through three generations of his family, showing how they
adopt, reject and survive the fierce, uplifting and ultimately
catastrophic ideologies of 20th-century Europe. We are taken on an
intimate journey from the exhilaration and extreme courage of the
French Resistance to the uncomfortable moral accommodations of
passive resistance in the GDR. "He describes these 'ordinary lies'
and contradictions, and the way human beings have to negotiate
their way through them, with great clarity, humour and
truthfulness, for which the jury of the European Book Prize is
delighted to honour Red Love. His personal memoir serves as an
unofficial history of a country that no longer exists... He is a
wry and unheroic witness to the distorting impact - sometimes
frightening, sometimes merely absurd - that ideology has upon the
daily life of the individual: citizens only allowed to dance in
couples, journalists unable to mention car tyres or washing
machines for reasons of state." Julian Barnes, European Book Prize
With wonderful insight Leo shows how the human need to believe and
to belong to a cause greater than ourselves can inspire a person to
acts of heroism, but can then ossify into loyalty to a cause that
long ago betrayed its people." Anna Funder, author of Stasiland
>>"Leo uses the intimate scope of his family to explore the
turbulent political history of East Germany from a perspective that
has not been seen before. The result is an absorbing and personal
account that gives outsiders an insight into life in the GDR"
Shortlist "Affectionate, insightful... Red Love is a fascinating
tale... beautifully written and translated" Bookoxygen Maxim Leo
was born in 1970 in East Berlin. He studied Political Science at
the Free University in Berlin and at the Institut d'Etudes
Politiques de Paris. Since 1997 he is Editor of the Berliner
Zeitung. In 2002 he was nominated for the Egon-Erwin-Kisch Prize,
and in the same year won the German-French Journalism Prize. He won
the Theodor Wolff Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.
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