Word: kramer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...perceptive, engaging, but ultimately frustrating new book, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (Random House; 293 pages; $27.50), Jane Kramer, who writes the "Letter from Europe" column for the New Yorker, addresses the question of how the former West Germans and the former East Germans are adjusting to each other. She finds wariness and disappointment; they are making an edgy acceptance of unity without much enthusiasm. "As far as 'mentality' goes," Kramer writes, paraphrasing the thoughts of one German, "the Wall is very high in Germany, and will still be high in ten or twenty...
...Kramer's approach is not systematic, and the subjects of her six chapters are very specific: a restaurant in a bohemian district of West Berlin, an East German poet who spied on his friends for the secret police, the struggle over what kind of Holocaust memorial--if any--should be built in Berlin. Perhaps the most poignant and telling of the stories is the one about a young man whom Kramer calls Peter Schmidt, a drifting East German who tried to escape when the Wall still existed, was caught and imprisoned but was eventually sold to the West (the East...
Peter suffers from a deep passivity, bred by East Germany's attempts to "produce a worker for the worker's state, someone not too smart, not too skeptical." When Peter first arrives in Hamburg in 1985, Kramer writes, "He had a little cassette player, tapes by Pink Floyd, Grace Slick, and the Grateful Dead, a filter coffeepot, and two hundred and fifty grams of Jacobs Fein und Mild Guatemala-blend coffee. He had everything he needed until someone came and told him what...
...book offers many such pointed moments. Kramer quotes a West German after the Wall has come down, saying, "What can I possibly say to an East Berlin scientist who, after years of trying, finally gets permission to travel, and buys an old piece of western equipment for his lab, and spends a year rebuilding it, and is proud of it--and then scientists from the West arrive and say, 'This East German science is ridiculous,' and his lab is closed." In her chapter about the opening of the Stasi files, Kramer focuses on a poet, Alexander Anderson...
According to Kramer, this summer the circulation staff started putting together a database which would keep track of all subscribers. The database, he explained, will be very useful in dealing with delivery problems. With the database, subscriber complaints will be stored and complaints will appear on deliverers' route lists (which the deliverers use each day). At the same time, the database will allow the staff to contact subscribers with unforseen problems at the touch of a button. Unfortunately, this database was not finished in time for the early semester rush...