Red Love by Maxim Leo, review In this beautiful and supremely touching memoir, Leo tells the story of how his own family coped, or failed to cope, with this bizarre historical anomaly. Each member of the family had a different relationship with the East German state. There were those who defended it with every breath, those who resisted it, and those, like Leo's mother, who struggled to understand how they felt at all. The only impossible thing was to ignore it altogether. In the words of Leo's father, Wolf, "The GDR was always there in bed with us." The story begins with Leo's grandparents who, in their own ways, were both ardent supporters of the East German regime. The two sides of Leo's family could not have been more different. Gerhard, his maternal grandfather, was a Jew who had been forced to flee Germany before the war to escape the Nazis. Leo's paternal grandfather, Werner, by contrast, had originally supported the Nazis so enthusiastically that he not only hung his own windows with swastikas, but pestered others to do likewise. While Gerhard joined the French Resistance during the war and had all kinds of astonishing adventures fighting against his former countrymen, Werner joined the Wehrmacht and fought for the Fatherland in the doomed Ardennes Offensive. Gerhard returned to Germany a hero, and became a poster boy for the Resistance; Werner returned a broken man, having spent two years toiling in a French prisoner-of-war camp. The next generation, Leo's parents, had a much more difficult relationship with Communism. His mother, Anne, found it almost impossible to reject the ideology of the hero father she loved so well. But as she grew up she began to discover that the Communist ideal and the Communist reality were entirely different things. As a journalist she wanted to criticise the regime, and yet because of her devotion to her father every criticism felt like a betrayal. And besides, criticism was not really an option in the GDR. Leo's father, on the other hand, rebelled against his Nazi-cum-Communist background almost from the very beginning. A colourful, defiant artist, Wolf constantly pushed the boundaries of what he was and was not allowed to do. He produced subversive pictures, and made inflammatory speeches at the Artists" Association. This caused all kinds of family arguments, both between himself and Leo's mother and between the generations. On one occasion the hero grandfather accused him of the worst crime imaginable: "When it comes to the crunch, you're on the other side of the barricade." But even Wolf was not entirely against the regime. The secret police themselves quickly realised this: a Stasi report on Wolf noted that his attitude was "critical, but not hostile," and they even made a couple of attempts to recruit him. In the end neither of Leo's parents truly wanted to topple the state. They merely wanted it to change, to reflect the real needs of the people more effectively. As a consequence they found themselves in a sort of limbo, "not faithful enough for the faithful, too uncritical for the critical." And what of Leo himself? When he was growing up he had no idea whose side he wanted to be on. He just wanted to live in a normal family, without the "barricade" that his grandfather spoke of. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 he felt no surge of joy, just a kind of anxiety that he still has trouble identifying. He had no love for the GDR, and yet it was all he had ever known. And now, in a matter of what seemed like a few days, it had simply dissolved. Leo's memoir was the winner of the European Book Prize, and deservedly so. It is a moving saga of people who love one another but are doomed never to get along, and it is also an unbearably poignant description of a world that no longer exists. His family is a microcosm of the GDR itself, struggling with the same opposing sets of ideals that eventually tore the country apart. The death of the GDR, when it came, was like the death of a dysfunctional relative, at once liberating and tragic. As Leo's book makes painfully clear, those who grew up in this dysfunctional family are still living with the consequences today. Keith Lowe is the author of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (Penguin, £9.99) Red Love: The Story of an East German Family Maxim Leo Pushkin Press, £16.99, 272pp