One Day A Year Book

I finished it! It took six months, with many breaks along the way, but I did it. Between 1960 - 2000, East German writer Christa Wolf chronicled her events and thoughts from a single day: September 27. With the first entry, Wolf is a mother of two young girls, living in an East Germany that does not yet have the Berlin Wall. Forty years later, her youngest grandchild is a teenager and she's living in a unified Germany.

The entries are by no means a political manifesto; nor are they a shopping list of Wolf's daily life. They really serve as a public diary - a blog before there were blogs. But Wolf's tone is much more serious, intense, and intellectual than any blog that I read. In other words, this isn't the East German version of Erma Bombeck or Betty MacDonald (although I would love to see that!).

My least favorite entries were the ones written when Wolf was in the middle of working on one of her texts. Then she would turn to a lot of intellectual navel-gazing that may have been useful for her other writing projects but rendered me bored and more likely to skim the chapter.

My favorite years were the ones that gave a good sense of the overall political climate, while also offering lots of those quotidian details that I love so much. Tell me more about the shops! The clothes! Your home!

I'm no expert on East German life, so my experiences reading this reminded me of my childhood reading experiences, when I had to use context clues to fill in a lot of my knowledge gaps. But that was half the fun.