Clemens Meyer was 12 when the Berlin Wall fell. The author, who grew up in Leipzig in what was then East Germany, remembers it well. “The whole world changed,” he said, matter-of-factly, “not immediately, but within a couple of months.”
The differences became apparent in the look of Leipzig – “and the smell”. It had been “a grey city, in a nice way, quite a romantic way. The rivers were dark, industrial, there were factories all around the city, like big castles.” The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was socialist, a satellite state of the Soviet Union. “And then the new influence came in – the traffic started, the things you could buy on the streets, in the stores, new signs of the new system, new commercials all around.”
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