Kirjahaku

Illumination is my ninth poetry anthology, highlighting my coming of age as a writer. It is split into three sections: Living in the Shadows, Walk in the Light and Life in Colour. Come be illuminated with me

At midnight of 12 August 1961 East Germany became partitioned from the West by an ideological barrier that would remain a chancroid rash upon the political landscape of post WW2 Europe for some forty-five years. Initially little more than rolls of barbed wire, this barrier soon became the concrete monolith known the world over as the Berlin Wall. Prior to the construction of the wall an exodus of some 3.5 million East Germans circumvented the Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions in order to escape the socialist nightmare that many knew was now imminent. For those on the other side of the wall their lives would be characterized by fear, oppression, the denial of basic human rights and an abject paranoia coupled with endless ques of people outside shops with no goods to sell. This book tells the story of those who lived under the German Democratic Republic (GDR) where Marxism-Leninism and Russian language were compulsory for all schoolchildren. Although hatred and resistance towards the regime soon flourished it would take many decades for communism to choke upon its own poison, but would a re-unified Germany and the rest of Europe be any safer in the wake of its demise?

As the last flames of the Second World War flickered and died, Germany emerged into an apocalyptic wasteland, where the Hitler Youth generation would be cursed with the running sore of National Socialism. With the uncaged bear of the Soviet Union flexing its muscles and the escalating tensions between East and West providing some distraction from the funeral pyre of the Third Reich, those living in West Germany soon understood that they were the geological bulkhead, a component in the prevention of communism spreading throughout the infantile peace of post-Second World War Europe. Despite all the destruction and political tensions which surrounded them, the young men and women of Germany were keen to experience the world beyond their own precarious borders. In August 1945, Tia Schuster and Lisa Kraus were two fourteen-year-old Berliners, and - like many - they found themselves shoehorned into what was to be the second new era' of their young lives. The first had brought about only death and destruction, yet this second had a cold unfamiliarity about it. As the late 1940s gave way to the 1950s and 60s, a series of new decadent eras - of rock-n-roll, fashion, flower power and sexual revolution - was on the horizon, which posed a threat to the traditional German way of life championed by the Nazi regime and post-Second World War German government. With this heady mixture of new-found freedom, the youth of Germany unwittingly became a feature of everything that both fascism and communism despised. This unique work tells the story of the tentative steps taken by young men and women into the afterlife of Nazi Germany'. Encompassing memoirs along the way, it presents a quirky portrayal of charm, humour, mischief and personal accomplishment along with a vitally important slice of (West) Germany's social history, which has remained hidden from the literary world for decades. As Tia Schuster remarked: The world suddenly became a very big piece of pie, we wouldn't be happy with just taking a slice of this pie, no, we wanted the whole damn thing and we didn't care if it made us sick or not!'