ABSTRACT
Born in Germany in 1955, I grew up with ‘the German question’. At the age of 5, I was scared when I first saw the border which people called die Zonengrenze-the zonal frontier. I understood that the question had something to do with it, and with the fact that our relatives in the East could not come to see us whenever they wanted to. Three years later, on 17 June, the ‘Day of German Unity’, our primary school teacher told us about the uprising in the Ostzone-the Eastern zone-ten years before. Russian soldiers had moved in against German civilians. I was angry at the Russians, but I had heard about another culprit whom the teacher had not mentioned, so I put up my hand and asked if the whole situation had not been Hitler’s fault, in the first place. I was told to shut up, and that I was too young to understand. I was angry because I could not see why we were officially being told about something we were too young to comprehend, and because I had gathered enough information to make me sure that what I had said did have something or other to do with German unity. But my question had obviously not been the German question which the teacher wanted to hear.
