I am tempted to say this is something one shouldn't be able to read, to even get access to. On the one hand, those are private notes, but they are not meant to be private in the end, and we are all used to the fragile notion of celebrities' privacy. But the way life runs out of a person, years converted into hours for us, the way faith and purposefulness turn into bafflement, despair and vacuum, becomes painfully clear. This is a mortifying perspective that is usually hidden from view like inner organs, and this is what CW lays out for the reader with all the fervor and earnestness that had been frustrated and diverted from its ideological path. And it is eviscerating.

For many the book is a valuable excursion into the history of split Germany, but those have to be knowledgeable or interested enough to bridge the gaps and connect the dots; I am neither, and I struggled to strip the text of the official and the ideological to get to the humanistic and the personal, and what came forth was a portrait of a stubbornly sincere, strong and unswerving and yet faithfully individualistic person riding on a train that is being dismantled under her feet, descending into relentless meaninglessness of life, unknowingly (?) writing her own obituary. The date September 27th now has the sound of a bell tolling for me.

I do not intend to read the second part in which she dies. Everybody does. ( )

"Heute drückt mir dieses ganze Land auf meine Schultern, und nur manchmal werde ich frei davon und kann mich leichter aufrichten. Aber das wäre natürlich woanders genau so. - Nicht ganz, sagt er. Woanders würde es dich nichts angehen."