Translator's Preface

Summary

It is my great pleasure and honor to be able to present to English-speaking readers a translation of Olaf Georg Klein's book on East German lives caught in the turmoil of reunification, Plötzlich war alles ganz anders. I have tried to be as respectful as I could of the variety of voices within the work and of the particular situations in which these voices found expression, while at the same time making them accessible to readers from a very different background.

There were many challenges in translating this work, but I would like here to touch on two in particular. First, although it is becoming more and more the norm to retain the German noun Wende (from the verb wenden, to turn) to denote the circumstances surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany's subsequent reunification, in no small part because of the many nuances of meaning inherent in the term, I made the decision to translate it here. Due to the frequency with which Wende appears in the German text, I felt the inclusion of the term would have been too distracting to the English-speaking reader. Throughout the text I have translated Wende as “changeover”: this term seemed to me to be a more neutral choice than other possibilities (such as “turnaround” or “turning point” or even “revolution”) and as such to better encapsulate the variety of responses to the Wende presented in Klein's book, both positive and negative.

A second translation challenge was presented by the designation Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter or IM, the term used for an East German citizen who worked secretly with the Stasi (State Security), either willingly or unwillingly. Now that the vast network of neighbor passing on information about neighbor has come to light, one can readily understand why this term is most often translated as “informer.” However, again because of the varied nature of the responses to the changeover presented in Klein's book, a term carrying less moral freight was needed. I made the decision to render the term more literally, as “unofficial co-worker” or UC. Of course, whenever a protagonist uses a different term, such as Spion (“spy”), I have used a more value-laden translation.