The Tower: Tales from a Lost Country
SynopsisPlot
In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West.
Story
About this book
Set in Dresden from 1982, The Tower follows an educated, middle-class family through the final years of East Germany. Meno works as an editor at a publishing house and must work around state censorship. His brother-in-law, a respected surgeon, leads a double life, and with his blind wife has raised a son in a home built on culture, music and hard work.
The family's affluent quarter works like a bubble, an echo of cultivated nineteenth-century Germany preserved inside a productivist socialist state. Tellkamp sets that carefully maintained private world against the system around it. Characters respond in different ways: some retreat into nostalgia, some conform, and others test the narrow ground between East and West, where mistakes carry real consequences.
The novel moves through several overlapping lives, among them a soldier, a surgeon, a nurse and a publisher, so the period appears as a composite rather than a single line of narration. The polished surface soon shows cracks, and the country itself begins to shake. Tellkamp avoids the tone of denunciation, tracing instead the quiet compromises that tie this enclosed world to the state, up to November 9, 1989.
