Günter de Bruyn | Kindheit und Jugend in Britz

A reading from the memoirs of Günter de Bruyn, whose family moved into the new Britz housing a hundred years ago, shortly after his birth. The writer, known as an outsider of GDR literature, recalls his childhood and youth in the 1930s: rural idyll and sweeping modernity, family security, and the oppressive constraints of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft on the road to catastrophe, which many of the portrayed people did not survive and which left the bombed-out parental home in ruins. Far more than a nostalgic look back, de Bruyn tells of everyday conformity and refusal under totalitarian rule and of learning individual resistance against collectivist constraints. Wolfgang de Bruyn, a literary scholar, preservationist and writer, is the son and trustee of the Günter-de-Bruyn-Stiftung; he reads from his father's memoirs and his own memories, moderated by Henning Holsten.