This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger

ANNA WINGER despite the harsh reality, seeking personal freedom where they can. The plot isstraightforward?the depth and complexity of the novel come from its intertwiningofdetails and its skillful psychological ren dering of the characters. The most compelling strand follows Christian from school (he is seventeen at the beginning of thenovel) to thearmy, where he serves as commander in a tankdivision and is ironicallycaught in the trapof suddenly findinghim self a figureof some authority in a system inwhich he is inevery sense a dissident. He is now surrounded by new characters, rougher people fromdifferent walks ofEast German life. His illusion ofpersonal freedom and a lifeof literatureand medicine unravel as he confronts the army's brutal reality.He ends up in the notorious Schwedt military prison, afterwhich he is sent tohard labor in a chemical factory. Interspersed among the chap ters dealing with Christian's fate, we also see the progression of the other main characters of the novel. Christian's father, Richard, manages to live a double lifedespite the con straints of the East German state, keeping a secret second family that he visits once a week. Christian's uncle Meno, formerlypart of East Germany's "Red Aristocracy," with draws increasingly frompublic life and dedicates himself tohis former passion of zoology and the study of the single cell. As the lives of these characters move toward a cul-de-sac, the fallof theBerlinWall comes as an ultimate release from the oppres sion of the East German state. PeterConstantine New York AnnaWinger. ThisMust Be the Place. New York. Riverhead. 2008. 304 pages. $24.95. isbn978-1-59448-997-6 The "place" ofAnna Winger's title referstoBerlin, but italso applies to the apartment house the main char acters live in.Built in 1911, thegrand original offered "a villa on every floor"on theelegant residential Bis marckstrasse, as Winger notes in a prologue. What's leftof thebuilding survived Berlin's "ninety years of drama" but is now surrounded by cheap shops and busy traffic,and E Winger uses the city and thebuild- E ing tobacklight the transitionsofher E characters. E We firstmeet Walter Baum, E who, after meteoric success as a very E young man in a kitschy TV series, E is now merely Tom Cruise's Ger- E man voice. The contrast between his E young self and the fortysomething E with a beer belly and bald spot E makes him unwilling toperform on E his girlfriend's soap opera, and she E moves out. E Then we get toknow Hope, an E American woman who has come to E joinher Jewishhusband, Dave, who E is based in Berlin but frequently E away on an economic assistance E project inPoland. To help her learn E about Berlin,he'd given Hope books E about theHolocaust instead of a city E guide. Five months previously she E had lost a baby, but only the events E of 9/11 propelled her to leave their E Greenwich Village apartment to join E her husband. Now it's November E 2001; she's been here a fewweeks E but has not made any progress in E her German class nor any friends. E Having "bonded" over 1980s E rock music in the elevator, Hope E and Walter finally connect and E develop a deep platonic friendship E that allows both to come to terms E with theirpasts, much as the city E is trying to do. The goyish Hope E had married Ave, against his par- E ents' strong objections. As it turns E out, this situation is refracted in E Walter's family. When his long-ago E TV show had been at itspeak, his E fatherdied, and he decided to try E tomake it inHollywood. His Eng- E lishwas good because he'd learned E his from his mother, an American E army bratwho'd married his father E at seventeen. Yet the best role he E gets is Prince Charming at Disney- E land.While there,he looked up his E ^fl March-April 2009 i71 I 3 maternal grandparents and discov ered that theywere Jewish,but for them itwas inconceivable that they could have a German grandson and simply denied his

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