Children of Hoy

Author Grit Lemke has kept in touch with the people from the former socialist model town Hoyerswerda after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. She virtuously intertwines the voices of her complex generation, thrown off course by the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 pogrom, to create a gripping oral history.

Author Grit Lemke, who has already explored life of her hometown Hoyerswerda in her film Coal-Country Song. Gundermann – which earned her a nomination for the highly acclaimed Grimme Award – has now written down a biography of her complex generation. In her documentary novel, she interweaves the voices of the Children of Hoy into a fascinating oral history. These children came to Hoyerswerda, the socialist model town, stamped out of the heath, assembled from structural elements, with their parents in the Sixties and Seventies. In the mornings, the parents drive off in buses that run especially for the shift workers, while the children grow up in a large collective. Growing up, the narrator and her friends become part of the culture and art scene around Gerhard Gundermann, the »Springsteen of the East«. A kind of proletarian bohemia develops: At night, they celebrate in the basement clubs, in the morning they ride the shift bus to work, like their parents did. But reunification is followed by mass redundancies, and latent racism against contract workers living in the city as well as a rapidly growing right lead to riots. And then the unthinkable happens in September 1991: There are attacks on foreign contract workers and refugees, in which local residents also participate while the police stand back, unwilling to intervene, for some time. The cultural scene remains on the sidelines, but nothing will be as it was for them either...

»an incredible reading experience« Matthias Schmidt, MDR