Haus des Kindes

In the organizer's words:

The Haus des Kindes, designed by Hermann Henselmann as a residential and children's department store, was located at the entrance to the former Stalinallee. Life there is the starting and crystallization point of an episodically narrated novel that begins before 17 June 1953 and ends in 1965.

When the narrator's communist parents return to Germany from emigration to England after the war, they soon move into the impressive building on today's Strausberger Platz with their children. Through the girl's eyes, we meet her neighbors Hermann and Irene Henselmann, Robert and Karin Havemann, the writers Alex Wedding, F. C. Weiskopf and Bodo Uhse. They are all united by their belief in a different Germany. But the girl also gets to know people her own age. For example, the boy next door, whose parents were deported to the Soviet Union after the war and whose mother will later flee to the West. Or her school friend Gilda, who grows up in an old apartment building behind Stalinallee as if in another cosmos, and the orphaned Zsuzsa, who was transplanted from Hungary to Berlin after the 1956 uprising and comes to visit the child's house. After a few years, the first tiles fall off the façade onto the street, and cracks also appear between the residents.