5 Questions About Friendship Without Borders

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Phil Lesak discusses his book Friendship Without Borders.

Kimberly A. Redding’s review of Friendship Without Borders is available online and will appear in the forthcoming issue 48.2.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

Friendship without Borders tells the stories of a group of women born in the late 1920s in a small town in eastern Germany, which later became part of the German Democratic Republic. It covers their time together at school and their experiences during the Nazi period, and the subsequent division and reunification of Germany. It is based on nine hundred letters written to one another over fifty years and on interviews with some of the women when they were in their eighties. The narratives that emerge are set within the wider historical development of this extraordinary period.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

The letters were written spontaneously, sometimes in haste and often with real emotion, giving a vivid picture of the women’s immediate circumstances and how they saw their lives at any given moment.

Looking at the historical record, along with the places the letters describe, offers us another way of reflecting on and checking the credibility of what they were recounting.

Oral history provides an important third version of events to compare with the letters and the historical record. Interviewing some of the women at length allowed them to reflect on their lives and to think about the differences between what they had written at the time, and how they saw their lives now. This was a productive way of drawing out more and more of what had taken place, revealing the relations among different members of the group, the way the group as a whole functioned and sought to keep itself together, and the interaction between state and other authorities and individual women in both West and East Germany.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

I appreciate the way oral history leads us into the previously unknown. Often entirely unexpectedly, an interviewee—through pauses, digressions, silences, and breaks in chronology—reveals something entirely new or confronts us with problems of interpretation we did not know we faced.

I particularly value the warmth and commitment of many of the people I interview, and their own interest in finding out more about their own lives and those of others around them, as they reflect on what they are discussing. Even at a great distance—in this case, many decades—suddenly there are images or events that are as clear as when they happened, events that were often painful or distressing or particularly joyous, which they are able to think about once more, appreciate, or come to terms with.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

Fellow historians will be interested in the extraordinary source material in Friendship without Borders, and how it gives us new ways of understanding women’s lives across the two different versions of Germany. The letters and interviews make clear the entanglement of these lives, despite the border separating the half of the women who moved to or were forced to leave for the West from the other half still in the East. With their original home now in communist East Germany, the women living on each side could see both the terrible and the positive in what was taking place. In their letters, they seek to find ways to come to terms with the contradictions they face and the ambivalence they feel.

The picture of the girls growing up in the Nazi period and contending with the dangers of the end of the war highlights the energy, optimism, and naiveté of youth. The corresponding picture is of the women in their sixties, some cheerful and optimistic, others embittered and pessimistic, in conflict with one another over the impact of the collapse of the communist regime in the GDR. This picture conveys a sense of real and unexpected division between East and West, along with a shared wish to overcome the division. It is helpful to historians that the letters continued until 2000, giving a sense of a new, shared ‘normal’ emerging in the reunited Germany.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

I want readers to remember and appreciate the lives of these women and to have a better sense of both how difficult and how wonderful it was for them to live through this extraordinary period of history.