How Did Hensel's Identity Change After The Berlin Wall

History was made on November 9, 1989, this was the night the Berlin Wall had fallen . Generally speaking, the wall coming down would be a good thing, but what people do not realize is how much this did impacted the people of East Germany. Jana Hensel was just a thirteen-year-old girl when the wall came down. In her book After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next, the readers get insight on how life was different after the wall came down. In particular, the readers see how her perspective changed and how it shaped her identity and her views between East and West Germany. Everyone has things that remind them of their childhood, but for Hensel her childhood was basically gone. She says, “These pictures were taken more than fifteen years ago. In the meantime, everything has changed. The Wall came down, the GDR was swallowed up by the West, and my childhood disappeared. ” So many things changed after the wall came

For example, she talks about how she felt pressured to change, they need to be like the West . Before the wall came down, she talked about how people would be able to differentiate the West from the East, but after the wall, “ by the end of the ‘90s, it had become impossible to differentiate native from non-native Berliners, or East and West Germans, by the way they dressed ”. They had to dress a certain way or they would feel different from everyone else and stick out. Everyone has someone they look up to get their fashion sense or other things from. But people didn’t see the GDR as a place to look up to. If someone were to ask Hensel where she was from she would say East Germany, but doing so got complicated and she eventually gave up and just started referring to herself as a German . There are many different things that changed the identities of the people from East Germany based on the relations with the East and the