After The Wall By Jana Hensel: Chapter Analysis

When the Berlin Wall went up, Gerta, her mother, and her brother Fritz are trapped. They realize that her and her family get divided overnight. They are trapped on the eastern side where they were living. While her father, and her other brother Dominic are in the West. Four years later, now twelve, Gerta sees her father on a viewing platform on the western side.

During Elie Wiesel’s time in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, he was met with the sentiment, “Forget where you came from; forget who you were. Only the present matters.” German forces at concentration camps echoed this sentiment to many persecuted ethnic Jews, attempting to shed their last shred of individuality. Elie Wiesel did not follow the words of his oppressors. Instead, Elie learned the importance of memory, despite the repeated attempts at stripping away his identity.

In school students do not care about writing as much as they used to. If they would work harder in school, their grades would be higher and more colleges would want them. In Esther Cepeda 's research, she managed to prove that students test scores are going down. That is because they do not work as hard as they used to.

“A Night Divided” written by Jennifer A. Nielsen, took place in Berlin, Germany, after World War Two. August 13, 1961, the German Democratic Republic, also known as the GDR built the Berlin Wall, it divided the East from the West. In Germany, it had Four Sectors, French, British, and American for the West side. As for the East, it was the Soviet Sector. The East side is going through tough times, Germans were starving to death, some people where arrested, some people where killed, and people trying to escape from this horrible place they once called home.

During Christmas, Tan is worrying about how Robert is going react about their culture. Tan’s mom sees that she does not like the culture of her family in front of Robert. Furthermore, her mom does not want her daughter to be ashamed of her family and her culture. The best way for Tan’s mom to teach her a lesson is to follow their culture on her way to cook and act, and she says something unique, “Your only shame is to have a shame.” Its change the way she thinks after year later (111).

Due to her introverted personality, she already thinks that the process of posing in front of a crowd is nerve wracking, but when people begin to flatter her, she begins to think and believe that she is becoming more confident and by the end of the day, she already is. In addition, the boy from, A Secret Lost in the Water, does not know how to get the water, so he happily says, “Somewhere along the roads I’d taken since the village of my childhood I had forgotten my father’s knowledge. ‘Don’t feel sorry,’ said the man, thinking no doubt of his farm and his childhood; ‘nowadays fathers can’t pass on anything to the next generation.’” (Carrier 20). During present day, the boy is grown-up and feels guilty for neglecting his culture.

Back then there were walls that divided countries, families, and friends. Because of walls, many authors write about the lifestyle of living there. Author John Boyne and Jennifer A. Nielsen both wrote books surrounding different walls. In Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it takes place when the Jews had no right to do anything because of their religion.

If we were able to make our children smarter, better looking, or more athletic, should we? Amy Sterling Casil had that exact scenario in mind when she wrote her short story, Perfect Stranger in 2006. Written in the first-person narrative that takes place in the distant future, Casil weaves a terrifying story of genetic alteration to “fix” our children’s flaws. What harm can it cause if gene therapy is performed as an elective procedure rather than medical necessity? Gary and Carolyn, expecting parents, find out their little boy will need gene therapy while still in the womb if they hope to spare him from a fatal heart condition.

Immediately following World War II, Berlin was presented to the Allied victors as a cold crater, the ruins of both a modern city and Germany’s culture. Hitler’s time in power had placed German cultural and intellectual pursuits in stasis after 1933, leaving Berlin’s theaters, newspapers, and films among the war’s rubble. In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948, touches briefly on the cultural activities of the Third Reich, but places most of its attention on Berlin and its efforts to rebuild in the period between 1945-1948. Schivelbusch discusses the reconstruction of Germany’s cultural organizations as a primarily German enterprise, but there are brief sections of In a Cold Crater where the author highlights the American and Soviet contributions to the city’s rebirth, as it was their occupied zones that held Berlin’s former cultural and intellectual institutions. The international presence in postwar Berlin, combined with the returning émigrés’ affinity for the 1920s and its avant-garde creativity balanced the past and present in Germany’s reconstruction period, and held the promise of new cultural endeavors; however, according to Schivelbusch, “nothing memorable came from that

Diaspora, a Greek word, was first used to refer to the “dispersion” of Jews who migrated outside their country Israel. It is regarded as a dispersion of population from their original homeland, a scattering of an originally homogeneous entity such as language, culture or tradition. Later in the 1980s and onwards, the term was regarded as a metaphor designation ‟ to describe different categories of people, expatriates, political refugees, expellees, alien residents, immigrants and ethnic and racial minorities‟. (Victoria chen 1995) The Chinese diaspora is the largest group in America.

Born in 1948, post war East Berlin, Christina Erika Olga Mandrella never planned to be a pioneer for women, and in early 1985, at age 36, her legacy would not end, but continue to blaze trails for women. In June 1950, Soviet forces blocked the roads and railroad lines into West Berlin, and in December of 1951, impoverished, and with fear, Christine and her family fled to the West leaving behind the life the young Mandrella family created. In spite of losing everything they owned, young Christine always had a smile, was always learning, and was always on an adventure.

After arriving in Japan and living like this, she becomes disillusioned with the world and people around her. She becomes trapped in this foreign country with no way back home. She initially wanted to travel to Japan just for pleasure. “... she went to Japan for loveliness.” At the end of the story, she thinks about the Kamikaze pilots of World War 2, and how they would go on a one way trip with no return.

I have read the chapter 7 and chapter 8 of book written by Deborah Stone. In these chapters the author Stone has described the facts about the values of symbols and numbers in development and change of public welfare policies by the politicians. According to Stone, symbolic representation is the embodiment of issue definition in politics. According to the author, a symbol is anything that stands for something else. The importance of a symbol is not characteristic for it, but rather is put resources into it by the general population who use it.

Crossing The Border This story is about a Native American family crossing the border from the United States into the Canada. They are driving from Detroit. Being stopped at the border ,the border guard thinks that he could possibly get evidence to bust them. The guard represents stereotypes and clearly has a problem with other races or cultures. As for the author, Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa Oklahoma.

While reading the story, you can tell in the narrators’ tone that she feels rejected and excluded. She is not happy and I’m sure, just like her family, she wonders “why her?” She is rejected and never accepted for who she really is. She is different. She’s not like anyone else