Red Love: The Story Of An East German Family
by Maxim Leo
(Pushkin Press, £16.99)

This much praised saga of a GDR family, winner of the European Book Prize, is by Maxim Leo.

He was only 19 when the Berlin Wall came down and - though he hardly experienced it as an adult - like many of those who grew up and lived in the GDR, he can't get it out of his system.

Seeking to ascertain what life was "really like" in the socialist state he interrogates his parents and grandparents, a generation fractured by war and its aftermath.

The book's subtitle, The Story Of An East German Family, is perhaps misleading because it's more the story of the author's two grandfathers.

One was Jewish and fought with the French resistance and the other, who joined the nazis as a youngster, began a new life post-war, becoming a teacher and a supporter of the GDR. Both kept diaries which provide fascinating detail of their lives.

Leo's own parents grew up in a privileged environment. His mother was the daughter of a revered resistance veteran and a top Communist Party journalist and she too, imbued with a belief in the socialist system, became a communist though finally she was completely disillusioned.

Ironically, the author's father - an anarchistic artist who chafes under what he feels is the GDR's "provincialism" - becomes equally disaffected but more by the hegemonic consumerism and materialism of the new united Germany.

Leo's other grandfather tells him how seductive nazi Germany was and how, interned after the war, he worked for a French farmer before finally returning home and starting his life afresh.

By implication, Leo demonstrates why for very different reasons these two men supported the young GDR.

But his portrait of the GDR is like an exercise in describing someone by beginning with their every little wart and scar, detailing every failing and weakness.

Unsurprisingly, a very ugly portrait is painted.

Leo's is a description of a 1984 dystopia in which nothing relieves the oppression of state and party interference in everyday life apart from the opportunity of fleeting escape into a personally carved niche.

Even a truth can become an untruth if there is deliberate and serious omission. As with the film The Lives Of Others - shot almost entirely at night time, as if the GDR never experienced daylight - this book, too, is entirely in negative colours.

It is unsurprising that the book has won widespread praise in the West because it reiterates the one-dimensional image of a totalitarian regime, constantly peddled by the victors.

Many other, much more differentiated, life stories have been published but are not translated. One that is, Edith Anderson's Love In Exile: An American Writer's Memoir Of Life In Divided Berlin, is no rose-tinted view but a much more accurate picture of a complex reality.