Why a Booktrail?
1980s, various times: A powerful love story that explores the close, fraught relationship between England and Germany
Snowleg
What you need to know before your trail
A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends decades convincing himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will her find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave her – Snowleg.
Locations
Reset- Germany - Leipzig
- A: Leipzig University
- B: Leipzig - Astoria
- C: Dorna
- Germany - Hamburg
- D: Eppendorf
- E: University of Hamburg
Travel Guide
Leipzig
Imagine being told when you’re seventeen that your real father was an East German, a political prisoner. Then to travel to Leipzig in order to find him and some answers about your past.
A town without a soul it would seem. There’s a prison called Bautzen just outside Dorna. The prison is known as Yellow Misery
“Leipzig like its university operated under a new identity”
The railway station came back into sight and he recognised the word that jutted into the skyline, each purple letter the size of a man. The Astoria, at least, had remained faithful to itself”
Hamburg
Peter’s experience here has led him to fear and even dislike a part of himself couldn’t know so he goes back in order to vanquish the dragon and goes back to meet it. He sees the Berlin where he studies, and works in the hospital.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Snowleg
Destination: Germany, Hamburg, Leipzig Author/Guide: Nicholas Shakespeare Departure Time: 1980s and various
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