[In the following review, Blomster offers a positive assessment of Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen.]

During the past year almost every East German writer who could claim the dissident label has felt an obligation, it seems, to publish a volume of nonfiction pieces documenting his or her activities in the period surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although Christoph Hein was unquestionably the leading figure of the younger generation among these authors, the unfocused collection Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen speaks uncomfortably of a hurried sifting of manuscripts, undertaken mainly to fulfill this obligation. The twenty-three items included here, nine of which appear in print for the first time, extend from 1988 to the January 1990 address given by Hein marking Kurt Tucholsky's one-hundredth birthday.

In November 1989 Hein shared the dream of a new and truly socialist nation then cherished by many East German intellectuals. The demise of that dream now leaves many of the brief offerings here destined for the dustbin of history. (Still, Hein's Alexanderplatz address of 4 November 1989 will stand as a magnificent monument to a noble sentiment.) The best of the pieces are those which are not directly political, and among that group the prize goes to Hein's tributes to others who labor with literature: the laudatio for Max Frisch upon the latter's receipt of Düsseldorf's Heinrich Heine Prize in 1989, the foreword to Gustav Just's memoirs, and the contribution to an Arbeitsbuch on Christa Wolf. Outstanding is the author's analysis of the Historikerstreit, the debate on German responsibility for the Holocaust that raged within the country's academies late in the last decade. His Leipzig lecture on poetics will remain essential in future considerations of Hein's own literary output. The title essay, by the way, is a witty contemplation of a piece of socialist-realist hack work, the cooperative painting I Saw Stalin Once When I Was a Child by Komar and Melamid. It constitutes one of the finer available obituaries on the communist dream.