A memoir of a young East German woman, searching for her country and herself. It tells the story of a lost generation of East German kids forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future.

Here was everything her generation had coveted for so long - Coca Cola and pop CDs, Hollywood movies and magazines. In their desperation to get with it, Jana and her friends acquired every possible Western product and mannerism. They changed the way they talked, the way they walked, what they read, where they went. They moved to Berlin. They cut off from their parents. They wore Levi's jeans, took English lessons, and opened bank accounts.They spent a decade trying to assimilate. Now they looked right, talked right, and walked right, but who were they? They were always fighting to catch up. But where were they going? In "After the Wall", Jana Hensel tells the story of her generation, a lost generation of East German kids forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future. It is a bittersweet story of loss and discovery, of growing up fast in a strange world that your childhood had never imagined.