A Girl from East Berlin by Alexis

A Girl from East Berlin by Alexis - June 2014 Scholarship Essay

I fell in love with history the day I read The Lightning Thief by Rick Riodan in the fifth grade. I fell in love with writing the same year when my friend showed me the story she was writing. Ever since, I haven’t been able to get enough of history and I haven’t been able to stop writing. Yet, up until last year, I never combined the two. The day I discovered I could write a novel interweaving the events of history was the day I fell in love writing historical fiction rather than fantasy or typical young adult fiction.

The novel I wrote back then placed a young girl in Thailand, who became separated from her family after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami came to the shores of their hotel. Today, if I were to write another historical fiction book, I would place a young girl in East Berlin, separated from the West because of a wall that was a symbol of the Cold War. I have always been fascinated with renaissance history, but the Berlin Wall has always been a remarkable story of hardships, symbolism, and perseverance to me.

For a long time I’ve wanted to write about a girl, fifteen years old or so, living in East Berlin in 1987. She has a friend who has just managed to listen to Ronald Reagan’s speech, and now he wants to escape to the West. She objects, but he manages to persuade her to go with him, and they make a plan throughout the first half of the novel to somehow get over the wall. Yet, when it comes down to the hour of their escape, she loses confidence and doesn’t meet her friend at their meeting place. Instead she stays home, and when she wakes up in the morning she finds out her friend is missing. She knows why, but no one else does, and she’s unable to ask or find out if her friend is alive or dead. That is, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The second half of the novel would be the girl trying to find out what happened to her friend and coming to dead end after dead end. What I want to express through the novel is the differences between the West and the East. I want the girl’s parents to be full supporters of East Germany, but her views are skewed by her friend’s because his family secretly doesn’t support the East. I want to express the views of the people when the wall came down. I want to show how there were people who supported the East and people who didn’t. I want the girl caught up in it all while she tries to find her best friend. When I think about it, I want it to be an emotional ride. At the same time I want it to be a lesson on history. My favorite books are historical books that tell a compelling and emotional story while managing to hide that it’s a history lesson too. Those books are the best books in my personal opinion, and that’s why I want to write about a girl and her friend from East Berlin.