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|title=Red Love: The Story of an East German Family

|author=Maxim Leo

|publisher=Pushkin Press

|date=September 2013

|summary=Life in a Socialist police state has never been as perceptively looked back on as here.

}}

Chances are there have been major disagreements and splits in your family. One black sheep might have supported the wrong football team. Some of you will be strictly ''Strictly'', the rest ''X Factor''. But probably nothing compares to what went on in the Leo household over decades in Eastern Berlin. One of our author's grandfathers, Gerhard, was too Jewish and bourgeois to survive life in Germany, fled to France, and came back a Communist having fought against Nazism. His counterpart Werner ended the war with some semblance of PTSD, and more or less landed in Communist Berlin due to facts of administration, yet became a fully-fledged Party activist. Author's mother Anne worked as a journalist on the Communist mouthpiece newspaper, even if she managed to doubt things she was forced to write during the Prague Spring and more. Her husband Wolf – Werner's son – in a similar industry was involved in sort-of Photoshopping for propaganda, and often sabotaged his own output. He was violent, awkward, but very anti-establishment. And if you can't see how having a non-Communist in such a family in the heightened times of Cold War Berlin would be, you certainly will after reading this gripping collective biography.

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{{toptentext|list=Top Ten Autobiographies and Biographies of 2013}}

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