SOURCE: Blomster, Wes. Review of Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen: Essais und Reden, by Christoph Hein. World Literature Today 65, no. 2 (spring 1991): 297.

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...