Living in the basement of a rectory

she found the furnishings and conversations out there unbearably spießig, dowdy, philistine

ended up working as a secretary after her Abitur

"We can go directly to the Stasi," he said.

[...] he didn't want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he'd been living in.

[...] Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly clasutrophobic; a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

[...] Being an exceptionally bright and receptive little boy, you also already believed in the historical inevitability of the socialist workers' state. [...]

The Nazis had persecuted the Communists and nearly destroyed the Soviet Union, which had then been fully justified in exacting reparations, and America had diverted scarce resources from its own oppressed working class and sent them to West Germany to create an illusion of prosperity, luring weak and misguided East Germans across the border.

his father replying "From each according to his ability" or something similarly sententious and correct

In theory, psychologists were unnecessary in the Republic of Bad Taste, because neurosis was a bourgeois malady, a morbid expression of contradictions that by definition could not exist in a perfect worker's state.

Beyond the berm were disused rail tracks

[...] If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in that infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it.

Meanwhile in Russia there was glasnost, there was Gorby. The true-believing little Republic, feeling betrayed by its Sovet father, cracked down harder on its own dissidents.