Nadine Gordimer Destroys the Walls of Separation

Nadine Gordimer, the white South African writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, was recently in Germany to read from her new novel "A Man in the Street".

During her visit, the film "The Wall in the Mind" premiered in Germany at the first "internationales literaturfestival berlin".

Gordimer had made the movie together with her son Hugo Cassirer. This film is about overcoming borders and draws interesting parallels between two important cities in Gordimer's life, Johannesburg and Berlin.

Nadine Gordimer was born near Johannesburg in 1923. Apart from extensively travelling in Africa, Europe, and North America, she has spent her life there ever since. South Africa's metropolis is what she calls "home".

But Nadine Gordimer has been married to a born Berliner, Reinhold Cassirer, for more than 45 years now. For him, "home" does not really exist: Cassirer is Jewish. He escaped Nazi Germany, emigrated to South Africa and got South African citizenship.

Nadine Gordimer and her husband visited Berlin on a number of occasions before and after the wall came down. She admits that she has always been very much struck with the similarities between Berlin and Johannesburg.

She once put it all in just one simple sentence: "The Berlin Wall separated Berliners, the walls of Apartheid separated Johannesburgers".

However, conditions have dramatically changed since these two walls came down.