With his trusted 35mm camera, Ron Hoffer plunged into the turbulent post-Soviet world of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a myriad of images, he captured the beauty as well as the daily challenges, friends and strangers alike had to face in Czechoslovakia or East Germany, while trying to cope with the adventurously new economic and political realities. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Ron Hoffer's vignettes of women, the youth, everyday culture, and devastated landscapes turn this book into a very personal memento and photographic tribute to this astonishing time of global optimism.