A Writer's Life in the GDR

You have written a book of 750 pages about the final days of the GDR, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and events of the first half of the 1990s presented mainly in the form of letters, and to a lesser extent, in literary texts. Next to Thomas Brussig - who worked mainly in the form of comic sketches - you are the only contemporary German writer to discuss this period.

 

Indeed, numerous books have been written about the GDR, but few novels describe the collapse of the Berlin wall.

 

 

It astounds me, too, considering that those few months affected everyone. Strangely enough, I often find myself in the unthankful situation that I must somehow find justification for writing about the collapse of the wall. Especially in the West, it feels like something that happened a very long time ago - and 1968 feels closer than 1989. Yet, the great turning point when the change of system occurred was in 1989. At the same time, the disappearance of the East is less exciting to me than the change of the West. It brought us the issue of comparisons, and one of the greatest disadvantages of living in the GDR was that it offered no opportunities for making comparisons. Today we can do all that, using criteria that we had never even thought of before. I have tried to describe this in my novel, which has been predestined - especially in the West - to be labelled a Wenderoman. Yet, I think it could be much better described as a Bildungsroman, or even an Entwicklungsroman or an Erziehungsroman. I only realised this after the events, but those six months were really important because they represent a period of transformation in the GDR, a process that had occurred much earlier in other countries of the East Bloc. The GDR was always the exemplary student of Moscow. So within the year-long period between the 40^th anniversary of the founding of the GDR (October 7, 1989) and the date of German reunification, the first half of the year 1990 was especially important, when we were living in some sort of suspended animation.

 

 

The process seems to have been slower in Hungary, but in addition to being slower it was also more independent. It is possible that this slowness is more fruitful. The GDR has often been praised for carrying out changes quickly and skilfully but the economic miracle has never happened and this has caused much disappointment. I have often had the impression that we were being pushed from behind instead of really learning from the West. The election results of 1990 were very symptomatic. This also played an important role in my novel, because it showed that people once again wanted to get rid of responsibility. This was very sad on the one hand, but also liberating on the other hand.

 

 

I hope heroism is still represented in the other figures of the novel. As for Türmer, similar to Nero, he does everything for the same purpose, in other words he is an egoist who cares about nothing else but becoming a writer. Through this character, I tried to show that after 1989, the meaning of words also changed. Ambivalence was indeed important to me and it was exactly the epistolary novel form that enabled me to show this as a writer - because I did not want to act as a judge.

 

 

No, not at all. The main protagonist and the three addressees can be understood as part of four different models, offering different aspects of criticism. At the same time, their personal experiences, their world views, fates, interests and desires are also presented. The novel does function as a criticism of ideologies but I hope it first of all encourages us to take account of the past and not be left alone with our experiences.

 

 

From a literary parvenu, he becomes a mute man. Through his works listed in the appendix, I tried to show how it was possible to survive the GDR.

 

 

I was saddened by this deafness. I do not fully understand it because even those who praised the book left the last hundred pages unmentioned. Yet, I feel the modernity of the book was hidden in these texts. It was this appendix that most strongly suggested my strategy regarding relativity, which I mentioned just before, regarding style and also content. I also wrote short summaries before the chapters in Simple Stories in order to prevent readers getting immersed in the story. Closeness and distance, as well as maintaining heterogeneity were definitely conscious efforts.

 

 

The publisher of the letters is an editorial and also a supplementing voice who must quickly find a position that best corresponds to his ambitions and also his relationship with the writer of the letters. This figure has appeared increasingly important to me, so when foreign translations of my book were in preparation, I cooperated with the translators to expand the notes and even write new ones. In the parts that contain the literary texts, I refrained from doing this because true literature must be able to stand on its own.

 

Author: Katalin Teller / Photo: Máté Nándorfi