Blankenship, Robert Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 768 All of this was and continues to be a very thorny puzzle, indeed, and one can only wonder at the hidden irony pervading these events when an author’s free voice from a hermetically sealed society is assisted by a secret organization, with all its cloak and dagger modes of operation, while so many liberal-minded socialists, fighting for the liberation of the world, in their attempt to placate the Soviet Communist party, were intent on suppressing the novel’s publication. To clarify this unlikely scenario, Mancuso seeks to discover which of the six manuscripts that travelled to the West was used by the CIA, a question that leads to yet another mystery: the identity of the person, who, among the anxious guardians of the novel’s copies, agreed to give the manuscript to the CIA. In this perilous quest, Mancosu stays the course, and while not every question is answered, the overall chain of events is presented with a sure touch. Mancosu does this by collecting the very diverse material into eighteen chapters, each with a new protagonist. One of the early chapters is also devoted to the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt in November 1956, which stunned the world on both sides of the Iron Curtain, undermined Feltrinelli’s allegiance to the Russian version of Communism, and emphasized the depth of danger faced by Pasternak. We also see the heavily redacted report of the CIA, explaining the process that led to their publication of the novel. And we also have a very useful Appendix that presents all the relevant correspondence, followed by a helpful index. Mancosu notes in passing that ‘Pasternak had sent Doctor Zhivago abroad hoping to pressure the Soviets to publish the novel at home’ (p. 113). This is the only conclusion I would question, for it is more probable that Pasternak realized very quickly, or even sensed this at the very beginning, that the explosive spirit of his work would never pass the censorship of a one-party system country. Apart from this, one cannot but admire the precision, scope and clarity of Mancosu’s exposition of this startling literary event of the twentieth century. Emory University Elena Glazov-Corrigan Blankenship, Robert. Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Camden House, Rochester, NY. 2017. vii + 193 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00: £75.00. In this intellectually stimulating book, literary scholar Robert Blankenship imaginatively explores the narrative strategies of GDR authors dealing with self-destruction. Blankenship places special emphasis on intertextuality, subtly analysing how East German authors reworked classic texts to reveal REVIEWS 769 their complex literariness. Blankenship discusses the various ways in which East German writers, such as Ulrich Plenzdorf, Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, Christoph Hein and Werner Heiduczek, transposed classical stories (among them, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Goethe’s Werther and Kleist’s Penthesilea) from their original settings into the 1970s behind the Iron Curtain and, most notably, how these appropriations exposed the subversive dynamics within the restrictive cultural climate of the GDR. ScholarswhoconstruesuicideinGDRliteraturemainlyasrealisticdepictions of individual self-destruction see its subversive potential as deriving merely from the fact that these writings break a taboo, highlighting the repression and despair of life under Communist dictatorship. By contrast, Blankenship argues that it is its ‘rich literariness’ which makes East German literature on suicide ‘so subversive’ (p. 27). Seeking for the mechanisms at work in both novels and plays, he shows how East German authors used suicide as a metaphor and how they produced aesthetic effects such as transgression, fluidity, or even explosion in order to instigate counter-memory. Consequently, this study does not pay much attention to the problems of individual suicide, so that the fatal victim of this study is less the individual but more the literary canon of the GDR. Such an understanding of suicide cuts both ways. In places, it tempts the author to overstatement. Blankenship goes so far as to assert that official literary heritage guarded by cultural authorities ‘was itself suicidal’ (p. 139). This application of suicide as a metaphor to denote ‘the self-destructiveness inherent in any programmatic...