Strategies under Surveillance: Reading Irmtraud Morgner as a GDR Writer by Geoffrey Westgate (review)

Abstract

1060 Reviews feld, 2001)). The outcome is to make Koeppen even more of enigmatic. Pending a full evaluation of Koeppen's fragments, and failing a dramatically unifying overall interpretation, he remains inscrutable. In the meantime, Ward offersclose readings and careful and convincing analyses of themes, notably liminality: the author and his figures gravitate towards marginal positions from which to observe the world. Whether such a position is enforced, e.g. by political pressures, or voluntary, or in? deed (seen anthropologically) a necessary ritual function, must make a difference,but it is rarely clear to the reader (or, apparently, to Koeppen) which it is at any particular point. As this ambiguity touches closely on the very identity ofthe author and on his techniques of characterization, it could be tested further,and no doubt will be. Ward stresses social role-playing: the roles, forinstance, of author (though unproductive) or parliamentarian (though disillusioned); and preoccupation with transitional spaces: borders, railway platforms, bridges, and the like. He analyses profoundly the possible concessions in Koeppen's writing around 1933 to ideas of 'Heimat', nation, or public and private duty which he did not necessarily share. But we have no evidence that Koeppen was actually unhappy with Nazism (and Doring has now blown cold on some of the evidence we thought we had). Despite Ward's dissection of passages where national strivings seem chimeric, the young Koeppen seems a rather unreflective conservative, perhaps offended by the aesthetics of Nazism but without a political response (like the young Frisch, not mentioned here). However, Koeppen could learn. As Ward points out, the outsider figures of the post-war novels are much more complex. Coming to grips with Littner's memoirs means critical examination of 'the negotiability of cultural identity' (p. 101) seen in the subjective Germanness of a secularized Polish Jew resident in Munich. The (attempted) rebuilding of a cultural German identity from literal and metaphori? cal ruins can then be fictionally treated from various angles. The writer's space is reached 'by establishing liminal structures in a narrative process of negotiation with the discourses which define the society ofwhich they [Koeppen's protagonists] are ineluctably a part' (p. 73). Even ifWard's own discourse is reached by negotiation with an academe which demands such vocabulary, his method can still bring old-fashioned insights. In sum, this is a helpful contribution to Koeppen exegesis. The book is well produced and remarkably free from misprints and the like (but on p. 141, for Brinkl-Frederici, read Brink-Friederici). Cardiff University Alfred D. White Strategies under Surveillance: Reading IrmtraudMorgner as a GDR Writer. By Ge? offrey Westgate. (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 148) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002. viii+ 276 pp. ?50; $46.50. ISBN 90-42o-i428-x(pbk). Geoffrey Westgate's book on Irmtraud Morgner, based on an Oxford D.Phil thesis, assesses how far the publication of this author's works was hampered, delay ed, and in one instance prevented by institutionalized censorship and control. Beyond this, Westgate sets out to show that the experience of such interference was a fundamental influence in shaping Morgner's choice of subject matter and her approach to it, even to the extent of guiding her aesthetics. Westgate argues moreover that contrasts in Morgner's texts, such as that between the relative optimism of Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz and the disillusionment of Amanda, reflect her sensitivity to the changing political situation around her; Beatriz, published in 1974, owes much to the new climate under Erich Honecker, both in its playfulness and in its 'formal iconoclasm' (p. 142), while Amanda (1983), a formally much more rigorous text with MLRy 98.4, 2003 1061 a strong socio-critical component, bears the mark of the pessimism which set in af? ter Biermann's expulsion in 1976. Referring to feminist readings of Morgner's texts, readings which have played a considerable part in the literary-critical reception and relative popularity of the author especially in West Germany, Westgate contends that these readings may be one-dimensional. They emphasize continuities in Morgner's writings, overlooking how her texts shift in tone and style in reaction to cultural sea-changes within the GDR...