The Production of Meaning in Jurek Becker's Schlaflose Tage

Abstract

Throughout his literary itinerary, Jurek Becker has explored truth and lies in an ethical, aesthetic, and political context (Wetzel et al. 265-292; Lauckner 141-154). At the same time, his work exerts pressure on contemporary discourse about literature to examine its object, fiction, in these terms. In his prose narratives, Becker questions the necessity and legitimacy of story-telling; the acts of speaking and writing themselves become part of the story. Becker' s canniness about the identity of truth and lies, and his ability to combine irony and pathos, place him among the few contemporary German authors to rehabilitate the mode of understatement without resorting to the monumentalism of Socialist Realism or the solipsism of New Subjectivity. Becker's balancing act not only crosses boundaries within former East German literary traditions, but within literary history in general as well. In Schlaflose Tage (1978), Becker' s use of understatement points to the exaggerations and hyperbole of official state rhetoric. In this novel, which derives its meaning from the interplay of irony and pathos, Becker raises questions about the quest for the truth in both a semantic and epistemological sense. He focusses on the capacity of language to tell the truth and on the ability of realism, specifically Socialist Realism in literature, to represent that truth. Following the advice given by Brecht in his poem Lob des Zweifels, Becker' s central figure carefully examines the authenticity of his words in order to establish the measure of their truth. The quest for truth, specifically for truth in the language of the state and in