Abstract
The narrator in the East German writer's story from the early 1980's, prefaced with a quote from Franz Kafka'sBeim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China), expresses continual frustration with authority, maddening encounters with bureaucracy, and a wall that signifies control and power. Allusions to the absurdity of the Berlin Wall and life in the divided city are centered on interconnections between Kafka's spatial metaphors and symbols of confinement, Freud's work on dreams and the subconscious, and Grimms' fairy tales with the motif of the forbidden room. This article focuses on Schubert's text in relationship to her intertexts, particularly in regard to the narrator's subconscious and her “Alptraume” (anxiety-ridden dreams) about visits to West Berlin-the forbidden room. I analyze the Wall as an outer and inner space. The narrator's impressions and reactions during her actual visit to West Berlin as a professional writer in 1978 reflect her internalization of political indoctrination and propaganda against the promises of capitalism. Schubert's text with its Kafkaesque dream elements and symbolic structures is read as a journey toward self-understanding and as a subtle appeal to relax travel restrictions.
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