Abstract
Monika Maron’s Animal Triste (1996) was widely understood as a response to German unification. This reading of Maron’s critically acclaimed novel places the text in the context of the literary discourse of the so-called New World. The United States have long enticed the German literary imagination and have served as a screen for projections of (utopian) promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The narrator’s exploration of her freedom, symbolized in a trip to New York City, are juxtaposed with feelings of imprisonment, expressed through seemingly endless remembering. Maron’s novel connects with the tradition of German writing about love, another powerful trope of freedom and captivity, and resonates with other women’s writing about the U.S. after 1989.
Highlights
Born in Berlin in 1941, Monika Maron moved with her mother to East Berlin in 1951
In Animal Triste, the narrator’s flight to America is precipitated by the fact that the fall of the Berlin Wall, which came to symbolize the end of the Cold War, does not lead to the narrator's liberation
I suggest that the representation of “America” in this novel has outstanding significance, since a trip to Manhattan is the only journey the narrator undertakes at this crucial point in her life
Summary
Born in Berlin in 1941, Monika Maron moved with her mother to East Berlin in 1951. Her stepfather Karl Maron was the interior minister of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1955 to 1963.
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