'Wende' und 'Einheit' im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur: Ein Handbuch by Frank Thomas Grub (review)

Abstract

57? Reviews work, which occupies a space that combines fiction, non-fiction, and police report. She notes that this specific consideration highlights how 'the sheer magnitude of Stasi material, the intensity with which the Stasi planned and carried out its activities, the very real goals ofZersetzung and kaputmachen [...] constitute a reality that many West German readers finddifficultto comprehend, but one that East Germans experienced as an everyday reality' (p. 224). In this regard her essay makes an interesting study of the impact of surveillance material on life and literature in the GDR. One contribution that stands out is Paul Cooke's essay on Wolfgang Hilbig's Ich. Cooke raises questions about the limits on resisting the world-view offered by the state, and about the extent to which the 'unofficial informants' might also be de? scribed as victims. He draws out the relationship of this issue to Foucault's ideas, and presents a provocation that could have been productively pursued at other points in the book. The GDR, as it is depicted here, seems to have been something ofa laboratoryforexperimenting with policing its subjects. It was farless veiled in its application of power than the West and for this reason its mechanisms run parallel to those de? scribed not only by Foucault, but also by Althusser and Zizek. Some of the essays would have benefited by more directly pursuing these social and historical concerns. Undeniably, some readers will find that the volume's essays stay too close to indi? vidual texts rather than returning to the broader issues outlined in the introduction. However, the book contains many well-considered and thoughtful readings, and its close textual analyses will well serve those who would want to use the book to struc? ture courses on the GDR, or to reflecton the question of what it means for literature to be written beneath the watchful eye of a police state. University of Missouri, Columbia Brad Prager 'Wende'und 'Einheit'im Spiegel der deutschsprachigenLiteratur: Ein Handbuch. Vol. i: Untersuchungen; vol. ii: Bibliographie. By Frank Thomas Grub. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. 2003. Vol. 1: x + 689 pp.; vol. 11:x + 349 pp. ?148; $178 (the set). ISBN 3-11-017775-7. Literary production in the years immediately following the 'Wende' was accompanied by complaints from literary critics such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki that few ofthe works being published sought to address the events of 1989 and 1990, or the implica? tions of these events fora reassessment of German and not least East German history. Gunter Grass's novel Ein weites Feld (1995) seemed to provide an answer to calls for a 'Wenderoman', and Rolf Hochhuth's Wessis in Weimar (1993) could certainly claim to be a significant 'Wendedrama'. But these works did not satisfy the critics; their aesthetic quality was disputed, and, perhaps more importantly,they had been written by West Germans sympathetic to East Germany, whereas the expectations of many West German literary critics had been that East Germans would write literary works critical ofthe GDR. What constitutes a 'Wenderoman' is, then, a matter of perspec? tive; this, surely, is the underlying satirical point of Jens Sparschuh's novel Eins zu Eins (2003), which sets the history of the 'Wenden' in relation to the 'Wende' and its aftermath. Any chosen perspective is of course itself informed by a set of political, historiographical, and ethical expectations that often have little to do with aesthetics. Some ofthe participants in the 'Literaturstreit' of 1990-92 sought to sever what was perceived as the Gordian knot connecting German literature with didactic, politicizing agendas. Politics, the argument ran, was bad for aesthetics. That Gunter Grass's Ein weites Feld and Hochhuth's Wessisin Weimar were pilloried by many literary cri? tics is evidence that the real goal ofthe 'Literaturstreit' had been to replace left-wing agendas with right-wing ones. The hoped-for totalitarianist deconstructions of the MLRy 100.2, 2005 571 GDR in literary form were clearly not regarded as bad for aesthetics?one reason, no doubt, for the overestimation in some sections of the German press of Monika Maron's 'family history' Pawels Briefe (1999), which spans the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic...