SOURCE: Robinson, David W. “Chronicling the Cold War's Losers and Winners.” In Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein's Literature of Dissent, edited by James Hardin, pp. 181–219. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1999.

[In the following excerpt, Robinson explores Hein's post-unification literature and how it indirectly attacks capitalism and Western culture.]

In early 1989, two major events in Hein's career took on larger significance as the political ground began to shift. The first was the publication of Der Tangospieler, a book that would have stood out as a remarkable event even had it not been Hein's last novel of the GDR era. The novel's most obvious message was its condemnation of a now-familiar Hein figure, the Aussteiger, the social outcast or drop-out—the sort of person, usually an intellectual, who becomes the perfect servant of the state precisely because he thinks himself “free” from political entanglements. But Der Tangospieler was also problematic for other, more pressing reasons: it shows a pair of Stasi agents going about their unsavory business, and it contains an account of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, making it the first—and last—novel published in the GDR dealing with that event. The book had survived stiff resistance in the Culture Ministry. In his remarkable account of the inside workings of East German censorship, historian Robert Darnton describes how mid-level East German literary officials managed to get Der Tangospieler into print only by issuing an authorization on their own initiative, creating a fait accompli while preserving their sympathetic boss's “deniability” in dealings with his superiors in the ministry and the Party Central Committee (213). The story of the book's publication indicates how far Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms had tempted even the guardians of the East German social order to stretch the existing political limits. It could never have been published if the author had been less prominent or the narrative style less couched in satirical indirectness, which Hein disguised as objective description of a bygone era. Hein plainly had conceived of Der Tangospieler as a perestroika piece and had designed it to straddle the precise limit of what could be openly said. The events of the novel are a veiled commentary on the arbitrariness of the SED regime, coupled with a searing portrayal of the complicity of GDR intellectuals in their country's crimes. In choosing the end of the Dubček regime as the historical background for the novel, Hein was also returning to the formative event in his own political life, the moment at which he claims to have lost faith in the promise of a just socialism (Hein, “Kennen”). Thus the book recapitulates and interprets Hein's twenty years as a politically engaged writer, while diagnosing the ills that would lead to the GDR's collapse sooner than anybody, including Hein, imagined.¹

The other, equally portentous event was the production of Die Ritter der Tafelrunde in Dresden. The play revisits the legends of the Arthurian knights and their search for the Holy Grail, focusing this time on the aftermath of the grand early exploits, once the heroes and heroines have grown old and quarrelsome. The play is a farce at the expense of the old warriors whose view of reality has become fossilized, hence a commentary on the fate of ideologues and their ideologies. The action takes place in the room housing the Round Table, which is now in disrepair and nearly deserted. The knights bicker among themselves about how to carry on, and some have given up the quest completely. The women bemoan the stupidity of the men and the loss of their own beauty. The younger generation, represented by Arthur's son Mordred, appears destined to overturn all of Arthur's achievements once it assumes power, yet Mordred has no idea what changes he might institute. And we learn that meanwhile, outside Camelot, Arthur and his knights have become objects of contempt instead of awe. Not even the threat of impending ecological disaster can rouse the embittered old men from their paralysis in the face of outcomes they never anticipated. The play ends with Arthur resignedly acknowledging that Mordred's day has come, and that, like it or not, it will be his responsibility to find a path into the future. The central philosophical burden of the play is the nature and meaning of the Grail, which appears to signify any ideal or utopia toward which human beings must strive in order to remain human, even when they know they can never attain it. The failure of Arthur and his knights to locate the Grail thus appears less tragic than merely inevitable, but so too is it inevitable that the whole process of pursuing the ideal, whether understood as social justice or personal fulfillment, will continue. The desperation of the knights, their fear that everything they have lived for is slipping away, turns out to be a parochial, if understandable, illusion based on limited perspective. Thus the play is at once an allegory for the moribund state of the GDR in the late 1980s, and an exploration of the role of utopian thinking in human experience, regardless of time or place. As such, it might be understood to speak to the fortunes of political idealism and social justice in the West as well as the East, and to the cyclic struggles that result when one generation must hand over power to a new one with wholly different experiences and views.²

Hein himself, meanwhile, found himself lionized in the waning months of 1989 as a public spokesman for reform. Following the Politburo shake-up on October 18, demonstrations across the GDR had grown ever larger, culminating in the November 4 demonstration on Alexanderplatz that by some estimates drew more than a million people. Hein was one among a decidedly mixed crowd of orators (ranging from reform leaders to Christa Wolf to Politburo spokesman Günter Schabowski to former espionage chief Marcus Wolf). He staked out a position in support of democratic socialism:

Dear no-longer-voiceless fellow citizens!

We all have a lot of work to do, and little time for it. The structures of this society must be changed if it is to become democratic and socialist. There are no alternatives.

We must also speak of dirty hands, of dirty histories. Here, too, is work for the society and the media. Featherbedding, corruption, misuse of office, theft of public property—all this must be investigated, and the investigation must extend to the leadership of the state. That is where it must begin.

Let us be careful not to confuse the euphoria of these days with the changes that we still have to make. The enthusiasm, the demonstrations were and are helpful and necessary, but they are not substitutes for the work at hand. Let us not be fooled by our own enthusiasm: we haven't yet succeeded. The cow still isn't off the ice. And there are sufficient forces that oppose change, that fear a new society and have reason to fear it.

I wish for us to think now of an old man, an old and probably very lonely man. I am speaking of Erich Honecker. This man had a dream that he was ready to go to prison for.³ Then he was given the chance to make his dream a reality. It was not a very good chance, because its midwives were defeated fascism and victorious Stalinism. A society took shape that had little to do with socialism. Instead, it was—and remains—distinguished by bureaucracy, demagoguery, spying, abuse of power, passivity, and crime. A system took shape before which many good, intelligent, honest people had to abase themselves if they wished to continue living here. And no one knew any longer how to proceed against this system, how to dismantle it.

And I believe that even for this old man, our society is scarcely the fulfillment of a dream. Even he, standing at the helm of the state, responsible above all others for its successes but also for its mistakes, its sins of omission, and its crimes—even he was virtually powerless when confronting its encrusted structures.

I call this man to mind for one reason: as a warning, lest we now also create structures before which we will someday find ourselves powerless. Let us create a democratic society founded on the rule of law and subject to the review of law. A socialism which doesn't make the word into a caricature. A society tailored to human beings, not one where human beings are subordinated to the system. This will mean a lot of work for all of us, much of it tedious detail work, worse than knitting.

One word more. Success, as the saying goes, has many fathers. Obviously, there are many who believe that the changes in the GDR are already successful, because many are now revealing themselves as the fathers of this success. Peculiar fathers, reaching high into the leadership of the state. I think, however, that our memory is not so bad that we have forgotten who really did begin dismantling the all-powerful system. Who ended the sleep of reason. It was the reason of the streets, the demonstrations by ordinary people.

(Hein, Als Kind 175–177)

Hein's independent leftist position, which called for the people of the GDR to confront and solve their own problems and to preserve the positive features of their society, and which combined rage at the SED leadership with strong suspicion of the West, was typical of the intellectual and artistic class that founded the Neues Forum. As the GDR's first officially recognized independent political organization, Neues Forum participated in the rump SED government in the “round tables” that briefly governed the country, and made up the constituency of the vaguely socialist coalition “Bündnis 90” that was soundly thrashed in the 1990 elections that installed a pro-unification GDR government. Hein's political views amid the whirlwind of the Wende were entirely consistent with his essayistic remarks over the previous ten years, in which he had been calling for a more democratic socialism instead of a rapprochement with what he saw as a rapacious and militaristic West. The realization during November and December 1989 that a majority of the citizens of the GDR no longer wanted socialism in any form, and wished to join economically and politically with the Federal Republic as quickly as possible, came as a huge disappointment, though it can hardly have been a surprise to the playwright who had imagined the disaffected post-socialist youth Mordred in Die Ritter der Tafelrunde.⁴ Hein persisted gamely in his assertion of his right, as a citizen of the GDR, to participate in the writing of his own history and in arraigning the crimes mentioned in his speech; most notably, he served on the Ausschuβ zur Ermittlung der polizeilichen Übergriffe vom 7. Oktober 1989, the citizens' committee investigating the violence of police authorities against peaceful demonstrators.⁵ But clearly, Hein's own dream of a free, self-determining GDR—politically tempered by the experience of forty years of Stalinism, and free of the overwhelming force of West German materialism and its supporting capitalist ideology—would never be realized. With unification, the social position and role of the artist (like every other aspect of East German society) would be radically revised, from that of uniquely positioned social critic and public intellectual, to, on the face of it, a supplier of products utterly beholden to market forces. Changed, too, for an East German critic of ideology in the new whole-German state, was his primary subject matter: Stalinism was replaced by capitalism, a much more complicated target, and one with which he was less intimately familiar. Like his fellow citizens, Hein had no choice but to reinvent himself and his social function.

AGAINST THE NEW VICTORS OF HISTORY: HEIN'S ATTACK ON THE WEST

Clearly, with capitalism triumphant, it was hazardous for writers (or critics) to show sympathy with the losers of history, as shown by the journalistic campaign against Christa Wolf (which was exacerbated by proof that she had herself written reports on fellow writers for the secret police in the early 1960s). This was merely the first of many similar attacks on the reputations of prominent figures of the GDR.⁶ Although Hein's integrity remained untouched by any such allegations, his out-spoken anti-Western sentiments, his uncompromising calls for social justice (which he was not afraid to label “socialism”), and the long-term anti-ideological project of his writing were poorly suited to resonate with the newly-dominant orthodoxies. (However, this dissonance was nothing new—it was, after all, as an opposition figure, as a challenger of political limits, that Hein made his mark in the GDR.) Certainly the prevailing German political mood had a distorting effect on the way Hein's most recent work, Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, was received in late 1989 and early 1990. Even before the Wende, and despite the general applicability of the themes of idealism, delusion, and disillusion evident in the play, Die Ritter was understood too frequently as a straightforwardly hostile allegory of the GDR's leadership. Governmental permission to produce the play had come only at the last minute after a delay of many months; Hein defended himself against suspicions that the knights were modeled on Communist Party Secretary Erich Honecker and his cronies by denying that he would have stooped to the flattery suggested by such an analogy (“Das Geld,” 226). Nevertheless, the timing of the play's premiere did nothing to discourage the view that Arthur was Honecker, and the Round Table was socialism. The desire of some of the knights to solve their problems by killing off the younger generation was horribly paralleled in Tienanmen Square in May 1989, just a month after the play opened, and the impotence of an aging, doctrinaire leadership would be copied by the reality of the GDR in October and November. Hein soon acquired the status not just of political dissident but of prophet—a mixed blessing, since the immediate result was a great deal of public interest in the play, but at the cost of it being understood in rather crude terms. Karla Kochta, a dramaturge at the Dresden State Theater where the play was first produced, relates how a group of West Berlin literature and theater students came in early 1990 to what they expected to be the GDR's “perestroika play,” hence an already musty bit of history, only to be puzzled that the East German audience was responding to the issue of utopia as though it were still a living concern. The Western students were also surprised that Mordred didn't smash the table to pieces at the end of the play, thereby announcing the end of a failed ideology. Kochta's answer, like Hein's, is that the failure of an ideology does not mean the end of hope for a better world (Kochta, 225).

The aspects of Die Ritter that have relevance to the post-Cold-War era are precisely those which early critics of the play ignored or failed to grasp. The reviewer for the West Berlin tageszeitung was typical in judging the play a political allegory pure and simple, and then criticizing it for datedness and inadequacy to the torrent of real political events sweeping Germany in the fall of 1989 (Mehr). Theater heute complained that the allegory was too heavy-handed, but that, puzzlingly, the Dresden audiences seemed to respond to it (Krug). The problem in each case may be traceable to inattention to Hein's other plays and novels, in all of which the place of action, often enough the GDR, is partly incidental: the popularity of Der fremde Freund, for example, resulted not from any West German taste for GDR-exotica, but from shocked recognition of the book's depiction of alienated life in a modern urban-industrial society. Similarly, Hein's novel Horns Ende explored the German, not just the East German, willingness to forget history, and Hein's most successful play to date, Ah Q, has been produced throughout Europe because of its insights about the fate of individuals in all revolutions, not just German or even socialist ones. Die Ritter der Tafelrunde is likewise a play about a society without a future, where old values have ceased to be relevant, the ruling class lacks the flexibility or creativeness to change, and the younger generation is plagued by hopelessness. It doesn't take a sociologist to point out that these are also characteristics, to varying degrees, of West German and American society, not just endemic maladies of the defunct East Bloc. Thus West German critic Antje Janssen-Zimmermann has argued cogently that the play should be seen as a meditation on the fact that material prosperity does not necessarily result in happiness; alienation is always with us, and Hein expects members of his audiences to apply the questions raised in the play to themselves now. The readiness of West Germans to ignore the contemporary relevance of Hein's concern with idealism and personal moral choices speaks volumes about the reactionary political climate of unified Germany in the early 1990s. The notion that the end of the Cold War somehow meant the end of ideological struggle merely reflects the Western point of view: ideology no longer exists, because what we do isn't ideology, it's just the plain, practical truth, like, for example, the practical need to seal our borders against the immigration of poor people.⁷

Hein's first post-Wende work was a collection of Wende-era speeches and essays, Als Kind habe ich Stalin gesehen (another and partly overlapping collection, Die Mauern von Jerichow, followed in 1996). Meanwhile, readers and critics waited expectantly to see what his post-GDR fiction and plays would look like. To many, the first indications were a bitter disappointment. It had been imagined that Hein would dust off all his formerly unpublishable manuscripts and treat the reading public to some serious postmortem muckraking about the evils of the GDR. However, as one eastern German weekly noted, “Hein settled his accounts with the GDR during its lifetime” (Kopka). True to form, Hein's new efforts concerned the West and the present-day East. And these treatments of new material proved as annoying to the establishment critics of the West as the earlier works had to the establishment critics of the East, even eliciting similar charges: that Hein doesn't really know what he is talking about when he describes the West so unflatteringly; that he is dreaming up wayward fantasies; that his characters are unrealistic, implausible, atypical.⁸ Where Hein once risked being accused of anti-socialist provocation when he depicted alienated, unhappy citizens of the GDR, he now risked being accused of anti-Western stereotyping for depicting successful western Germans as arrogant, greedy, and ruthless.

The first piece of fiction Hein wrote after the Wende originally bore an English title, “Bridge Freezes before Roadway” (1990), a phrase Hein doubtless noted during his visit to Kentucky in 1987. Amid political change such as the GDR was experiencing, it is tempting to read the title as a metaphor of a hazardous transition between the neo-Stalinist past and an uncertain future. The content of the story, however, makes it difficult to apply such a convenient political interpretation. In the story, a young female academic interviews a middle-aged former economist about his memories of a recently deceased mutual colleague. The men had been friends and rivals during their student days, and ultimately we learn that Rieder, the subject of the interview, had authored an anonymous letter of denunciation against his friend in order to secure for himself the post of institute director. This piece of workaday GDR office politics backfired, with the rival getting the institute job and pursuing a brilliant career, and Rieder leaving academia. After emigrating to the West, Rieder becomes a successful businessman, and a thoroughly unpleasant person: bitter, vulgar, self-important, misogynistic, manipulative, and unscrupulous in evading his interviewer's questions while he tries to seduce her. The story ends with the tables turned: Rieder learns from the interviewer that his and his rival's shared mentor had privately determined that Rieder should be rejected for the institute job because of unspecified weaknesses in his character. Rieder is left trying vainly to convince the woman (and himself) that his luxurious lifestyle is sufficient recompense for his ruined scholarly career and distorted personal relationships.

Rieder is like a number of earlier Hein characters who struggled to deny or justify a failed life by pointing to their successful adjustment to society or their material comfort. He lives in splendid near-isolation, cut off from his past, from friends and family, and from society—a condition that Hein regards as pathological and even dangerous. He is also the first of a series of evil-capitalist-caricatures that would dominate each of Hein's next two post-Wende works, the novel Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993) and the play Randow (1994). The conjunction in “Bridge Freezes before Roadway” between old and new emphases may illuminate the meaning of the seeming caricatures in subsequent works. The socially isolated characters of Hein's GDR-era writing translate easily into criminal freebooters in a West dedicated to the maximization of profit. As the title of the story suggests, all transitions are hazardous, and therefore the transition from socialism to capitalism can be expected to produce monsters. Rieder's own life serves as a bleak emblem of the Wende: the most corrupt and antisocial socialists have the best qualifications for success in the West, where greed and self-interest have the status of civic virtues. The capitalist takeover of the East will make good use both of those who emigrated and of the weak who stayed behind.

Hein's 1993 novel Das Napoleon-Spiel presents an even more scandalous picture of capitalism and one of its indigenous characters—this time a genuine monster.⁹ Hein's protagonist, Manfred Wörle, also was initially an East German, his family having settled in Thuringia as refugees after the war, but Wörle eventually moves to West Berlin in order to study law. He builds a successful practice and later becomes a legal advisor to the West Berlin city government. Though Wörle is intensely involved in civic affairs, he always functions at a psychological remove from other people, who never suspect that the devoted public servant is actually a self-consciously nihilistic adventurer. Wörle describes himself as a “player” or gambler. Oppressed by the meaninglessness of his life, an emptiness that cannot be filled by women, money, or success, Wörle finds satisfaction only in the excitement of “games.” Wörle's games start small but become more elaborate. He is a small-time black marketeer in the GDR, he experiments with the gamesmanship inherent in trial law, and he advances to the playing field of politics. Finally, he decides to kill a man for sport. Wörle is evidently mad: he fancies himself a modern-day Napoleon, playing dispassionately with peoples' lives, hence the murder he plans is to be deliberately random, its victim analogous to an impersonal casualty of war. The narrative itself is Wörle's explanation of his actions to his lawyer while he awaits trial. As in Hein's earlier first-person narratives, much of the narrator's energy is devoted to specious rationalization of his outlook and behavior; one valid criticism of the book may be that the reasoning is less seductive here than in some of the other examples, so that Wörle strikes one merely as a monster, not as an object of ambivalent sympathy like Claudia or Kruschkatz.

Hein himself objects to any such dismissal of Wörle, returning to the notion of chronicling (that is, of objective, dispassionate description sine ira et studio) to argue that Wörle is due something more complex than simple moralizing:

When I have a choice between precise chronicling and moralizing, I will always choose precision. Even when there may be immorality involved. There is great value in being asocial. The readers can moralize if they wish. I present the matter, and I entrust any judgments to the reader. Including the judgment of this character [Wörle]. I just find it boring to invent a character simply to condemn him. It seems stupid.

(Hein, “Kennen”)

Hein puts himself in the same category with Wörle when he equates chronicling with being “asocial,” rather as a wartime photojournalist is asocial when he stands and photographs a dying person rather than helping him. Such immorality is not without its uses, he points out. The detached chronicler Hein sympathizes, then, with Wörle's detachment (as with Claudia's, etc.), and as this quotation further suggests, he even sympathizes with Wörle's fear of boredom, and the “games” he plays as ways of fending it off. Being a moralist is “boring” to Hein; having a moral, conventional life is “boring” to Wörle. As always, though, the claim of moral indifference is slightly disingenuous. An essential difference between Hein and Wörle is surely that Hein has a social and moral conscience lurking behind his actions and his work, whereas Wörle is totally empty. But more importantly, Hein refuses to exempt himself from whatever pathology plagues Wörle and, by extension, Germany as a whole:

The man acts out of boredom. This is increasingly a problem in these wealthy societies and can only be explained by looking at the deformed state of civilization. The more basic needs are met, the more boredom. I am not interested in the moral aspect, but in how he got into this, and what interests him about it. How can it come to this. For a person out of the lower orders, as they say, this wouldn't have been a problem.

(Hein, “Kennen”)

Accordingly, the novel culminates in a brilliant scene where Wörle's individual act abruptly takes on socio-political significance. Wörle commits his murder while on a West Berlin subway train passing through one of the “ghost stations” lying below the streets of East Berlin. These stations were sealed at the time the Berlin Wall was built, in August 1961, and their ground-level entrances sprouted again through the pavement of East Berlin only after the Wende. The setting is particularly arresting for any of the millions of passengers who experienced that same train ride past those empty platforms: it was the experience of being in two worlds at once, but also in neither. The rationally planned irreality of this twilight no-man's land that thousands briefly inhabited every day is a more telling symbol of Germany than the more obvious Berlin Wall: what better place for an act of mad arrogance? It is tempting, furthermore, to interpret this scene as an allegory of the fascist past underlying both Germanies, the site of atrocities that have been pushed out of the consciousness of the divided, speciously rational daylight world.

Hein's use of Wörle as an exemplar of Western values and ugly German history was clearly meant as a provocation to a western German public burdened with invincible confidence in its economic and cultural superiority. It provoked howls of displeasure from critics who dismissed Wörle as an aberrant figure who, though possible, was in no way representative of Western society.¹⁰ (The argument perfectly mirrors complaints by advocates of Socialist Realism that Hein's unhappy East Germans were atypical of the New Socialist Man.)¹¹ A minor perversity introduced at the end of the novel—after the Wende, Wörle hires his abused, disinherited, and professionally failed brother, who had stayed in the East, as an all-purpose goon—points to the next step in Hein's critique of Western Man: the post-Wende, colonialist phase. Having established the nature of the West, he sets about describing its conquest of the East. McKnight suspects an allegorical aspect to the novel (Understanding Christoph Hein 114), which would make it something of a departure from Hein's earlier work, and sees a connection between the book and the political activities in which Hein was involved during its writing, particularly the investigation of police attacks on peaceful demonstrators in October 1989:

In such a context, the novel is a commentary on unscrupulous and arrogant behavior by men in power, presented as symptomatic of the time in which we live. Hein had always written about victims in the past and had usually done so with humor. This time, he turned his attention to a perpetrator, and his portrayal is totally devoid of humor.¹²

(133)

Hein's first play written and produced after the Wende, a dramatization of a shady East German property transaction entitled Randow, also provoked loud charges of stereotyping, anti-Western bias, and crude tendentiousness. Eastern reviews were sympathetic to the play if sometimes critical of the production, while Western reviews were flatly hostile on both counts. The play juxtaposes two initially unrelated settings: first, the Randow Valley border region with Poland, where the local authorities are pressuring an artist, Anna Andress, to sell her choice piece of land, and where two illegally entering asylum-seekers turn up murdered; and second, Cologne and Berlin, where we see a lawyer, Fred P. Paul, guiding his right-hand-man in the East (Peter Stadel, a former Stasi officer) in the acquisition of potentially lucrative Eastern property. After an inconsequential attempt by a Western-born officer of the Federal Border Patrol to acquire Andress's property for himself, as well as other forms of harassment against her, such as the poisoning of her dog, Andress sells out, and the plot culminates, predictably enough, in the takeover of the Randow property by Paul and his shadowy backers, who have promised to use the land to create new jobs.

The critical response to the play was mixed. Some reviewers dismissed it as simplistic stereotyping and saw it as proof of the ongoing decay of talent from the former GDR. The tageszeitung described the play as preachy and boring, declaring it “not a comedy, but a blunder” (Walther), while Die Zeit panned it as a Dallas-style soap opera suffering from bad dialog and built around commonplaces such as “When two fight, the third wins” and “It's a thankless world” (Engler). The Tagesspiegel summed up the matter revealingly:

The catastrophe of this play, an attempt to come to grips with hard reality that ends up merely serving the Eastern Anti-Wessi-Complex, has its parallels in the aesthetic debacle signified by the end of the GDR: namely, the disappearance of the drive toward innovative devices of encryption, an ugly and beautiful system of signs that existed between the author and public. All that remains now is an excessive obviousness that serves as compensation. As in this play: the Ossis are wounded seekers, dubious victims even when perpetrators as well. They are represented by the exploded and dispersed family that ultimately is robbed of its house, or by pawns of the West like Voβ [the Bürgermeister] or Stasi-Stadel. The Wessis themselves are either greedy scoundrels or barely-disguised Nazis—ideally, both at once.

(Schulz-Ojala)

The most striking feature of this particular critique is its longing for the Cold War game of interpretive hide-and-go-seek, an old favorite of Western critics which, by the way, Hein has repeatedly denounced. (Whatever one thinks about Hein's politics or art, nobody can accuse him of being nostalgic for the Cold War and it cultural arrangements!) The best rejoinder to this late echo of the Literaturstreit appeared in the Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt, which characterized Randow as an irritating and uncomfortable play, but interpreted this merely as being Hein's procedure: refusing to approve the status quo, describing it dispassionately as a chronicler, and offering no solutions. The play represents a new phase in Hein's work only insofar as the end of the Cold War facilitates more nuanced reading than was formerly possible:

This would be a good time to reconsider Christoph Hein's complex fictions, particularly his theatrical work, since Hein as a writer was never a mere GDR-phenomenon. They reveal surprising insights and new connections, precisely because they always used to be read one-dimensionally in light of circumstances in the GDR. The alienation effects have in fact sharpened.¹³

(Klunker)

The complaints about stereotyping are, again, new versions of the earlier, GDR-era complaint that Hein peopled his works with unrepresentative (hence meaningless, insignificant) figures. After all, if one admits that monsters like Das Napoleon-Spiel's Wörle are possible, it is hard to maintain that the characters in Randow are either impossible or particularly unusual. The two stock GDR figures, Bürgermeister Voβ and Andress's estranged husband Rudi Krappmann, are scarcely implausible, the one being a small time politician with a talent for bending before every political wind, the other a drunken ne'er-do-well baffled by the post- (as by the pre-) Wende world. The Western villain, Paul, likes to minimize German historical guilt, uses the word “patriotism” as though it meant Führerprinzip, and denies that anything as mundane as love of money motivates his Eastern undertakings—again, none of these characteristics is very remarkable. And even if we grant that Paul is one-dimensional, a definite bad guy, how much do we really care about his inner life? Externally he is a cynical, pompous opportunist, and for the Eastern citizens touched by his financial machinations, the external is what matters. Hein is perfectly capable of rounding-out characters like Paul or Voβ, as his earlier works prove, but here he has decided not to. In an interview, when asked about the harshness of the play and its lack of hope, he replied:

That obviously means a gain in realism, then. Hope has something to do with utopia, of course, and when that's all over, lost, irrecoverable, then we draw closer to a hopeless, utopia-free reality. Which is also an advantage, a genuine advance. I think that the play corresponds to the present situation—as I see it.

(“Mit etwas Rückgrat”)

Hein's claim of increased realism might well be taken with a grain of salt, for it can be argued that the apparent realism of his prose was never realistic at all. “Realism” is founded on an assumption that reality is directly accessible through surface detail, and that this detail is ultimately the only truth. Hein, on the other hand, provides a painstaking depiction of reality in order to show that the truth is hidden, elsewhere, obscured by ideological illusion and the universal desire to forget unpleasant memories, either in individuals or by whole societies. The GDR, for example, could not be depicted realistically, because it never “really” existed: it was an ideological construct through and through, and its truth was not to be found in surface details. Hein's prose attempted to capture and reveal the ideological fantasies inscribed in those surface manifestations. And as it turns out, this method can also be fruitfully applied to less obviously ideological societies. If all social experience is mediated by ideology, the realistic depiction of a western German character is no less ideologically interesting than that of an eastern one.

Reactions to Das Napoleon-Spiel and Randow suggest that Hein's writerly project has collided with the Western project of erasing all things Eastern, a process that often resembles the consolidation of a colonial hegemony. Events in Germany are showing how culture enables, enacts, and reflects the structures or mechanisms of power at a moment of revolutionary change. As the process of colonization proceeds, ideology must deflect real though arbitrary differences of power by allegorizing and rationalizing them in a manner that favors stable colonial rule. Through the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Eastern dissident or quasi-dissident intellectuals were understood in the West as members of a common humanity, or at least a common Germanness, which was embodied in Western democracy and suppressed by Soviet Communism. The Western political and economic triumph following 1989 necessitated a redistribution of symbolic categories: the difference which had been denied during the Cold War (when all differences were subsumed by the controlling one of Democracy vs. Communism, with Germany as a special and tragic case) suddenly became useful, once reified as a stereotype, as a tool for exploitation. Just when one could have reasonably expected the East-West difference to become irrelevant, it was in fact rediscovered and exaggerated for new political profit. The East quickly and bizarrely became a site of absolute difference (figured, indeed, in all the ways that the West has traditionally figured the East, whether the Muslim world, or the Far East, or even Russia—as passive, effeminate, sentimental, irresponsible, irrational, feckless, evil.) In this figural world, the failed culture of the East had to be completely discredited and annihilated from memory, clearing space for the superior, successful culture of the West that had so long battled the decadent Russian influence on its eastern flank, and effecting a symbolic implementation of simultaneous economic and political shifts. At the same time that Christa Wolf was being portrayed as a Communist stooge and a literary hack, East German agricultural production was left rotting in the fields and East German industrial capacity was being liquidated by the Treuhandanstalt (the federal agency commissioned to privatize publicly-owned East German property), making room in both cases for the expansion of Western production into the new Eastern market.

AFTER THE FALL: HEIN'S RECENT SHORT FICTION

Hein's Wende-stamped writing (notably Das Napoleon-Spiel and Randow) has been succeeded by fiction that appears to seek a new equilibrium after the tumultuous events immediately following the collapse of the East Bloc and the sharp literary response to them. If Hein can be accused (perhaps with some justice) of vilifying the West mit Haβ und Eifer through the creation of characters like Manfred Wörle or Fred P. Paul, the same cannot be said of the most recent books, Exekution eines Kalbes (1994) and Von allem Anfang an (1997), which take stock of Hein's pre-existing repertoire of chronicling techniques, and begin to apply them to the cultural scene of post-Cold War Germany. Beyond this, Hein has begun experimenting with surrealist allegory in his short fiction, while returning even more recently to the autobiographical material that informed the picture of 1950s GDR life in Horns Ende. This simultaneous exploration of past material and future forms has met with considerably more positive critical response than the more obviously topical work from the early nineties, solidifying Hein's reputation as the dominant literary voice of Germany's new federal states.

Hein's collection of short fiction Exekution eines Kalbes provides an interesting comparison to his earlier short-story volume, Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois. The collection is composed of stories written between 1977 and 1990, arranged in roughly chronological order, and thus providing an extraordinary literary-historical document across two decades of turbulent political change. The early stories look, indeed, as if they could have appeared in Einladung, while the later ones explore new possibilities opened by the collapse of the GDR and its system of censorship. The unusual diversity of the pieces set a difficult task for reviewers struggling to find a contemporary cultural framework in which to place (or entomb?) such a historically tortured book.

After the extreme annoyance provoked by Das Napoleon-Spiel a year earlier, Exekution appeared to slightly warmer reviews, a fact which can profitably be viewed in light of Hein's dictum that criticism is primarily self-disclosure. What the West German critics hated (insolent criticisms of the West by an Easterner) was less in evidence, and what they loved (confirmations of the miserable state of GDR society) was again a major theme. Yet despite a consensus that the stories were technically masterful, for most reviewers the book was either too political or not political enough, with little agreement as to specifics. What unfolded was a series of attempts to map Hein across some available historical/political grid, and when this failed, to blame the author. The Süddeutsche Zeitung tried to fit Hein within a literary version of convergence theory (the view that the two Germanies had become less different through time) by characterizing Hein as a Protestant counterpart to the Catholic West German novelist Heinrich Böll, both of them “old-fashioned social critics” (Krumbholz). Betraying an extreme insistence on the difference of the GDR and the interpretive centrality of the Wende, Der Spiegel complained that the dating of the stories was too coyly imprecise, “As if today, in 1994, it were already a matter of complete indifference whether an East Berlin writer wrote down his stories in 1977 or 1991” (“Ein Leben”). The Neue Zürcher Zeitung argued the opposite view, that the before-and-after question is no longer of much interest, the East German milieu of the stories is a mildly exotic but non-essential background, and that literature of “artistic quality” displayed classical technical virtues free from place and time (von Matt). This view led to special praise for the collection's most surreal stories, “Ein älterer Herr, federleicht” and “Moses Tod,” yet these same stories came in for sharp criticism from the Frankfurter Rundschau as excessively symbolic, even though the reviewer also plays down the importance of the stories' East Germanness or lack of it (Hüfner). The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dismisses Hein as an unoriginal imitator of Boccaccio, Kleist, Hebel, and Brecht, whose only real stylistic innovation is boredom; moreover, the reason that Hein is so boring and humorless is that he learned to write in an “unfree situation” (Seibt). Die Zeit renders a similar verdict, calling the stories “lifeless,” and complaining that Hein is too much the (again) Protestant moralist. The reviewer sums up with this muddled assessment:

He tells too little of politics and history to make us interested in lingering there, and too little of the abjectness of his heroes to make us care about them. One cannot help suspecting that we are dealing with an author who is more interested in the existential state of depression than the depravity of politics. … He should give it a rest. … He should worry less about his convictions and more about aesthetics.

(Isenschmid)

The one clear conclusion to draw from all this is that the critics know not what they want. In the uncertain post-Cold War cultural landscape, first there was reaction (the Kritikerstreit), and later, as that venom faded in strength, puzzlement as to what happens next. Someone who writes like Hein is an embarrassment: he carries over too much from the GDR to be politically trustworthy, and too much from the nineteenth century to be aesthetically trustworthy. The critics seem unable to find the point of most of the stories—what, then, should a point look like? Baffled by a loss of old ideological and literary categories, conservative critics in particular demand an aesthetically pure, apolitical literature (as if such a thing were possible or desirable), while continuing to read Eastern authors exclusively as political allegorists, and blaming them for it.

The stories of Exekution fall into several categories. The title story is a lengthy Novelle and perhaps the GDR's last piece of production-prose. There is also a Hebel-like stylistic set-piece titled “Ein sächsischer Tartuffe,” which seems akin to the stylistic experiment of “Der neuere (glücklichere) Kohlhaas”; a set of ten brief stories that could be justly described as additions to the album of “Berliner Stadtansichten”; “Die Krücke,” a monologue by a mentally deficient boy, somewhat reminiscent of Marlene Gohl's passages in Horns Ende; one Wende-piece, the previously-published story “Auf den Brücken friert es zuerst” (“Bridge Freezes before Roadway”), discussed above; and two stories unlike anything in Hein's oeuvre to date: “Moses Tod,” a satiric allegory about the promised land of communism, and the concluding piece, “Ein älterer Herr, federleicht,” a surreal fantasy set in gritty East Berlin.

The title story, its composition presumably dating to 1977, takes up once more the Schlötel syndrome, in which the ambition and talent of an individual worker (this time a cattle producer in an LPG, a Soviet-style cooperative farm) leads to his ruin. Other issues familiar from Hein's writing in the seventies and eighties include jail, emigration/exile, damaged family relations, and the poisonous bureaucratism of the East German system. The story is set up as a Novelle, with its “unerhörtes Ereignis” (the bizarre public “execution” of a calf) announced after an opening in medias res, in which the protagonist, Gotthold Sawetzki, is expelled into West Germany. The Novelle describes Sawetzki's struggle to raise LPG cattle amid unrealistic production requirements from the Party bureaucracy, incompetent management, and catastrophic reductions in fodder allotments. His heroic efforts to perform his job increasingly tax his family life, which collapses in adultery and divorce. When his protests and complaints to the administration of the LPG fail to achieve any effect, he slaughters, then buries, a healthy calf in front of the cooperative office to dramatize the mismanagement of the cattle operation. Hein encourages a reading of Sawetzki's protest that recalls animal sacrifice in the ancient sense. The whole affair is surrounded with suggestions of the supernatural, beginning with the rather unprovoked descriptions of Sawetzki's act as “widernatürlich” [unnatural: (Exekution eines Kalbes, hereafter cited as EEK) 12] and “verwunderlich” [astonishing, odd: 65], very much in the Kleistian manner. Similarly, the commentary of the local shopkeeper, who is reputed to be a witch, adds to the mystical atmosphere by whipping up superstitious dread. Hence in a story centering on cattle and shortages, even the simplest material truths are hidden in a fog of mystery that cloaks the incompetence and self-interest of the management, and their accomplices among the workers and the community. The dilemma formulated in Schlötel (How does one live realistically without becoming a collaborator in corruption? How does the virtuous man act within an evil system?) receives the usual official answer, the voice of cynical common sense that recommends conformity. The prison official who informs Sawetzki he is to be expelled from the GDR tells him that “er hoffe, Sawetzki werde es in Zukunft besser verstehen, sein Leben nach den Gegebenheiten einzurichten” [he hoped that in the future Sawetzki would better understand how to arrange his life according to the prevailing circumstances: 11]—good advice East or West, though certainly open to divergent interpretations.

The brief stories that follow are prefaced by “Ein sächsischer Tartuffe” [“A Saxon Tartuffe”], an odd, ribald, mock-moralistic, Hebel-like sketch combining several narrative registers, obviously ironically, that range from fairytale formulations to patriotic jargon: the story centers on “ein böses Weib” [a wicked woman/wife: 75–76] and takes place in “unseres beliebten Vaterland” [our beloved fatherland: 73], and so on. Ten of the next twelve pieces are recognizably of the same class as the “Berliner Stadtansichten,” although Hein doesn't label them as such. Like their counterparts in Einladung, they turn on various large and small ironies of life in the East and West, in war and peace, and under changing legal and political circumstances. These stories may be summarized as follows.

“Der eine hauet Silber, der andere rotes Gold” [“One Man Works Silver, Another Works Red Gold”] juxtaposes the shabby cover-up mentality of many postwar Germans with the moral clarity possessed by the victims of the Nazi atrocities. A roomful of jewels and precious metals smeared with blood and hair is found in the cellar of the Finance Ministry. The officials responsible for dealing with it decide to quietly nationalize it instead of seeking the heirs of the murdered owners. Later, a German-born American identifies his family's property in a jeweler's window. When the jeweler claims to have a respectable pedigree for the items, the man declares, “Es sind nicht nur Mörder … es sind auch Räuber und Lügner” [They aren't just murderers … they are thieves and liars as well: 83]. With its frank assertion of East German complicity in Nazi crimes, the story would obviously have been unpublishable in the GDR.

“Der Name” [“The Name”] is a semi-amusing story about the craziness of the Nazi regulations concerning Jews. An old, half-senile woman refuses an official's order that she accept (like all the other Jewish women) the new middle name “Sara.” Meeting official irrationality with her own, she insists that if she is to have a new name, it will be Miriam, a name she has always liked. Later, after informing an uncomprehending and then furious police officer that her papers have the wrong name on them, she dies contentedly the very same night.

In “Der Krüppel” [“The Cripple”], a return-from-Soviet-imprisonment story, a man missing an arm comes home from Siberia in 1952, and finds that his family doesn't need or want him. After three months they throw him out.¹⁴

“Zur Frage der Gesetze” [“A Question of Law”] portrays a virtuous abortion doctor. First in Weimar Germany, then under the Nazis, and finally in the GDR, he performs illegal abortions as a public service and political protest, free of charge. In each instance he is eventually caught and punished, the final time because of his refusal to perform what he regards as an “unnecessary” abortion, which leads to him being denounced and to the revocation of his license. He dies working as a doorman, having refused to clear his name even after the GDR legalized abortion in 1972. His motives are unclear, but the suggestion from his left-wing/independent political background seems to be that in a society too favorable to abortion, he again feels obliged to resist. He remains his own man, choosing the GDR regime to live in, but keeping it at arm's length from his own political center of belief.

“Jelängerjelieber Vergiβnichtmein” [“The Longer, The Better, Forget-Me-Not”], a love story ending in old age and self-denial, takes up the familiar topic of loveless marriage and extra-marital affairs.

“Unverhofftes Wiedersehen” [“Unhoped for Reunion”] narrates the tale of a man who re-encounters his Eastern nemesis in the West, after both have fled the GDR. The old enemy has not changed, however, and again tries (though unsuccessfully) to block the man's career. Thus the story depicts an ideological fanatic who is ultimately indistinguishable from a simple opportunist, always adopting the necessary beliefs and always landing on his feet—on the side of authority.

“Matzeln” [“Wood Scraps”] is another Hebel-like, tongue-in-cheek anecdote. An inexperienced gatekeeper at a coal mine halts a miner's departure with a sack of wood scraps, accusing him of “fortgesetzten und widerrechtlichen Aneignung von Volkseigentum” [long-term illegal appropriation of the people's property: 129], even though private use of the scraps is common practice. Hein is satirizing the Prussian love of rules and the letter of the law, as opposed to such qualities as mercy or human sympathy; there probably also is a comment on the cumulative effect of the quiet accommodations that made socialism function. At the conclusion, the Matzeln are symbolically equated with sins—let's all hope there isn't a Prussian Advokat who will total up our accumulated venalities.

“Die Vergewaltigung” [“The Rape”] has the earmarks of a “Berliner Stadtansicht,” but with an unusual passage that gives a synopsis of East German history during the Aufbau and fifties almost in the manner of a fairy tale, as in this summation about the rebuilding of central Berlin:

So entstanden die [Karl-Marx-] Allee und die Stadt neu aus Trümmern, und das Leben ging seinen Gang in dieser schönen und grimmigen Welt, und die Zeitungen des Landes berichteten von der schönen Welt und schwiegen über die grimmige.

(135)

And so the [Karl-Marx-]Allee and the rest of the city rose out of the ruins, and life went on in this beautiful and savage world, and the newspapers of the land reported the beauty and said nothing of the savagery.

This, along with such passages as the one explaining historical details like the Arbeiter und Bauern Fakultäten of the Aufbau-period (the Worker and Peasant Faculties established to bring class diversity into higher education—a sort of socialist G.I. Bill) imply an expected audience broader than just East Germany. Hein's role as chronicler, strongly visible in the story, assumes in retrospect an almost elegiac character, as the peculiarities of the GDR are summed up for posterity. This historical background prepares for the main theme of the incompatibility between socialist propaganda (e.g., the lionizing of the Soviet “liberation” troops) and the fact of Soviet wartime atrocities. The contradiction occurs here in the rape of a woman's grandmother by Soviet soldiers in 1945, an event the woman seemingly forgets as she pursues a successful career, benefiting from the most admirably progressive policies of the socialist system. In 1983, the woman gives a speech at a Jugendweihe (the secular equivalent of a church confirmation) portraying the Soviet occupiers as kind benefactors and generally piling on the official East German clichés concerning relations with the Soviet Union. Her husband criticizes her afterward for having told one side of the truth and not the other, whereupon she breaks down and screams that he is a fascist. The official ideology that requires such a radical compartmentalization in the woman's mind (as in the whole society) has left her with no other category than “fascist” to accommodate unpleasant or contradictory facts. As a portrait of the intellectual trauma suffered by a whole generation of East Germans, the story is unsurpassed in Hein's writing.

“Ein Exil” [“Exile”] looks at the plight of an expatriated Paraguayan artist who finds that his politically-engaged work has gone out of style. He feels cut off from history, as from his homeland, a silent victim of his country's regime. Recognizing that neither his art nor his engagement has meaning anymore, he hangs himself.

In “Eine Frage der Macht” [“A Question of Power”] a regime-oriented hack writer throws his weight around and gets some drunken detractors hassled by the police. A visiting foreign colleague remarks that one doesn't do such things, and the writer replies that here (in the GDR), “we” have the power, and “we” intend to hold onto it. This “we” is worth reflecting on. Does the writer deceive himself, or is he in fact part of the despotic regime? In any event, the point seems to be to show an outsider's view of the despotism and ideological arrogance of “intellectual workers” in the GDR.

The remaining stories, “Die Krücke” [“The Retard”], “Moses Tod” [“Moses' Death”], “Auf den Brücken friert es zuerst” (discussed above), and “Ein älterer Herr, federleicht” [“An Old Man, Light as a Feather”] depart from the familiar ground of the “Berliner Stadtansichten”-like sketches. In “Die Krücke,” a feeble-minded boy plots the murder of his teacher, who also is his mother's lover and ostensibly the impoverished family's benefactor. He is actually a physically and morally repellent extortionist who takes advantage of the mother's financial vulnerability and threatens the boy, whom she loves, with institutionalization. Like the unreliable narrators in Horns Ende, Der fremde Freund, and Das Napoleon-Spiel, the boy is not altogether wrong in his judgments about the world, and one is both horrified by the boy's crude (but not inaccurate) assessment of power relations, and somewhat gratified to anticipate his murder of the evil old man.

“Moses Tod,” a satiric parable about socialist utopia, resembles nothing else Hein has published. As in the Biblical story, spies are sent to inspect the Promised Land, and the Israelites are afraid to enter it. In Hein's version, however, it is not the giants and other hostile inhabitants that inspire fear, but the report that the Promised Land has no heaven over it. Caleb, the only spy who remains faithful to the Lord, explains that this is not a problem: “Kaleb verspottete die Ängstlichen und sagte ihnen, daβ im guten Land der Himmel auf Erden sei. Und Jahwe fand Gefallen an ihm” [Caleb mocked the fearful ones and said, in the Promised Land, Heaven is on Earth. And Caleb found favor with the Lord: 122]. The doubters (including Moses) are mercilessly punished (Moses is left unburied, to be eaten by animals), and after the whole generation (save Caleb) has died out, the Israelites happily occupy their promised homeland, unconcerned that “sich kein Himmel über ihrem Land wölbt. Denn keiner vermiβt ihn, wo der Himmel auf Erden ist” [that no Heaven stretched above them. For no one misses it, where Heaven is on Earth: 123]. One reading of this might be that Socialist idealism (with heaven over the earth—the normal situation, one would think) is traded (unwisely) for Realsozialismus (heaven on earth, lost transcendence). Is fun being made of utopia or the fear of utopia? Or both? In the end, the Israelites get their heaven-on-earth—what does this mean? The parable also foregrounds the figure of the chronicler once more: we learn of this heterodox account only by way of certain lost, forgotten writings of a discredited chronicler. They were publicly burned after the establishment of the Israelite state, which has, like all states, no love for revisionist accounts of its origins.

The last story in the collection, “Ein älterer Herr, federleicht,” is even more peculiar and much more difficult to classify, though Kafka comes to mind as a model. Squatters breaking into a run-down Berlin apartment building discover an old man living there; one of them, a young woman, returns later and begins taking care of the man, who calls himself Noah and claims to be 940 years old. She eventually finds him dead, and moves into the apartment herself. At the end of the story, a social worker comes to the apartment and has a conversation through the door with someone who appears to be the old man, and on the way out passes the women, who is just coming home. This surreal conclusion adds to the strangeness of Noah's stories about his past and his equally strange chronology (why is he aged 940, similar to Methuselah, and not 3000-plus?) to yield an unsettling but pleasant ambiguity. The concrete setting of the story and the stretch of history it purports to reveal might cause one to seek a historical or political interpretation, reading the story as an allegory, but Hein provides no secure interpretive foothold for such a procedure. The story appears to be rather an anti-history, a fulfillment of Spodeck's advice to distrust one's memories.

THE DETACHMENT OF THE CHRONICLER IN VON ALLEM ANFANG AN

In his most recent book, Von allem Anfang an [Right from the Start, 1997], Hein stunned the critics with his stylistic polish, his warmth, and his apparent renunciation of contemporary political commentary. The book describes the life of a 13-year-old boy living in the GDR in 1956, recounting his home life as a minister's son in a large family, his parents' marital discord and reconciliation, his school experiences, his vacation visits to the LPG managed by his grandfather (who is later sacked for refusing to join the Party), his sexual awakening, his dreams of escaping the small town where he lives (by running away with the circus, no less), and his first visit to West Berlin, where he is destined to attend high school in a few years. Much that occurs in the book will be familiar to Hein's longtime readers: the narrator Daniel resembles Thomas of Horns Ende, and the town where he lives is indistinguishable from Bad Guldenberg. Further, the parallels between Daniel's life and Hein's are overwhelming and precise, lending credibility to the assumption that with its first-person narration, the book is in fact a thinly-disguised autobiography. Hein, however, has rejected any such literal equation of himself with Daniel, asserting instead that the work is a “fictive autobiography,” a work of fiction employing the genre of autobiography (Krusche; also personal interview, 18 July 1998). The ambiguity of the author's relation to the protagonist here is reminiscent of the subtle stance taken by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which uses extensive parallels to Joyce's own life in the construction of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus. In both books, the reader must be unusually cautious when ascribing authorial intent; despite the intimacy of the portrayal, an abyss of irony yawns beneath the central character, with the narration shuttling erratically between contemporaneous immediacy and implied post facto judgments by an adult Daniel. And like Joyce's Portrait, Von allem Anfang an attempts to capture the formative experiences that lead the protagonist to become the writer he is. In Hein's case, this means discovering the detached, dispassionate chronicler's stance, which evolves as a means of mastering the vicissitudes of adolescent life. When viewed thus as an account of the author's emerging aesthetic and moral position—emerging moreover from a specific historical context—Von allem Anfang an evinces as much political heft as any of the earlier books.¹⁵

Initial critical reaction focused on the fact that the political per se is conspicuously downplayed in this book, which foregrounds instead the universal discoveries and experiences of an adolescent boy who could be living anywhere. For most of the reviewers, this was a welcome escape from topicality into the purely aesthetic. “This book deliberately escapes every politically-oriented reading, for instance as an autobiographical reminiscence of the early GDR, in which Hein grew up. ‘Right from the start,’ historical thinking is an illusion” (Langner). Strong words about the author of Horns Ende!¹⁶ Baier, writing for die tageszeitung, contends that the important thing about Daniel is that he is a youth, not that he is a youth in the GDR, and further argues that the book is not so much about the GDR as about the disappearance of an “agrarian petty-bourgeois way of life” (Baier, “Nackte Brüste”). Peter von Matt's especially glowing review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praises Hein for his “Gerechtigkeit” [fairness] in dealing with his characters, congratulates him for having thrown away his “pocket guillotine” (presumably employed on Westerners in a book like Das Napoleon-Spiel), and describes at length the advent of a new style that transforms banalities into art. The most straightforwardly political readings, not bothering to hide behind notions of transcendently apolitical art, simply praise Hein for showing, once again, how bad the GDR really was (“Leuchtschrift am Kudamm”; Raddatz). Largely missing from these readings is an awareness of Hein's rigor in representing the political through the personal, with the personal thus becoming a key to the society at large. The infrequent intrusions of politics into the events of the book (such as the Grandfather's trouble with the Party, or Daniel's trip to West Berlin) do not exhaust the political implications of the book. These, rather, are best sought in the motif of detached observation that unifies the seemingly random selection of scenes from Daniel's life.

Applying his narrative method of chronicling without passion or prejudice to Daniel, Hein perfectly captures the naive crassness of childhood that his narrator often embodies. Here is Daniel describing the fashion shows that occasionally relieve the boredom in his small town:

Die Modevorführungen waren langweilig, aber ich ging dennoch jedesmal hin, weil es etwas Besonderes war und weil Mutter mitkam und den Eintritt spendierte. In der Schule hatte einer erzählt, dass es in Leipzig Modenschauen gebe, wo Damenunterwäsche vorgeführt werde. Die Frauen marschieren über die Bühne mit fast nichts an und wenn man einen guten Feldstecher dabei habe, könne man alles sehen.

([Von allem Anfang an, hereafter cited as VAAA] 39)

[The fashion shows were boring, but I always went because they were something different and because mother came along and paid the admission. At school someone had reported that there were fashion shows in Leipzig for ladies' underwear. The women would march across the stage with almost nothing on, and with a good pair of binoculars you could see everything.]

The objective presentation of Daniel's 13-year-old sensibility amuses without provoking any sort of judgment; this is simply how a child thinks and talks, even if the child is an alter ego for the author. Similarly, Hein's dialogues often approach the high comic standard set by plays like Ah Q, while managing to remain entirely convincing as documents of childhood. One of the best examples of this successful blending of the documentary function of fiction with the humor seen in his plays is the conversation following Daniel's ejection from a lecture/demonstration on liquid air. His companion Bernd blames the lecturer and enlightens Daniel as to the man's sexuality:

“Und alles wegen dieser schwulen Sau,” sagte er. …

“Wieso schwule Sau?”

“Hast du das nicht gemerkt? Der ist doch stockschwul, der Kerl.”

“Dieser Doktor?”

“Natürlich. Das ist eine Tunte.”

“Woher willst du das wissen?”

“Das sieht man doch. Schon wie der angezogen ist! Und wie der läuft! Du kennst doch den alten Barmer?”

“Den vom Friedhof?”

“Ja, von eurem Friedhof. Das ist auch eine Tunte. Der läuft so schwul, als ob bei ihm die Beine verkehrtrum eingeschraubt sind. Mein Vater hat den sogar schon mal in Frauenkleidern gesehen.”

“Ist das wahr?”

“Meinst du, mein Vater lügt? In Frauenkleidern, mitten in der Stadt!”

“Aber warum denn in Frauenkleidern?”

“Das machen die Schwulen so. Haben wohl Spaβ daran, die Leute zu erschrecken, oder so.”

“Mit Frauenkleidern könnte mich keiner erschrecken. Da ist doch eine Maske besser, so eine richtig gruselige Maske. Ein Mann, der in Frauenkleidern rumläuft, das ist doch eher zum Totlachen.”

“Vielleicht wollen die das. Die sind doch nicht ganz richtig im Kopf.”

“Und der in der Aula, das ist so einer? Du meinst, der läuft in Frauenkleidern herum?”

“Nicht immerfort. Aber das ist ein Schwuler, das kannst du mir glauben.”

“Woher willst du das wissen? Er hat doch einen ganz normalen Anzug an.”

“Die trägt er natürlich nicht am Tage. Aber wenns dunkel wird.”

(VAAA 47–48)

[“And it's all because of that damn queer,” he said. …

“What damn queer?”

“Didn't you notice? He's totally queer, that guy.”

“That doctor?”

“Of course. He's a faggot.”

“How do you know that?”

“You can see it. Just look at the way he's dressed! And the way he walks! You know old Barmer, don't you?”

“From the cemetery?”

“From your cemetery. He's a faggot, too. He walks so queer you'd think he had his legs screwed on backwards. My father even saw him dressed up in women's clothes once.”

“Is that true?”

“Are you calling my father a liar? In women's clothes, in the middle of town.”

“But why in women's clothes?”

“That's just what queers do. Maybe they like to scare people or something.”

“Nobody can scare me with women's clothes. A mask would be better for that, a really creepy mask. A man running around in women's clothes would make me die laughing.”

“Maybe that's what they want. They aren't quite right in the head.”

“And the guy in the auditorium, is he like that? You think he runs around in women's clothes?”

“Not all the time. But he's queer, you can be sure of that.”

“So how do you know, then? He was dressed in a regular suit.”

“He doesn't do it in the daytime. But when it gets dark. …”]

Despite the absurdity of Bernd's adduced evidence for the professor's homosexual behavior, the attitudes expressed are realistic enough and lead in the book to a further exploration of sexual attitudes in the GDR of the 1950s, with Daniel consulting his more charitable father on the subject and being advised even by him not to shake hands with “sick” Herr Barmer (VAAA 54). Even in the most absurd moments of Daniel's non-academic education, the humor and seriousness are perfectly balanced, providing opportunities for contemplation of the irony rather than pursuing any specific moral or political program. The finest example of this distanced yet fair stance comes when Daniel tries to reconcile his luminous vision of the older girl Pille with her clothes off and the news that she plans to join the Party, which, in Daniel's family, represents nothing but worldly corruption. But how bad can the Party be if this beautiful girl (without clothes) is in it? “Ich hatte ihre Brüste gesehen, die groβen roten Brustwarzen, das feuchte Schamhaar, von dem die Wassertropfen herabrollten. Diese Bilder mischten sich in meinem Kopf mit der Partei, und ich war verwirrt” [I had seen her breasts, her large red nipples, the wet pubic hair with water dripping off of it. These images got mixed up in my head with the Party, and I was confused: 99]. Hein's detachment allows him to capture such ambiguous states of consciousness without giving up the potential for showing how politics impinges on individual lives, whether absurdly or tragically.

Versions of this same Olympian detachment are also found in many of the book's characters and even its symbols. Their common domain is Daniel's consciousness, which, like his creator's, relentlessly seeks out examples of composure and objectivity in the face of suffering, fleeing the self-deluding delights of partisanship and creating the possibility of real mastery over events. This search for models of detachment begins with the allegedly homosexual professor already mentioned. His deportment, which Daniel finds extremely peculiar even before it is explained to him by Bernd, suggests a kind of freedom from the banal struggles of schoolboy life, the petty tyranny of teachers over students that reflects the oppressive conformity of East German society. Even though he scarcely hides his condescension, the demeanor of the “little man” who give the physics lecture recalls Hein's many descriptions of the chronicler's stance: his movements have an “eigentümlichen Ruhe” [extraordinary composure: 41], “Manchmal streifte sein Blick über uns, ohne uns wirklich wahrzunehmen” [His gaze would sometimes sweep the room without really seeing us: 41], “Sein ganzes Benehmen war etwas grotesk, verwies jedoch auf Distanz zu uns” [His whole manner was slightly grotesque, yet it attested to his distance from us: 42]. Daniel and the other students are spellbound, oddly, by the utter disinterest or even contempt the professor seems to have for their world:

Jede Geste verdeutlichte seinen herablassenden Stolz, seine Scherze und ironischen Bemerkungen waren nicht eigentlich heiter und führten bei uns nicht zu einem ausgelassenen oder zumindest befreienden Lachen. Auch sein Humor hatte etwas Übellauniges und seine heitere Stimmung war eigentlich verdrossen. … Sein Benehmen hatte zur Folge, dass eine eigentümlich fiebernde Erwartung entstand

(VAAA 42)

Every gesture revealed his haughty pride, his jokes and ironic asides were not really amusing and they gave no occasion even for tension-breaking laughter. His humor had something mean-spirited about it and his high spirits were a cover for sullenness. … The effect of his manner was that a peculiar, feverish expectation arose.

The professor's detachment fascinates because it promises something outside the constricted range of possible thought and action familiar to Daniel and his fellow students. The most effective subversion of totalitarian Stalinist society (or of conformism in bourgeois society) comes from the violation of its taboos, the speaking of what cannot and must not be imagined from within it; hence the homosexuality of the lecturer has a subversive effect—it is an eruption of the unspeakable within a closed discourse, a disclosure of distance and difference, and consequently a portent of a more general liberation.

Two less peripheral characters, Tante Magdalena and Daniel's grandmother, model for Daniel more positive versions of the professor's Gelassenheit, or composure, when they describe for him their ways of dealing with painful events in their lives. Tante Magdalena is a more lovingly developed version of Gertrude Fischlinger of Horns Ende, sharing her clear-eyed stoicism in overcoming vast personal loss. Tante Magdalena's fiancé was lost at sea during the First World War, and she has led a life of quasi-widowhood ever since. Daniel, at the age of 13, may see every new experience as unique and catastrophic, but Tante Magdalena knows that catastrophes are anything but unique, and she exhibits Hein's favorite virtue—stoic endurance of tragedy—by surviving the most dreadful experiences and laughing where once she cried. Daniel finds in Tante Magdalena both a refuge from the turbulence of his own life and an education in how to master it. It is she who delivers the advice that provides the title of book. When Daniel's sister Dorle complains that her mother and grandmother (who has recently moved in with the family) are always fighting, Tante Magdalena says:

Dem Leben muss man von allem Anfang an ins Gesicht sehen. Ihr seid jetzt alle zusammen, das ganze Jahr über. Ihr müsst euch nicht mehr trennen, ihr könnt euch jeden Tag sehen. Das ist einfach so schön, dass man sich manchmal streiten muss.

(VAAA 140)

[You have to look life in the face right from the start. Now you are all together all year long. You don't have to say goodbye, you can see each other every day. That is simply so wonderful that you need to have a fight once in a while.]

As in Hein's essays, Tante Magdalena's stoic embrace of the truth, no matter how painful, includes the rejection of ideological cant, an unsentimental self-discipline she learned from her almost-mother-in-law after her fiancé's death:

“Ich weinte immerzu. Sie kochte uns schweigend einen Kaffee und wir setzten uns ins Wohnzimmer. ‘Hör auf zu heulen,’ sagte sie zu mir. Und dann: ‘Ich verfluche den Krieg, der mir meinen einzigen Sohn genommen hat. Und dieser Dummkopf hat sich freiwillig gemeldet. Wer soll nun den Hof übernehmen?’ Sie verzog keine Miene, ihr Gesicht war wie erstarrt. Ich sagte ihr, was Bernhard mir aufgetragen hatte, dass sie stolz sein solle und dass ihr Sohn verboten habe, um ihn zu klagen, weil er für das Vaterland gestorben sei. Sie erwiderte nichts, sie weinte keine Träne. Nur ich heulte. Sie sah mich mit ihrem starren, harten Gesicht an, dann stand sie auf, kam auf mich zu und haute mir eine runter. Mann, hat die zugehauen. Ich heulte gleich noch mal so laut. Aber sie sagte nur: ‘So, Anna Magdalena, soviel dazu. Und wenn Bernhard noch leben würde, bekäme er die doppelte Portion’”

(VAAA 195–196)

[“I cried and cried. She made coffee without saying a word and we sat down in the living room. ‘Stop crying,’ she told me. And then: ‘I curse the war that took my only son. And that blockhead enlisted voluntarily. Now who will take over the farm?’ Her face had no expression, it was like stone. I told her what Bernhard had instructed me to say, that she should be proud and that her son forbade her to mourn, because he had died for the Fatherland. She didn't answer, and didn't shed a tear. I was the only one crying. She looked at me with her frozen, hard face, then she stood up, walked over to me and slapped my face. Man, did she hit hard. Now I was crying twice as loud as before. But she just said, ‘There, Anna Magdalena, that's what you get. And if Bernhard were still alive, he'd get a double portion.’”]

“Magdalena,” a fallen woman, an every-woman, a universal figure with a modest but real fund of wisdom, connects the chapters to one another through commentaries like these. In the closing lines of the book, Daniel states that when she died (he was in West Berlin at the time and unable to attend the funeral), he inherited nothing from her, not even a photo. Of course, he did inherit something extremely precious: a narrative stance. Similarly, Daniel learns from his grandmother that the passage of time brings distance from suffering, and hence allows one to look back at it with a cooler and more comprehending gaze. Her son, Daniel's uncle, had been killed in the Second World War:

Weil sie nie weinte, wenn sie von ihm berichtete, fragte ich Groβmutter einmal, ob sie nicht traurig wäre, dass ihr einziger Sohn im Krieg umgekommen war. Groβmutter sah mich überrascht an und dachte nach. Und dann sagte sie: “Natürlich bin ich traurig, Junge, aber es ist lange her. Aber wenn ich an ihn denke, sehe ich nur den kleinen Jungen vor mir, der er einmal war. Und dann bin ich nicht mehr traurig. Es ist merkwürdig, nicht wahr, aber das machen die vielen Jahre, die seither vergangen sind. Jetzt tut es nicht mehr weh.”

(VAAA 138)

[Because she never cried when she talked about him, I once asked Grandmother whether she was sad that her only son had been killed in the war. Grandmother looked at me with surprise and thought for a while. Then she said: “Of course I'm sad, boy, but it was a long time ago. But when I think about him, I only see the little boy that he used to be. And then I'm not sad any more. It's strange, isn't it, but that's what happens over the years. Now it doesn't hurt anymore.]

The book's most striking example of the dispassionate chronicler's stance emerges from Daniel's interpretation of the altar painting in his church, which depicts the Four Evangelists flanking Jesus on the cross. Daniel is fascinated by how unmoved they appear as they witness the crucifixion:

Jeder von ihnen hielt ein aufgeschlagenes Buch in der Hand, das wohl die Bibel sein sollte, und zeigte mit einem langen und eigenartig gebogenen Finger auf den Text, während er teilnahmslos und ohne Erregung oder erkennbares Mitleid auf den Gekreuzigten blickte oder zu dem Betrachter des Bildes. … Und Lukas hatte mich besonders beeindruckt. Mir gefiel sein Evangelium besser als das der anderen, ich fand es einleuchtender, und seine Worte waren einprägsamer. Viele seiner Sätze kannte ich sogar auswendig, obwohl ich sie nie gelernt hatte und nur gelegentlich zu hören bekam. Ich glaube aber, seine grünen Augen waren es vor allem, die mich für ihn und seine Schrift einnahmen. Durch seine Augen war er vor allen anderen hervorgehoben und durch seinen besonders gelassenen, gleichgültigen Blick, den er auf den blutüberströmten, mit Nägeln durchbohrten Jesus warf. Jedesmal während des Gottesdienstes hatte ich genügend Muβe, ihn zu betrachten und meinen Gedanken und Vermutungen freien Lauf zu lassen. Mir gefiel, dass er bei der entsetzlichen Szene so lässig dabei stand, die Hinrichtung scheinbar unbeeindruckt zur Kenntnis nahm, nicht gewillt, einzugreifen und zu helfen.

(VAAA 109–110)

[Each of them holds an open book in his hand, the Bible no doubt, and points with a long and strangely bent finger at the text, while looking impassively, unmoved and without any noticeable sympathy, at either the crucified Christ or the viewer of the painting. … And I was especially impressed by Luke. I liked his gospel better than the others, it made more sense to me, and its words were more memorable. I even knew many passages by heart, although I had never tried to learn them and only occasionally heard them read. I think, though, that it was most of all his green eyes that drew me to him and to his writing. He stood out from all the others because of his eyes, and because of the calm, indifferent gaze he cast at the figure of Jesus dripping with blood and pierced with nails. During every service I had lots of time to study him and let my thoughts and conjectures run free. I liked the way he stood next to the horrible scene so casually, unimpressed by the execution he was witnessing, unwilling to intervene or give assistance.]

Though the Evangelists are indeed chroniclers in a sense, they can hardly be accused of being non-partisan and indifferent; this is Daniel's adumbration, or rather Hein's. Daniel's interpretation enables him both to deconstruct the religious cant that he endures as the son of a minister, and to reapply its moral imperatives to his own contradiction-filled life. His situation parallels the position of various Hein characters as they struggle to escape, conform to, or improve society, and like Claudia or Herr Horn, he runs the risk of withdrawing altogether at the very moment he achieves the distance necessary for effective intervention. Hein's elucidation of this paradox is his most important contribution to the Brechtian tradition of privileging political-moral-aesthetic intellect over emotional self-indulgence in response to tragedy.

The culminating moment of Daniel's evolution as a future chronicler of himself and his society occurs during his visit to West Berlin. The double-edged nature of impassive detachment sine ira et studio is fully in evidence as Daniel notes the indifference of West Berliners toward the events of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, yet integrates this response into his developing ideal of calm, composed conduct:

Verwundert beobachtete ich die anderen Gäste des Cafés. Sie warfen nur gelegentlich einen Blick auf die Leuchtschrift und beobachteten offensichtlich weder die Nachrichten noch die Werbung. Sie plauderten miteinander, schauten sich aufmerksam die vorbeiflanierenden Passanten an oder starrten in die Luft. Auch die Passanten blickten nur selten zu den Meldungen hoch. Sie sahen sich die Auslagen der Geschäfte an, musterten eindringlich die hinter den Glasscheiben sitzenden Gäste des Cafés und schauten sich unbefangen an, was serviert worden war. Diese Gelassenheit beeindruckte mich. Neugierig geworden, teilte ich meine Aufmerksamkeit zwischen der flimmernden Schrift und den Passanten, ihren Gesichtern und der Art ihres Reagierens. Da ich mir nicht vorstellen konnte, dass diese Nachrichten für sie ohne Bedeutung waren, erschien mir ihr Verhalten ein Ausdruck der Groβstadt zu sein. Nur wenn man vom Leben einer Weltstadt geprägt war, konnte man sich selbst bei den schlimmsten Schreckensmeldungen so lässig und ungerührt geben. Wie die vier Evangelisten bei der Kreuzigung auf dem Bild in unserer Marienkirche.

(VAAA 185)

[I watched the other cafe guests in amazement. They glanced only occasionally at the illuminated letters and evidently paid no attention to either the news or the advertisements. They chatted with each other, watched the passers-by, or stared off into space. The passers-by, too, seldom looked up at the messages. They looked at displays in the shop windows, or studied the seated cafe guests through the glass, showing no embarrassment as they ascertained what was being served. This composure impressed me. Growing curious, I divided my attention between the flickering letters and the passers-by, their faces, and their way of reacting. Since I couldn't imagine that the news was of no importance to them, their behavior appeared to me an expression of big-city life. Only people shaped by life in a world city could appear so indifferent and unmoved by reports of the most terrible events. Like the Four Evangelists in the crucifixion scene in our Marienkirche.]

The critics who imagine that Hein has left pro-Eastern political positions behind, and who read Von allem Anfang an as a denunciation of the GDR, are applying only the most superficial analysis to scenes such as Daniel's visit to West Berlin. It would be obtuse to agree with Daniel's own assessment of evident Western indifference, taking it to be a sign of an achieved state of sober and worldly composure in the face of terrible events: “Since I couldn't imagine that the news was of no importance to them, their behavior appeared to me an expression of big-city life.” As the detailed description of the strollers and window shoppers makes abundantly clear, the West Berliners are not just pretending to be indifferent—they really are indifferent, and not out of some moral imperative, but out of pure consumer intoxication. Daniel is simply not materialistic enough to suspect that wealth could blind people to any sense of social or political solidarity. The oblivious passers-by and cafe guests represent the exact opposite of what Daniel is here inferring from their behavior, just as Claudia's rationale for her isolation completely misses its real causes and real meaning. West Berlin is not a paradise; it is nothing more or less than a background for Daniel's invention of himself. The West per se is treated with the same distance and neutrality as the East. Hence both in theme and in narrative strategy, Hein's latest book is of a piece with its predecessors both before and after the Wende, not the departure or change of direction some have hailed it as.

AT THE END OF THE COMMUNIST CENTURY

Hein's decade of work since the opening of the Berlin Wall can now be viewed with a requisite degree of distance and perspective. Its general outline becomes clear. In the months leading up to the Wende, Hein was turning to political allegory on the stage (Die Ritter der Tafelrunde) and minimalist/realist satire in his fiction (Der Tangospieler) to directly challenge the GDR's cultural and political establishments. These efforts showed a serene and sovereign command of materials and a profound intimacy with both the GDR's ideological contortions and its everyday realities. Next, in the immediately post-Wende works—consisting of socio-political fables of a somewhat shrill and utterly humorless cast, represented by “Bridge Freezes before Roadway,” Das Napoleon-Spiel, and Randow—Hein appears to briefly abandon the stance of Gelassenheit so carefully cultivated in his earlier work, perhaps (judging from these works' subject matter) out of anger or despair at the grotesque lies and injustices that must be counted among the dislocations of the unification process. Such a shift was probably inevitable given the ideological confusions of the early nineties, including the end of the East/West dualism, and, for artists, the loss of a clear (though not particularly pleasant) niche in GDR society as the main promoters of Öffentlichkeit. The imbalance of the early-nineties work surely derives from the ambiguity and even absence of a stable social context. Finally, the recent appearance of Von allem Anfang an announces a return to Hein's earlier proven strategy of resolutely dispassionate social chronicling, adapted now to a much more ambiguous political situation than that of the GDR. In other words, a narrative stance developed as a weapon in the ideological struggles internal to the GDR has now been transplanted into a fully post-Communist context, with future consequences yet to be assessed. Critics glad to see Hein abandon his direct criticisms of the West overlook the critical potential of exploring transhistorical issues of personal loss, official stupidity, and moral hypocrisy. In other words, the real subversiveness of Hein's recent writing lies in his treatment of the GDR as a typical case of humanity in general, a provocative enough notion, if reflected upon, for the complacent denizens of consumer capitalism: it may not be welcome news that East Germans, too, led fully human lives. Hein appears intent on naturalizing East Germany into the contemporary world, and retroactively into its own Cold War landscape, revising our attitude away from the ideological demonizing of the past toward a more normal, even banal recognition of it as a particular, but not particularly extraordinary, time and place. The process is similar to what must ultimately take place in the Federal Republic of Germany if it is to become a nation rather than a territory divided into antagonistic eastern and western sections. For that to happen, the human reality of the GDR will have to be assimilated—not repressed, not refuted as ideologically unsound, but made part of the totality of twentieth-century German consciousness.

The great question for observers of East German literature has been: How will former GDR writers represent their political sea change and their subsumption under Western ideology? A latent strength or potential of the old, ideologically constrained literary strategies of the East Bloc may be emerging: the invisible critique of a highly visible ideology (neo-Stalinism) has been turned inside-out, yielding a highly visible critique of an invisible, because perfectly internalized ideology (consumer capitalism). The appeal of such a strategy is that it strikes at the heart of a social arrangement that offers itself as utterly natural, inevitable, and hence non-ideological. The Western response to East German ideological critiques since 1989 has been to complain of stereotyping, over-simplification, prejudice, ignorance—anything, in short, that challenges the naturalness of capitalism, and with it, the rightness of capitalism. Hein continues to violate expectations whenever and wherever he writes. When Socialist Realist dogma demanded stereotyped, historically situated heroes that could function as role models, Hein created tortured, repellent individuals shut off from society. Now that Western ideology posits individual uniqueness and free will as basic human truths in our millennial post-history, Hein is creating stereotypes utterly trapped within themselves by historical circumstance. Hein's deconstruction of East Germany can therefore be understood as part of a larger anti-ideological project that continues unabated.

Hein's emergence as a German writer—rather than an East German one—comes as no surprise after his decades-long critique of German society and its characteristic accommodations with power. In politics as in art, each historical moment sees the proscription of certain thoughts as unthinkable. The integrity of Hein's writing has been proved by the fact that both East German and West German ideologues have decried it as wrongheaded. In literary terms, Hein is treading a path comprehended by neither of the historically competing literary canons, based in the East on a partisan, idealized, social subjectivity, and in the West on an ahistorical, reified subjectivity. His characters are always simultaneously victims and agents of history, trapped in society and trapped in themselves; the undialectical categories of West and East (we now call them winners and losers) are discarded in the effort to discover materially real historical facts—beginning with fascism, but extending also to the authoritarian roots of fascism, and ultimately taking in the conditions of modern industrial society. Hein's literature of dissent from ideological univocality promises to find ample raw material as Germany struggles toward self-definition.

Notes

1. An interesting footnote to Hein's novel came after the collapse of the GDR, when the soon-to-be-defunct DEFA movie studios produced a feature film of Der Tangospieler. By the time Roland Gräf's rigorously faithful adaptation premiered at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival, the events of 1989 seemed no less like ancient history than those of 1968. Critics of the film seemed unable to look at it as anything other than a historical document of a lost world, or worse, a nostalgic monument to that world. The alternative Berlin daily die tageszeitung, for example, accused Gräf of turning an absurdist parable into a sentimental look at eternal inner crises, and ridiculed the film for trotting out the usual East German clichés: “crumbled buildings, wretched apartments, dingy shades of gray” (quoted in “Letzter Tango”). The film seems to have fallen to the wrong audience at the wrong time.

2. See Robinson, “Christoph Hein between Ideologies, or, Where Do the Knights of the Round Table Go after Camelot Falls?”

3. Honecker was arrested by the Nazi authorities in 1935 for his activities in the Communist underground and spent ten years in prison (Turner 175).

4. As early as mid-December 1989 Hein remarked despairingly, “I am spending little or no time at my desk, but it is all for nothing: probably within a year … Germany will once again be Greater Germany. But there will be no reunification, just an annexation. McDonald's wins” (Letter to the author, 16 Dec. 1989).

5. For a more extensive treatment of Hein's political activities in 1989 and 1990, see Andress, “Christoph Heins Weg durch den Herbst 1989” and Meyer-Gosau, “Christoph Hein, Politiker.” See also the illustrated chronology of Hein's life in Baier (ed.), Christoph Hein: Texte, Daten, Bilder 101–118.

6. For further reading on the Kritiker- or Literaturstreit, see chapter 1, note 1.

7. On this subject see Hein's essay, “Eure Freiheit ist unser Auftrag: ein Brief an (fast alle) Ausländer—wider das Gerede vom Fremdenhaβ der Deutschen” [“Your Freedom is our Mission: A Letter to (Almost All) Foreigners—Challenging the Prattle About German Hatred of Foreigners”]. In this “letter,” Hein assures the world that Germans have nothing against foreigners per se; rather, it is poor foreigners that they can't abide.

8. In response to such accusations, Hein maintains he is simply reporting what he has seen, even in the case of the monstrous West Berlin lawyer Wörle in Das Napoleon-Spiel: “I situated him in the West because that is where I saw this ‘player.’ I saw him many times. The essentials were comparable to what I have described. The rest is borrowed from my own vita” (Hein, “Kennen”).

9. See McKnight, Understanding Christoph Hein, for a detailed English summary and discussion of the novel (113–135).

10. The irritated reviewer for Der Spiegel announces that Hein had “squandered” [verspielt] his status of being the “hope” of East German literature (Hage 235), and dismisses Wörle as a “mere assertion, a prattling cardboard figure invented solely to lecture us about what Hein thinks freedom can lead to” (239). Literary pundit Marcel Reich-Ranicki, writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, employs words like Blödsinn [idiocy] and Albernheit [silliness] in the course of judging the book a failure, meanwhile reading it so sloppily that he confuses Wörle with another minor character. By contrast, the Frankfurter Rundschau (Böttiger) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Baier) reviewed the book largely positively, the latter noting that “To the one-time ‘GDR-bonus’ there now corresponds a ‘GDR-malus’” among the critics.

11. See for instance the review collection “Der fremde Freund von Christoph Hein: Für und Wider” for several examples such as the one contributed by Rüdiger Bernhardt, who diagnosed “the author's deficient ability to keep in view the development possibilities of society while describing the individually possible experiences of his characters” (1638). In other words, Hein was waywardly ignoring the obvious truth of the matter, that the society of the GDR was a good society.

12. McKnight also recommends considering “Hein's intellectual activity during the writing of Das Napoleon-Spiel and his reaction to the neo-Nazi activity on both sides of the Elbe, especially his concern that the outgrowth of the long-lasting Historikerstreit would overturn national guilt and awareness about the past,” and offers the following political allegory:

    Wörle, who always let the “bastard” [that is, Wörle's East German brother] take the blame, might symbolize the specter of fascism (always linked with capitalism in socialist ideology) raising its head again in Germany during and after unification, a ghost of the Nazi past who succeeds in duping the Germans (Fiarthes) into defending him and who is found not guilty (on legal technicalities) by the judges (historians), setting the monster free once again. … The consequences of a successful manipulation of history and people's knowledge of and attitudes towards history are embodied in the disturbing figure of Wörle and his justification of

13. Other relatively positive assessments of the play similarly emphasized the continuities with his earlier work. Neues Deutschland, while judging the Dresden production itself to be rather weak, places Anna Andress in the same class as Hein's alienated Claudia. Anna's attempt at withdrawal from the world (after the exhilaration of the Bürgerbewegung), her “Nein!” to the various people importuning her, is akin to Claudia's “I'm fine.” She is living in a kind of fool's paradise and must be driven out of it by outside forces (Pfützner). The Neue Zürcher Zeitung similarly noted that the play addresses Hein's oldest theme, “how state power and individual fate were interrelated in the GDR,” only now the power involved is now that of the dog-eat-dog West where the right of the wealthier prevails. The characters themselves, as in Hein's earlier work, “are ordinary and monstrous at the same time” (Zimmermann).

14. John Bornemann's interviews for his anthropological study Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, and Nation reveal how archetypal this sort of story is for the self-definition of East Germans who lived through the war and its aftermath (124–54).

15. Because of the circular chronology of the chapters (the first chapter must be reread after finishing the last in order to be fully understood), we know from the outset that Daniel, like Hein, is destined to escape the stultification of rural life in the GDR by moving to West Berlin. Given that the book is to some extent a memoir, it is remarkable for its refusal to foreshadow Hein's ultimate return to the GDR in 1961. Daniel's trajectory offers no hint of such a return being likely. Similarly, the adult political convictions held by Hein himself are scarcely anticipated. Thus the book is a highly disciplined exercise in the chronicling of one personal and historic moment, undistorted by teleologies of foreknowledge and retrospection. Hein avoids constructing (however covertly) a basis for the overall development of a life, with its rounded narrative contours and evident significance waiting at the end. (The blatancy of Wörle's life, his long career of self-promotion, stands in stark contrast.)

16. Langner adds that Hein's style benefits from the changed circumstances for East German writers, who need no longer fulfill a “compensatory function as critical moralists.” Hein himself seems to agree, saying that he is relieved now that he can just be a writer, not a political seer (Personal interview with author, 18 July 1998). However, even being a mere writer involves a historical and moral context, as all of Hein's writing shows.