In 1968 Dieter Wellershoff published his essay “Fiktion und Praxis” as a contribution to the discussion of whether literature should be politically engaged. In particular his essay was designed as a reply to, or corrective of, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's view that literature can never change society: rather, at its worst, it disguises social conflicts. Literature, Enzensberger held then, was harmless, an excuse for its producers not to become directly involved in political discussion.¹ Wellershoff denounces Enzensberger's misconception that the socially engaged and the more autonomous type of literature are mutually exclusive. In Wellershoff's view they are just two extremes in current literary production. Approaching literature in terms of its function he describes it as a technique of simulation (“Simulationstechnik”). Like the astronauts who prepare their journey into space in the safety of specially constructed training conditions, so literature “ist ein der Lebenspraxis beigeordneter Simulationsraum, Spielfeld für ein fiktives Handeln, in dem man als Autor und als Leser die Grenzen seiner praktischen Erfahrungen und Routinen überschreitet, ohne ein wirkliches Risiko dabei einzugehen.”² This technique of simulation allows both the writer and the reader to enter into new forms of behavior and thinking and to enhance their experience. The experimental situation sets the author free to invent something new rather than having to be content with what is already there. Thus scientific advances, especially in psychology since Freud and in physics since Einstein and Heisenberg, have not only revolutionized our perception of the world but are reflected in new literary techniques which are designed to make us aware of what is going on.

While Wellershoff's aim is to defend literature against the claims that it should be explicitly politically useful, his heuristics of writing as an experiment in alternative styles of living can also be applied to other literary texts. Hardly any writer up to the present has created such memorable experimental situations as Franz Kafka, most notably in Die Verwandlung where he studies the impact on the protagonist Gregor and his family of a metaphor coming true. Monika Maron, born while bombs were falling on Berlin and brought up in the eastern part of the city, chooses a similar starting point in her second novel Die Überläuferin,³ which was published in 1986. What makes her attempt at close experimental observation so interesting is that she presents the same characters in a second novel set in the same period, Stille Zeile Sechs,⁴ published in 1991. However, by altering the conditions of the experiment slightly, she achieves a radically different result. In a comparison of these two novels, whose publication dates are only five years apart, it will become obvious how both experiments are closely linked to the historical situation in which they were carried out.

Rosalind Polkowski is the protagonist in both novels. She is a 42-year-old historian who for the past 15 years has worked for an academic institute in Berlin, the Barabas'sche Forschungsstätte, Barabas being the name of the person in charge. In Die Überläuferin she wakes up one morning to discover that she cannot use her legs any more. Disabled, she is confined to her room, which turns into a kind of cell. She has no contact with the outside world. Even her former boss fails to inquire after her, a fact which intensifies the atmosphere of total social isolation, in stark contrast to her previous working days. These had been extremely regimented, monotonous and predictable, Rosalind's life being entirely usurped by the institution. As in Kafka's story, Rosalind's sudden disability can be interpreted as the expression of what is going on inside her. Slaving for a government office has crippled her soul. But now her handicap, which forces her to give up the life she has hitherto led, is also a form of protest. Significantly it is a silent protest, a retreat into the private sphere of daydreaming and recollection.

When Rosalind reappears in Stille Zeile Sechs, without having aged and just after having left the Barabas'sche Forschungsstätte, she has changed considerably. Most importantly, she has resigned from her post of her own accord, without being forced to do so by a mysterious blow of fate. One day she decided that she did not want to be paid for thinking (intellectual work) anymore, as she had been while working as a historian. This conscious decision is followed not by daydreaming but by an attempt to catch up with some aspects of life that she had been forced to neglect due to the burden of her job. In other words, the alternative life Rosalind is seeking no longer lies in solipsistic retreat. On the contrary, she is eager to learn what is going on around her. When she tries to find out why no German translation of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni has done the piece justice, she is involuntarily put in touch with her personal past. Agreeing to write down the memoirs of a former high-ranking party member, Beerenbaum, whose right arm has been paralyzed by a stroke, she becomes increasingly aware of how he represents the people who have stolen her life. She realizes too that nothing has changed for these people: they live in fashionable neighborhoods, receive preferred treatment in hospitals and, when they die, get a state funeral and a grave in a reserved section of the cemetery. Nor do they seem to regret what they have done. On the contrary, old age has made them frail, allowing them to claim the status of victims.

Although Rosalind's decision to quit her job leads to her acquaintance with Beerenbaum, it is not of the same importance as in Die Überläuferin, where it is mentioned right at the beginning (Ü [Die Überläuferin,] 19). Stille Zeile Sechs, by contrast, starts at the end of the story—Beerenbaum's funeral. What has happened between Rosalind's leaving the Barabas'sche Forschungsstätte (SZ [Stille Zeile Sechs,] 18) and the funeral is then told in an analytical fashion.

The different arrangement of the experiment affects the narrative styles of the two novels. Whereas Rosalind's unexplained paralysis in Die Überläuferin corresponds to the surrealism of the narration that follows, the consequences of her self-denial in Stille Zeile Sechs are described in a realistic, though not chronological, form. Several different stories are combined: Rosalind's, Beerenbaum's, Thekla Fleischer's and that of Rosalind's former boyfriend Bruno and his drinking companion, the “Count.”

Surrealism, which allows dreams and fantasies to assume the same status in a narrative as the telling of facts, became popular in GDR literature around 1970, especially with Irmtraud Morgner's books, and in advance of the big move towards literary modernism following the expulsion of Wolf Biermann in 1976.⁵ Maron's novel thus comes as a late example of this movement, to which Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T. (1969) und Kein Ort. Nirgends (1979) also belong. It coincides with the new strand of GDR literary modernism expressed in Wolf's Kassandra (1983), which is dominated by a pessimistic view of the failure of the Enlightenment, and by end-of-the-world feelings and consciousness of catastrophe.

As in West-German literature, GDR literary periods, if they can be regarded as such, have never been homogeneous:⁶ at almost any time within the 40-year existence of the second German state its literature was characterized by both modernity and anti-modernity. Only the weighting varied. It is therefore hardly surprising that there were also different strands within modernism itself.

The surrealism of Die Überläuferin expresses itself not only in a conglomerate of different kinds of texts: dreams, fantasies, reports, dialogues and, not least, four Zwischenspiele, or interludes, that originate in Rosalind's mind and present caricatures of various types in GDR society passing judgment on her. Also surrealistic is the merging of the spheres of the conscious and the unconscious, of the actual and the virtual. Constant shift of narrative perspective and the uncertain identity of the characters—Martha turns out to be Rosalind's alter ego, many of the minor characters come out of the blue and disappear again without leaving any trace—create an impression of utter vagueness.

The situation is quite different in Stille Zeile Sechs. Here we find consistent first person narration. The only significant exception is the scene in which Rosalind cross-examines Beerenbaum about his past and especially about his part in destroying the career of one of his subordinates. Here the shift to third person narration marks the climax of the story. Rosalind breaks with her resolution not to use her head in working for Beerenbaum. His life, the account of which she agreed to write down for him, and all the other lives that his stands for, have interfered too much with her own for her to remain now the detached scholar that she had intended to be. The shift in narrative perspective thus indicates the highly emotionalized atmosphere that holds Rosalind in its grip even as she is writing about it:

Ich weiβ es so genau, als hätte ich diese Minuten zweifach erlebt, als Zuschauerin und als Akteurin. Und eigentlich war ich sogar dreifach dabei, denn auch als Akteurin war ich geteilt, in eine, die etwas tat, und eine andere, die etwas zu tun wünschte. Ich weiβ alles, nichts ist mir entgangen. Das macht das Erinnern so schwer.

(SZ 204-205)

The function of third person narration here is not—as in Die Überläuferin—to express vagueness but rather the opposite: to give a clearer mimetic picture of what really happened:

Ich sehe sie vor mir, Beerenbaum und Rosalind. Er hinter dem Schreibtisch, gefangen im gelben Licht der Tischlampe. Sie ihm gegenüber, zwei Schritte entfernt, verschanzt hinter der Schreibmaschine Marke “Rheinmetall.”

Während ich noch schwankte, ob die Gerechtigkeit mir Rache für den Grafen oder Rücksicht auf den kranken Beerenbaum gebot, sah ich, daβ Rosalind sich schon entschieden hatte … Rosalind verhörte ihn.

(SZ 205)

The shift in narrative perspective at this point is sufficiently motivated and justified by the logic of the narrative to underline rather than jeopardize its realism.

The similarities of certain details in the two novels are so striking that they can hardly be overlooked. Apart from Rosalind, there are her former boyfriend Bruno and the Count. Both had a bourgeois upbringing and received a profound academic and cultural education, placing them in opposition to the nonintellectual, even anti-intellectual party doctrine. Representing the group of the “Lateiner”—a metonymy for intellectuals—they lead the dissent in the pub rather than taking positive action like Rosalind. Although Maron claims “Ich habe mich nie als Feministin verstanden” (“E” [“Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind”] 110), she addresses feminist issues in the difference between the female protagonist and her male counterparts. Both novels show the men merely talking, mainly under the influence of alcohol, whereas the women act, if only in their minds (like Rosalind in Die Überläuferin). Bruno's contempt for Rosalind's lack of general knowledge, moreover, reflects the attitude that Maron sees in Heinrich von Kleist's “Nach Maβgabe Deiner Begreifungskraft.”⁷ In her acceptance speech for the Kleist-Preis awarded for Stille Zeile Sechs Maron points to Kleist's patronizing explanation of a foreign term in a letter to his fiancée. For Maron, this sums up men's attitude towards women.

Close intertextual links have been a hallmark of Maron's work from the beginning. Again this is most obvious in her characters. The Clairchen of Die Überläuferin, a fairly fat little person who ends up finding her unfulfilled love in a tree—she hangs herself—has turned up already in an early play called Ada und Evald (1984). In Stille Zeile Sechs Thekla Fleischer reincarnates Clairchen. In the interim she has lost her Berliner Schnauze but found her love in a well-preserved septuagenarian named Solow, to whom she is “married” by Bruno in a desolate cemetery chapel.

Each subsequent text opens up the horizon a bit more on individual characters. In Stille Zeile Sechs not only do we learn about the family backgrounds of Bruno and the Count, whose name is actually Karl-Heinz Baron (SZ 65), but even the Count's more recent past is elucidated. It becomes clear that his three-year imprisonment in the early 1960s was inflicted personally by Beerenbaum, who was then his superior. As an internationally renowned sinologist, Baron (based on a real person⁸) had helped a colleague who defected to the West smuggle an academic manuscript out of the GDR.

It is, however, mainly Rosalind whom we get to know better as a person. In Die Überläuferin we learn that her lack of will to live goes back to her traumatic birth between two air raids. In a scene reminiscent of the birth of another postwar literary character, Oscar Matzerath in Günter Grass's novel Die Blechtrommel, Maron invests baby Rosalind at the moment of delivery with a similar faculty of reasoning and determination. We also read that both her parents were ardent communists who were hastily qualified as teachers in order to build the new antifascist alternative German state. But only in Stille Zeile Sechs does it become clear how problematic Rosalind's relationships were, in particular with her father. Even as a teenager she could no longer accept the inconsistencies within socialist ideology and frequently cornered him about them, albeit to no avail. Eventually, she lost touch with him: he seemed to dread having his ideals shattered and his life destroyed along with his ideology. The priority of ideology and the lack of love and consideration for the individual within the family reappears on the level of society and state. Thus Beerenbaum, the party representative, can become the reincarnate father. What Rosalind failed to do with her real father she achieves with Beerenbaum. References to the link between the two abound. In place of her father Rosalind makes Beerenbaum answer for the lack of freedom in her own life. What is significant about the historical details given is the shift of emphasis: while in Die Überläuferin the focus remains on the transition from Nazi ideology to a socialist society—the dominant and haunting image being that of war and destruction—Stille Zeile Sechs is contained within the GDR and refers to crimes committed by its regime.

Not only does Stille Zeile Sechs offer more information about the characters, here Rosalind herself has also gained more insight into the mechanisms of society. This enables her to interpret her work in Barabas's institute more succinctly, as a comparison of the following two relevant passages demonstrates. In Die Überläuferin Rosalind thinks about her work in purely personal terms:

… Siegfried Barabas, Vorstand jener historischen Forschungsstätte, der Rosalind vor fünfzehn Jahren als Absolventin zugeteilt worden war und in der sie seitdem, wenn nicht Wochenenden, staatliche Feiertage, Urlaub oder Krankheit sie davon befreiten, um sieben Uhr fünfundvierzig eines jeden Tages zu erscheinen und bis siebzehn Uhr eines jeden Tages zu verbleiben hatte.

(Ü 10)

… Barabas' neuerliche Änderungswünsche an ihrem letzten Aufsatz. Dann ihr Zimmer, acht Quadratmeter, ab sechzehn Uhr Sonne, Zeitschriften, Karteikarten, die vernagelte Spree, die Schreibmaschine, die Zöllner auf dem Weg zur Arbeit, von der Arbeit, die Hunde, von denen man sagte, sie seien blut- und rauschgiftsüchtig, das jeden Tag.

(11-12)

Although the description creates the atmosphere of a factory worker standing at an assembly line, thus expressing a feeling of utter depersonalization, the impact the experience has on Rosalind as a human being is expressed only in the subsequent novel, where the situation is analyzed in political terms:

Sie, Kollegin Polkowski, haben wir für die Entwicklung der proletarischen Bewegungen in Sachsen und Thüringen vorgesehen, hatte Barabas gesagt, als ich ihm vor fünfzehn Jahren zum ersten Mal an seinem Schreibtisch gegenübersaβ. So war es: Nicht mir wurde das Sachgebiet zugeteilt, sondern ich dem Sachgebiet und auch dem Zimmer. Stürbe ich, würde es das Sachgebiet und das Zimmer immer noch geben, so wie es sie vor mir gegeben hatte; ein anderer würde ihnen zugeteilt werden, der, wie ich, die einzige Fähigkeit, die ihn von einer Katze unterschied, die Gabe des abstrakten Denkens, an einem kleinen Sachgebiet verschleiβen würde, um von dem Geld, das er dafür bekäme, sein kreatürliches, von einem Katzendasein wenig unterschiedenes Überleben zu sichern.

(SZ 22)

It is this deeper insight that Rosalind gains from pondering her work situation that makes her quit her job. The justification for the step, however, has already been formulated in Die Überläuferin: there Martha is quoted as saying: “Es ist pervers, für Geld zu denken … wahrscheinlich sogar verboten” (Ü 44).

The development of Maron's ideas is laid out before the reader in another example. Both novels, but in particular Stille Zeile Sechs, try to find out whether action necessarily leads to guilt and, if that is the case, whether it would not be preferable to remain passive. In Die Überläuferin Georg, a male character who is more in harmony with Rosalind than other men, accuses her of just that: “Du hast dich zurückgezogen auf die sichere Geste der Untat. Hörst du das Wort: Untat. Weiβt du, was das ist, keine Tat oder die böse Tat, oder ist keine Tat die böse Tat” (Ü 47). The reinterpretation of “Untat” in this challenge of Georg's equates the lack of action with an evil action.

In Stille Zeile Sechs the question of action runs through the novel so persistently that certain jobs are said to manifest themselves in the physique of men. Rosalind suggests a distinction between a natural and an unnatural double chin, where the latter is caused without fail by particularly unnatural occupations, which are reserved for men, such as military service (SZ 90f). Soldiers, like other men in uniforms, receive their peculiar facial features while exercising their duty:

Ihre Arbeit verlangte, daβ sie fortwährend das Kinn gegen die Brust preβten, als müβten sie den ganzen Tag lang auf ihre Fuβspitzen gucken. Hätten sie dabei demütig Schultern und Nacken gebeugt, wäre ihnen nichts geschehen. Da ihre Körper aber zugleich als Symbole der staatlichen Autorität zu dienen hatten, muβten sie, allen anatomischen Geboten zuwider, auf herrisch gespreizten Beinen den Bauch und die Brust vorwölben und darüber den Kopf rechtwinkelig beugen, was selbst bei dünnen Menschen eine Wulst zwischen Kinn und Hals zusammenschob, die, bei dauerhaftem Verharren in dieser Pose, langsam zu einem unnatürlichen Doppelkinn erstarrte.

(SZ 92)

This is the ironic side of action. In fact, Stille Zeile Sechs is the novel about a more serious Täter—Beerenbaum—who, like other retired party and government officials responsible for the loss of 16 million people's biographies (Ü 51), claims in his old age the status of frail victim. This time, however, Rosalind chooses to act, although she is still not quite sure. Since reading Ernst Toller she, too asks: “Muβ der Handelnde schuldig werden, immer und immer? Oder, wenn er nicht schuldig werden will, untergehen?” (SZ 41). Not only is the resolution not “to think for money” rooted in this quasi-alternative but her work for Beerenbaum soon makes her realize that she cannot detach herself from what she does even if she is just trying, quite literally, to serve as a typewriter. Her situation is different, too, from that of her aunt Ida, who—in a rather roundabout way—may have committed a crime when she bought dolls dressed in the Thuringian national costume for the Gesellschaft zur Verständigung aller Völker (SZ 119). Compared to Ida's guilt, the social mechanism of which is laid out in a highly ironic way, Rosalind's seems just as unlikely though more real. In the end the question remains: did she kill Beerenbaum by insisting that he answer sensitive questions about his past at a time when he was already in a frail condition? Beerenbaum's son and his domestic help certainly seem to think so. In any event, Rosalind shares with her creator the sense of the inevitable failure of action. In a 1988/89 essay on Ernst Toller, Maron writes: “Die Ahnung von der Vergeblichkeit allen Tuns und dem lebenslangen Versuch, diese Ahnung zu widerlegen, waren es, die Tollers Leben mir zum ermutigenden, wenn auch tragischen Gleichnis werden lieβen” (“E” 62). The experimental situation that Maron creates in Stille Zeile Sechs proves Toller right: Rosalind decides not to lend her intellect to an institute controlled by the party, but does so only to take up work for one of its former officials and be accused of causing his death.

To appreciate the difference between the two experiments one has to bear in mind that both novels are set at the same time—1985; the date can be reconstructed from the biography of the Count (Ü 179f). The Cold War could still be felt, if not to the extent of previous years. In fact, between politicians of the Federal Republic and of the GDR a mutual acceptance began as the new modus vivendi. Invitations were exchanged, and meetings took place. Culturally, too, the process of opening was under way in the East. Western hope for an arrangement with “real existing socialism,” and Eastern dreams of the possibility of reforming socialism, left no room for considerations that the Wall might come down imminently, let alone that the two Germanies might reunite.

While Die Überläuferin was both set and written in this political and cultural atmosphere, Stille Zeile Sechs only shares the narrated time with its predecessor.⁹ It is well known now that Michail Gorbachev, then president of the Soviet Union, introduced the thaw in the Eastern Bloc through his policies of perestroika and glasnost. Even Maron, who was then still living in East Berlin, could not help being impressed (B [Trotzdem herzliche Grüβe] 40-42, 18.9.1987). Less than six months later, however, the events following the dissolution of the Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht peace demonstrations in East Berlin finally broke Maron's resistance to leaving the GDR for the West. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and the peaceful revolution led to the Anschluβ of East Germany.

These events took place while Maron was working on Stille Zeile Sechs. In what way did they influence the setting of the experiment? Maron admired her fellow citizens for their newly acquired civil disobedience based on the individual's will to decide her/his own life. She had hoped for it as a consequence of Gorbachev's policies in the Soviet Union:

Und da sehe ich, daβ in den Leuten die Lust wächst zu widersprechen, sogar zu widerstehen. Versammlungen werden aus den Fugen der Tagesordnung gebrochen (mancherorts finden darum auch keine mehr statt), das Wort Zivilcourage scheint wieder einen Sinn zu bekommen und ist öfter zu hören; es ist wieder möglich geworden, an Veränderungen zu denken, auch wenn davon kaum etwas zu spüren ist.

(B 41, 18.9.1987)

Without this newly gained self-confidence, Rosalind's decision to quit her job and to single-handedly seek vengeance for her stolen biography (together with that of her friend) is hardly imaginable. The starting point of the experiment is not compatible with the time in which it is set, when fate reigned instead of self-determination, and dreams had to stand in for action. Yet a closer look reveals that the historical events are reflected in Stille Zeile Sechs only in an eclectic way: while Maron takes on board the early slogan of the marching crowds “Wir sind das Volk,” she neglects its more nationalistic successor “Wir sind ein Volk.” Thus the whole issue of reunification is absent from this fictional work. This, however, is due to the relative delay with which topical issues can be treated in fiction. In newspaper essays Maron has made clear her views on the “Psychology of Unified Germany.”¹⁰

The focus on recent GDR history and its political criminals in Stille Zeile Sechs would not have been possible, either, without the historical changes that occurred during the time the novel was being written. This also applies to the interconnectedness of family and political history demonstrated in the novel. In taking revenge on Beerenbaum, Rosalind in a Freudian fashion also makes up for what she had failed to do with her own father, a fact that assimilates the novel to the genre of the so-called Väterliteratur fashionable in the West in the 1980s. It is evident that Maron has used autobiographical material here, since her stepfather, Karl Maron, was GDR Minister of the Interior from 1955-1963. Her family background was reflected in 1989 in her acclaimed essay “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” which reconstructs her passage from a socialist upbringing to becoming disenchanted with the regime and to her eventual dissent even at the price of causing a rift between herself and her mother (“E” 9-28). At the threat of a new freeze in GDR politics, with tougher sanctions against dissidents, escape into dreams was no longer a valid response. It was Maron herself who ended her situation as Geisterautorin¹¹ (B 116)—which, incidentally, was not the same as a “ghost writer” but denoted someone who lived in the former GDR but published exclusively in the West, thus having no physical existence in the Federal Republic and no official status as a writer in the East. Maron has never looked for compromises. The story of Josefa Nadler, the protagonist of Flugasche,¹² who preferred to leave her secure job rather than not publish a report critical of an environmentally hazardous factory, could as well have been Maron's own. None of her works was ever published in the GDR. When the Aufbau Verlag finally decided to print Flugasche, almost 10 years after it had first appeared, it was forced to drop it again in direct response to Maron's outspoken political criticism in her exchange of letters with the West German writer Joseph von Westphalen.

Maron shares this reluctance to make compromises with her (female) characters. She never wrote what a West German journalist has called “Gesinnungsästhetik,” nor was she forced to justify her actions later on. When, during the summer of 1995, the Spiegel published an article that meant to disclose Maron's Stasi-connections between 1976 and 1978, it could not prove conclusively that she had harmed anybody.¹³ Having only agreed to report on the “enemy” in the West and not on her own dissident friends in East Berlin, Maron moreover wrote an essay report for the Stasi which compared life in the East in extremely unfavorable terms with that in the West. She does not seem to have been criminally involved with the Ministry of Security in the former GDR. Nor did she need to produce Rechtfertigungsprosa, unlike some of her more flamboyant colleagues such as Christa Wolf in Was bleibt (1990) or Heiner Müller in his autobiography Krieg ohne Schlacht (1992). Her stance as a moral authority nevertheless received a blow as, like other former informants, she did not reveal her Stasi-connection until she was found out. When she explained her actions in an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, she pointed to the humiliating practice of self-accusation she had experienced as a 12-year old school girl.¹⁴ The excitement about Maron's Stasi-past, fueled in particular by Der Spiegel, has since subsided. It is hoped that her next book will restore her reputation as an important, uncompromising, if not very loud voice in the literary and political discourse in united Germany.

Notes

1. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Gemeinplätze, die Neueste Literatur betreffend,” Kursbuch 15 (November 1968): 187-197.

2. Dieter Wellershoff, “Fiktion und Praxis,” Wahrnehmung und Phantasie. Essays zur Literatur (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1987) 11-29, esp. 21.

3. Frankfurt am Main Fischer, 1986 (= Ü).

4. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991 (= SZ).

5. See Wolfgang Emmerich, “Gleichzeitigkeit. Vormoderne, Moderne und Postmoderne in der Literatur der DDR,” Bestandsaufnahme Gegenwartsliteratur. Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Österreich, Schweiz, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (München: Edition Text und Kritik, 1988) 193-211, esp. 206.

6. See Emmerich.

7. See Monika Maron, “Nach Maβgabe meiner Begreifungskraft,” Nach Maβgabe meiner Begreifungskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993) 103-111.

8. See Monika Maron/Joseph von Westphalen, Trotzdem herzliche Grüβe. Ein deutsch-deutscher Briefwechsel Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1988) (= B). See also: Andrea Reiter, “A German-German Correspondence,” German Literature at a Time of Change 1989-1990: German Unity and German Identity in Literary Perspective, ed. Arthur Williams et al. (Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 1991) 321-338.

9. Harald Weinrich, Tempus. Besprochene und erzählte Welt (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1985).

10. See, for example, “Guter Westmensch, trauriger Ostmensch und andere,” Frankfurter Allgmeine Zeitung 270 (20. Nov. 1993).

11. Geisterautorin is a better term than innere Emigrantin which Westphalen used in his final letter (B 109), because this the latter term is laden with too many specific historical connotations.

12. Frankfurt am Main, 1981.

13. “Stasi Deckname ‘Mitsu’” Der Spiegel (7. Aug. 1995): 146-149.

14. Monika Maron, “Heuchelei und Niedertracht,” Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung 14. Oct. 1995.