Two sources have given me the cue for this paper. First, the title of Gerd Neumann's Die Schuld der Worte, a collection of prose pieces published in 1979.¹ And secondly Monika Maron's opening contribution to the ‘Deutsch-deutsche Briefwechsel’ with Joseph von Westphalen conducted in the columns of the ZEITmagazin. In Maron's contemplation from an East Berlin perspective of the nature of the border separating the two Germanies, one observation in particular makes an impact: ‘Die Gesetze sind das Schlimmste, sie kriminalisieren schon die Träume.’² What connects, in differing ways, these offerings from two GDR writers who still live³ in the country which denies them publication are their pointers to the literary imagination as a concocter of nefarious and subversive activity. Neumann's painfully self-reflexive endeavours with the language of his prose texts are a reaction to the cynicism—as he once put it—of socialist realism.⁴ His concept of the ‘Schuld der Worte’ refers explicitly to the failure of language to represent ‘Die Würde der Dinge,’⁵ but also hints at the consequences of attempting to overcome this: to dare to give a view of reality which is unadulterated and undistorted by ideological expediency is, implicitly, to become entangled in further levels of culpability and to be condemned, as one critic has put it, to ‘der traurigen Zukunft, daβ seine Bücher nicht in der DDR erscheinen werden.’⁶

The issues of language raised by Neumann's mode of writing, what has been called his ‘Krieg gegen die Sprache,’⁷ clearly would warrant separate treatment. But the purloining of his title may nevertheless serve its purpose here as an approach to the problems articulated in Monika Maron's two novels, Flugasche⁸ and Die Überläuferin.⁹

One is occasionally confronted with the agreeable problem of recommending to enquiring friends or colleagues who know little of GDR society and less about its literature a book or books which might satisfy their curiosity on both scores. Flugasche, hitherto published only in West Germany but which—had it not been for a series of faux pas committed by Maron in her ZEITmagazin correspondence—would have seen the light of day in 1988 in the GDR (albeit, as Maron herself noted cryptically ‘mit zehnjähriger Verspätung’¹⁰), commends itself admirably to this end, not least because it is also available in a passable English translation.¹¹ In the dramatization it offers of the gulf between the GDR's official view of itself and the day-to-day realities of life there through a treatment of the world of work—encompassed in the different milieux of journalism and industry—this novel touches on many of those literary and social issues which lend the study of GDR literature its particular fascination: the role of women, the generation gap as it manifests itself in the problems of the offspring of the founding generation and, perhaps above all, the psychological effects of unrelenting exposure to ideological pressures.

The origins of Flugasche are to be found in Monika Maron's own experiences as a journalist working, until 1976, on the weekly Wochenpost. The novel's heroine, Josefa Nadler, is despatched by her editor to write a feature on B.—clearly Bitterfeld, a town celebrated for marking a particular stage in the development of East German literature, but seen here in its reputation as ‘die schmutzigste Stadt Europas’ (p. 36), a place where the air is flavoured daily by 180 tonnes of industrial filth, the bronchitis rate is five times higher than elsewhere, where trees ‘über Nacht ihre Blüte verlieren, als wäre ein böser Zauber über sie hinweggefegt,’ and which is dominated by a ‘Kraftwerk, in dem das Wort Sicherheit nicht erwähnt werden darf’ (pp. 58f).

On an initial level the novel deals with Josefa's failure to get her article about B. published and the conflict with colleagues and officials this precipitates, which threatens her membership of the Party. The psychological and cultural prerequisites for this conflict on which she will eventually founder are rapidly established. Her reflexions in the opening chapter of the novel about her grandparents, ‘Die Verrücktheit des Groβvaters war verlockend, verrückte Menschen erschienen mir freier als normale’ (p. 9), in conjunction with her own complex anxieties—‘Die Machtsucht primitiver Gemüter läβt mich zittern. … Was habe ich zu befürchten? Das Bett, in dem ich sterben werde. Die Leben, die ich nicht lebe. Die Monotonie bis zum Verfall und danach’ (p. 12)—outline a personality of incipiently anarchic and restless disposition who will be ill at ease with the task of delivering the identikit portraits of exemplary Helden der Arbeit and the bromide vision of the industrial milieu which her editor requires.

And so it proves. Her visit to Bitterfeld is a dramatic eye-opener. Of her ignorance of the appalling circumstances in which the people of the town live and work she asks: ‘Und warum habe ich das alles nicht gewuβt? Jede Woche steht etwas in der Zeitung über ein neues Produkt, über eine Veranstaltung im Kulturpalast, über vorfristig erfüllte Pläne, über den Orden des Kollegen Soundso. Nichts über das Kraftwerk, kein Wort von den Aschekammern, die das Schlimmste sind’ (p. 21).

Particularly telling is the experience at first hand of what she subsequently calls ‘die Gewalttätigkeit industrieller Arbeit’ (p. 81). A crucial confrontation with the stoker Hodriwitzka—a figure initially reminiscent of the conventional socialist-realist hero, but given here an entirely convincing contour—makes her determined not to follow the example of colleagues who had been similarly ‘betroffen und erschüttert’ (p. 21) but had gone away to produce whitewashing reports. Of greatest significance in this meeting with Hodriwitzka is Josefa's embarrassed realization—dramatized in her involuntary recoil from his coal-dust handshake—of the gulf between workers and intellectuals. It is a gulf which had allowed her to accept without questioning the newspaper image of B. and to dwell neatly isolated and untroubled in that realm of non-manual work which Thomas Brasch once described as being more instrumental in determining the quality of life than the ideological and political system under which one lives.¹² Illustrating the divide of which she has suddenly been made aware, Josefa notes that ‘er sah mich an wie ein höflicher Chinese, mit dem man türkisch sprechen wollte’ (p. 50).

This divide between reporter and worker is treated in somewhat more reconciliatory fashion than it is in Gert Neumann's story ‘Die Reportagen,’ where journalists visiting a large building-project are treated with suspicion and barely muted hostility.¹³ Nevertheless, here and in a further abrasively humorous encounter with another worker, the red-haired Herrmann, which forces her to acknowledge her ‘uneingestandener, sozial verbrämter Standesdünkel’ (p. 141), the public ideology of the ‘Volksverbundenheit’ of the intellectual and of the solidarity forged by socialism between the different classes in the Workers' State is as resoundingly deflated as it is in Neumann's account.

Experiences such as these fortify Josefa's resolve to reject the solution of her friend Christian that she should write ‘zwei Varianten. Die erste wie es war, und eine zweite, die gedruckt werden kann’ (p. 24). She completes and submits her manuscript, setting in motion a process which begins with acknowledgement from Luise, her older colleague and mentor—‘Das ist eine Reportage so ganz nach meinem Herzen’ (p. 70)—but goes on to offer us unusual insights into the relationship between the mechanisms of censorship and journalistic practices in the GDR and the psychological repercussions for those involved in them. One example, the baleful vignette of Josefa's Illustrierte Woche colleague Fred Müller, who needs a liberal dose of schnaps daily to keep at bay the feelings of revulsion aroused by his job. Not until the alcohol has taken its numbing effect can he exercise his editorial function and ‘gleichmütig, als handele es sich um mathematische Formeln, die Sätze durch sein taubes Gehirn strömen lassen’ (p. 64). Recalling his earlier bitter and drunken outburst—‘Ich habe die ganze Scheiβe satt. Diese Arschlöcher. Schleimscheiβende Kriechtiere. Alles fette Ärsche und hohle Eierköpfe, Hirnaussauger!’ (p. 63)—we glimpse, as he goes about his work, a once creative talent stultified by over-exposure to the ideological image and cliché which are the stock-in-trade of his profession: ‘Die immer bessere Durchführung komplexer Wettbewerbsmethoden, das immer offene Ohr eines Bürgermeisters, die immer neueren Neuerermethoden befreit er vom gröbsten grammatikalischen und syntaktischen Unsinn. Die verbleibenden sprachlichen Ungereimtheiten folgen den eigenen Gesetzen einer Formelsprache und lassen sich nicht redigieren’ (p. 64).

Or, in Josefa's case, we are witness to the destructive effects, on an individual ill-equipped and unprepared to compromise, of blocks and hindrances to the expression of an authentic view of reality. At an early point in the novel she rehearses in an imaginary conversation with Luise the arguments which will ultimately lead her into fraught confrontation with her colleagues and authority: ‘Wem nützen unsere Schwindeleien, Luise’ (p. 34), she asks in an uncanny echo of the opening lines of Wolf Biermann's poem ‘Frage Antwort und Frage,’¹⁴ linking herself to all those critical spirits in the GDR who want to use their commitment to socialism as a springboard to more open discussion of its faults and deficiencies. But it must also be stressed at this point that Flugasche is much more than a dramatic disquisition on the obfuscatory ways of GDR journalism in its treatment of the world of work or of environmental problems.

What gives the novel its particular force is its wedding of these issues to questions of identity and self-realization, the search for what Josefa calls ‘die ihr gemäβe Biografie’ (p. 99). Her rejection of ‘Schizophrenie als Lebenshilfe’ (p. 24) is a refusal to compromise not only in her professional, but also in her private life. The desire for separateness and independence, not wanting to be defined in terms of a relationship with a man—‘die Angst, ein Vierbeiner zu sein’ (p. 42)—is as much an attempt to preserve her integrity as are her efforts to resist compromises in her work as a journalist. The two spheres are of course connected in a further sense, in that the possibility of personal fulfilment and private happiness is destroyed by her inability to function and operate as she would like in the public world: not being permitted honestly to record what she sees and experiences in her professional capacity destroys any chance of finding peace in her private life. She is the very opposite of what a character in Dieter Eue's novel Ketzers Jugend termed the ‘16 Millionen Schizophrene’ who make up the population of the GDR:¹⁵ not for her the comforting reassurance of Günter Gaus's ‘Nischengesellschaft’¹⁶—the rendering unto Caesar in her professional life balanced by the compensations of the private sphere. She desires to be all of a piece, but this proves to be an impossible and destructive desire. In a crucial exchange with Luise, she compares herself to a car travelling with the handbrake on: ‘ein Auto, das man hundert Kilometer mit angezogener Handbremse fährt, geht kaputt’; she feels cheated of her life: ‘Ich werde um mich selbst betrogen. … Sie betrügen mich um mich, um meine Eigenschaften. Alles, was ich bin, darf ich nicht sein’ (p. 78). She sees this, furthermore, not as a problem peculiar to her, but as part of a widespread malaise resulting from the very nature of GDR society. In one of the most highly charged passages in the novel she sketches a nightmare vision of a society emerging which is ruled entirely by cold rationality and in which only in dreams will the individual be able to find freedom of expression:

Und ein Mensch, glaubst du, der bleibt heil? Der geht auch kaputt. Er bleibt nicht stehen, fällt nicht um, aber er wird immer schwächer, bringt nichts mehr zustande. Seine wichtigste Beschäftigung wird die Kontrolle über sich selbst, das Verleugnen seiner Mentalität, seiner Gefühle. Er reibt sich auf in dem Kampf gegen sich selbst, stutzt seine Gedanken, ehe er sie denkt, verwirft die Worte, bevor er sie gesprochen hat, miβtraut seinen eignen Urteilen, schämt sich seiner Besonderheiten, verbietet sich seine Gefühle; und wenn sie sich nicht verbieten lassen, verschweigt er sie. Schlimmer noch: Allmählich beginnt er unter der künstlichen Armut seiner Persönlichkeit zu leiden und erfindet sich neue Eigenschaften, die ihm Lob und Anerkennung einbringen. Er wird vernünftig, bedächtig, ordentlich, geschäftig. Anfangs zuckt sein miβhandelter Charakter noch unter den Zwängen, aber langsam stirbt er ab, wagt sich nur noch in den Träumen hervor. … Noch vierzig oder fünfzig solcher Jahre, Luise, und die Menschen langweilen sich an sich selbst zu Tode. Dann sind die letzten Aufsässigen ausgestorben, und niemand wird die Kinder mehr ermutigen, mit der Welt zu spielen. Sie werden vom ersten Tag ihres Lebens an den knöchernen Ernst dieses Lebens kennenlernen. Ihre Lust wird getilgt durch maβvolle Regelung des Essens, des Spiels, des Lernens. Sie lernen Vernunft, ohne je unvernünftig gewesen zu sein. Armselige kretinöse Geschöpfe werden heranwachsen, und die Schöpferischen unter ihnen werden eine unbestimmte Trauer empfinden und eine Sehnsucht nach Lebendigem. Und wehe, sie finden es in sich selbst. Verstoβene und verlachte Auβenseiter werden sie sein. Verrückte, Spinner, Unverbesserliche. Du bist zu lebendig, wird man so einem sagen als schlimmsten Vorwurf. Ich denke nur, unsere Natur ist stärker als jedes noch so perfekte System der Nivellierung und bäumt sich auf, wenn sie zu tief gebeugt wird.

(pp. 78f)

It is inevitable that Josefa should seek to remedy this malaise, to find outlets for her frustrations and to counter-balance those forces which are robbing her of identity. She does this in part—and here we arrive at the nub of the argument—by excursions into fantasy and dream. Fantasy is escape, dream an expression of protest.

These various excursions take different forms. On the street a gust of wind catches her coat and she suddenly finds herself circling in the sky above the Alexanderplatz. Reality and fantasy merge here quite naturally to convey, in poetically literal fashion, a yearning to spread her wings and a desire to escape the deadening routine of everyday reality:

Und jetzt zur Sonne, Dädalus, ach ich weiβ schon, das darf man nicht. Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit; Brüder zum Lichte empor. Wir haben keine Zeit zum Fliegen. Wir müssen uns beeilen, immerzu beeilen. Zum Wurstladen, zur Sparkasse, ins Büro, in den Kindergarten, zur S-Bahn. Überall können wir zu spät kommen. Das Geld ist ausverkauft, die Sparkasse abgefahren, der Chef hat geschlossen, das Kind weint.

(p. 71)

But the motif of flying also signals Josefa's feelings of elation and relief at having completed the modest reportage about B. entirely according to her own lights: ‘Nichts Sensationelles, keine Entdeckung, kein Gedanke, den nicht jeder denken könnte, der einmal durch B. gelaufen ist. Nichts als der zaghafte Versuch, die Verhältnisse zu beschreiben, wie sie vorgefunden wurden. Trotzdem Grund genug zu fliegen’ (p. 73).

In the second part of Flugasche, as Josefa retreats to her bed to recapitulate and review her deepening personal and professional crises and her increasing alienation from her colleagues, the novel moves further into the sphere of her dreams and imagination. The second section opens directly in this vein—‘Es häuften sich die Träume, die in Josefa aufstiegen, sobald sie einen Fluchtweg fand aus den vielen Reden, die um sie herum geführt wurden und die sie selbst führte’ (p. 145)—paving the way for a species of dream cum self-induced dramatization of her inner tensions which anticipates the central preoccupation of her second novel Die Überläuferin and what one reviewer termed the ‘Theater im Kopf.’¹⁷ This very terminology points to a theatricalization of the psychological processes under scrutiny, to a puppet theatre of the soul:

Sie muβte nur auf eine spiegelnde Tischoberfläche oder in graue Wolken starren, bis sich der Vorhang vor ihre Augen spannte, hinter den sie ungehindert ihre Geschöpfe zitieren konnte … ob sie sich würde wehren können gegen ihre hämischen Gestalten. … Sie muβte nur die Augen öffnen, dann war sie ihnen entkommen, konnte sie in die Kiste sperren, bis sie Sehnsucht nach ihnen verspürte und ihnen ihre Spiele gestattete.

(pp. 145f)

Two dream-scenes follow each other in quick succession. In the first, an aged mother and daughter, in an all-pervasive lilac setting, are locked in a psychological and physical battle. The tyrannical domination by the mother, squashing her daughter's wish to learn and expand—‘“Ich will so gerne lesen können,” sagte die jüngere, “es ist so langweilig.” “Du hast deine Bilderbücher.”’ (pp. 147f)—clearly has its roots on one level in Josefa's relationship with Luise, as well as being in a broader sense an expression of the ubiquitous Bevormundung and prescriptiveness emanating from the political apparatus which have such an oppressive effect on her professional life. In a further scene Josefa sees herself—dramatically attired—striding on stage from a front row seat to deliver a passionate, bitter and, in part, ironical speech on the lamentable plight of women in the GDR and the nature of their sexuality. The all-woman audience respond enthusiastically but have seemingly comprehended and absorbed none of the urgency of her comment. Dramatically illustrated here are Josefa's grievances, despair and, perhaps above all, her sense of growing isolation.

What is common to these various examples of fantasy and dream is that they are essentially solitary activities, and solitary activity, in the society which Josefa Nadler inhabits, can as she is well aware be viewed only with suspicion. In an imaginary dialogue with Party colleagues, Josefa hints at the guilt, the culpability which retreat into an individual viewpoint, the exclusion of oneself from the ‘Wir,’ may incur:

Diese Genossen ‘Wir.’ Gegen mein klägliches ‘Ich habe gesehn’ stellen sie ihr unerschütterliches ‘Wir,’ und schon bin ich der Querulant, der Einzelgänger, der gegen den Strom schwimmt, unbelehrbar, arrogant, selbstherrlich. Sie verschanzen sich hinter ihrem ‘Wir,’ machen sich unsichtbar, unangreifbar. Aber wehe, ich gehe auf ihre majestätische Grammatik ein und nenne sie ‘ihr’ oder ‘sie,’ dann hageln ihre strengen Fragen: Wer sind ‘sie’? Wen meinst du konkret? Warum sagst du ‘ihr’ und nicht ‘wir’? Von wem distanzierst du dich?

(p. 33)

We leave unresolved the extent to which attitudes such as this result from her paranoia or a brand of abrasiveness which makes her the sort of person who, as Christian notes, would rather go head first through a wall than use the open door next to it. In this context, where to use ‘I’ rather than ‘we’ is to arouse distrust, in a society which in stressing collectivity seems to monotonize and level down existence, individual imagination and flights of fantasy become a way of escape, of asserting a sense of self. But they are also—by contravening generally accepted values—a way of incurring guilt. In one sense it could be argued that it is Josefa Nadler's very powers of imagination which make her unable to ignore or gloss over the reality of B. and which lead to her controversial and, by implication, criminal reportage. But on another, more complex level, they are the cause of her greater ‘crime.’ In the crucial move which leads to her downfall she leapfrogs accepted procedures and refers her reportage and grievances about the obstructiveness of Party colleagues to higher authority, to the ‘Höchste Rat.’ What is of most relevance to our deliberations here, however, is that the immediate trigger for this reprehensible and culpable move is not her reformer's zeal—the rational, crusading journalist side of her—but her fatal tendency to view a highly prosaic world in poetic terms. One day in Berlin she sees a ministerial car bringing the traffic to a halt. A familiar and everyday sight in the capital perhaps, but one which is transformed by her poetic fantasy into a scene of dramatic eeriness. A strange constellation, perceived only by Josefa, of light, sound, a bird falling dead as it is about to break into song and an official limousine moving as if through a silent vacuum, builds into paradigmatic significance: ‘Die Stille war es, dachte Josefa, die Totenstille. Sie schoben die Stille vor sich her; wohin sie auch kamen, die Stille war vor ihnen da. Sie müssen taub sein davon, dachte Josefa. Sie werden nichts wissen über B., sie können es gar nicht wissen. Sie … fuhr nach Hause, um den Brief zu schreiben’ (p. 176). It is as if the silence which seems in this moment to surround the car and the influential figures it is spiriting along is a symbol of the unreachability of the mighty, a metaphor for the imperviousness of the powerful to the complaints of the insignificant.

The letter which Josefa rushes home to write precipitates disastrous consequences. It alienates colleagues who might have been eventually won over to her reportage, and releases the avalanche of petty accusations and detailing of past misdemeanours which gives the orthodox and opportunistic the chance to debate whether she is worthy of remaining a member of the Party. But of most significance for our present argument is that this ‘crime’ has resulted from her responding with the intoxicating perception of the poet; it flows from the poet's gift of seeing the everyday in highly charged fashion. Imagination has made her culpable. When, on being confronted with her misdemeanour, she subsequently tries to offer this explanation for her behaviour she is met with blank and hostile incomprehension: ‘die schwarze Limousine, der tote Vogel, die Stille, es hätte gespenstisch geklungen, sagte Hans Schütz’ (p. 206).

It is at this point, as we begin perhaps to place the novel in a wider context and confront a society in which there seems little place for the vagaries of the poetic imagination, and where the hypersensitivities of the poet are regarded as pathological—‘Beweis für krankhafte Selbstüberschätzung’ (p. 206)—that a much wider vista opens up. As one example among many of what might befall the artistic temperament at the hands of a system too insistent on its rational and scientific principles, Günter Kunert and his defence of Kleist comes prominently into view.

The final pages of Flugasche find Josefa Nadler in bed, to which she has retreated, and from which perspective in time and place the second part of the novel has been narrated in flashback. Maron's second novel Die Überläuferin opens with its heroine, Rosalind Polkowski, likewise or similarly located: ‘Seit zwei Tagen lag, saβ sie im Bett, auf dem Teppich, im Sessel’ (p. 9). Despite the fact that the names and professional circumstances of their respective protagonists have been changed—Rosalind Polkowski works in an institute for historical research—the two novels nevertheless seem to flow one from the other and the second may be seen as a continuation of the problems left unresolved at the end of the first. In Flugasche we had seen someone relegating herself to the sidelines, put out of action by her failure to realize goals in both her private and professional life. We were witness to a kind of crippling of individual aspiration which was partly self-inflicted, partly the consequence of collective intransigence and expediency. The first novel was set largely in the real world, it dealt with the efforts of an individual to contribute to the solution of serious social problems—pollution and inhuman working conditions. Fantasy here had a directly social application. The imaginative sensibilities of Josefa Nadler enabled her to be shocked by the disturbing realities of life in B., but were also the cause of those breaches of discipline and of accepted norms of political behaviour which made her culpable and led to her fall from favour. They also had a further important role to play in the articulation of her difficulties and anguish, provoking the dreams, nightmares and escapist fantasies through which these were expressed.

In the second novel—billed on the dust jacket as beginning where Flugasche left off—we are presented with a heroine who is literally crippled, who is ‘lahmbeinig’ (p. 40). We move, furthermore, out of the real world, the world of the industrial milieu, the realm of journalism and the sphere of Party officials. Gone completely in Die Überläuferin are the elements of socialist-realist setting and character to be found in Flugasche and instead we move wholly into the realm of memory, fantasy and the world of the socially peripheral. But this novel is more than a continuation of aspects of a process begun in Flugasche, where Josefa Nadler had taken to her bed and increasingly retreated into her inner self. Rosalind Polkowski's story may also be seen as the attempt to show how the pieces of a shattered life may be gathered up, or at least how a modus vivendi and a way of dealing, however escapist, with one's perceived persecutors might be arrived at. The second novel, if not a complete answer to the problems posed by the first, could be interpreted as offering a kind of therapy for them.

What form does this therapy take? As Rosalind gives in to her ‘Bedürfnis nach Verzicht’ (p. 13) and is freed from the obligations of daily routine into a state of limbo, time ceases to be a tyrant and becomes instead ‘einen bemessenen Raum, in dem sie die Erlebnisse sammeln wollte wie Bücher in einer Bibliothek, ihr jederzeit zugängliche und abrufbare Erinnerungen,’ a place in which she is presented with ‘eine nicht endende Orgie phantastischer Ereignisse, ein wunderbares Chaos ohne Ziel und Zweck’ (p. 13). As these fantasies take shape, she becomes—as Josefa Nadler had been—a spectator of her own inner landscape.

After excursions into the past which begin with the catastrophic circumstances of her wartime birth, there develops, through a series of surreal ‘Zwischenspiele,’ a kind of Mad Hatter's Tea Party, a spectacle of endless permutations and possibilities in which Rosalind's ideological and spiritual adversaries, as well as a handful of eccentric women friends, are called up to act out their parts:

Nach einigen Augenblicken der Unsicherheit traute ich meinen Augen und verfolgte voller Spannung das mir dargebotene Spektakel, in meiner Aufmerksamkeit nur gestört durch eine übermütige Freude, hervorgerufen durch meine wunderbare neue Fähigkeit. Ein nüchternes Delirium, vernünftiger Wahnsinn, Traum ohne Schlaf. Sie spielten und spielten, während ich mir ausmalte, wen ich in Zukunft an mein eben gegründetes Zimmertheater berufen könnte. Jeden, alle, ob ich sie kannte oder nicht, alle könnte ich vor mir tanzen und reden lassen, selbst den Papst, wenn die Lust dazu mich ankäme.

(pp. 40f)

The inhabitants of this spectacle think of her as a ‘Gastgeberin.’ In fact she is a ringmaster who can control them at whim, summon or dismiss them as she wishes. The most dominant and aggressive figure, for instance, the man in red uniform, a symbol of authoritarian ideological inflexibility who later turns out to be a ‘Beauftragter der Staatlichen Behörde für Psychokontrolle’ (p. 122), can be immediately despatched into oblivion by the ‘Strafe des Vergessenwerdens’ (p. 41).

What initially appears to be a purely private and escapist process of controlling her fears and anxieties—she has after all had to cut herself off from the outside world in order to enact and exorcize them—is intercut with reflection on past experiences and individuals who have had an important role in her life, to produce a philosophy of much wider significance. This is anchored in the figure of Martha, Rosalind's alter ego and the epitome of the free and anarchic spirit that Rosalind had never been able to be. Martha, at an early point in her life—in a somewhat extravagant episode, typical of the awkward blend of the bizarre and the didactic which occasionally detracts from the effect of Die Überläuferin—had taken on board the philosophy of a renegade mathematics professor turned pirate chief:

du muβt deine nutzloseste Eigenschaft herausfinden. Denn schon ehe du geboren wurdest, hat man dich statistisch aufbereitet und deinen möglichen Nutzen errechnet: die durch dich verursachten Kosten im Kindesalter, die Verwendbarkeit während der Arbeitsphase, die zu erwartenden Nachkommen, die wieder entstehenden Kosten im Alter bis zum statistisch ausgewiesenen Sterbealter, kurz: deine Rentabilität ist veranschlagt und wird erwartet … Aber in jedem Menschen gibt es etwas, das sie nicht gebrauchen können, das Besondere, das Unberechenbare, Seele, Poesie, Musik … Dieses scheinbar nutzloseste Stück von dir muβt du finden und bewahren, das ist der Anfang deiner Biografie.

(pp. 50f)

This subversive, but eminently appealing advice from the pirate professor leads again to what may be seen as the dominant theme of this second of Monika Maron's novels: the culpability which certain kinds of imaginative expression can bring. It has to be said, however, that the dramatization of it in Die Überläuferin seems much more crass than had been the case in Flugasche. What in the first novel was delicately suggested and left to the reader to deduce, is here made painfully explicit. First Martha is called to account by ‘ein führendes Mitglied der Assoziation dichtender Männer’ who accuses her of crimes against literary taste—‘Wir haben Romantizismen, Lyrismen, Pathos, Selbstmitleid, Infantilismus und modisches Feministengeplapper nachweisen können’ (p. 156)—while Rosalind herself is accused of ‘unerlaubte Phantasie in Tateneinheit mit Benutzung derselben im Wiederholungsfall’ (p. 170). In other words, there tumbles out before us a bundle of entirely justified feminist, aesthetic grievances about a male-dominated, excessively rational and scientific world which seeks to shackle the imagination, and particularly the female one, in an ideological straitjacket; in the words of the man from ‘Psychokontrolle’: ‘Wer sagt denn, daβ ich gegen die Phantasie bin. Ich bin sogar für die Phantasie, für eine konstruktive, positive, saubere Phantasie’ (p. 171). Unfortunately, however, not only do we feel bludgeoned by ‘message’ at points such as these, but expression fails to do justice to the passion of the sentiment. Particularly in its final sections, the novel falls into a series of bizarre but essentially arbitrary images, which aim at the poetic allusiveness of the surreal, but decline into cabaretistic ephemerality.

Although neither of these novels has been published in the GDR, one may reasonably surmise that it is for quite different reasons. For all their more obvious closeness to the publicly unarticulated realities of the GDR and the vigour with which they prod its weak spots—those areas in which real existing socialism is palpably defective—there is at least an answer to be made to the criticisms voiced by Josefa Nadler in Flugasche. Through the figure of Luise, a staunch and plausible communist, Maron offers a reasonably persuasive response to them by drawing attention to the social and economic achievements of the GDR and by legitimizing the present system by reference to the iniquities of the past. Josefa herself indeed is briefly stopped in her tracks by Luise's arguments:

keine Gesellschaft kommt ohne ihre Kritiker aus. Aber dann kämpfe und hör auf zu jammern. Das sind nun mal die vielzitierten Mühen der Ebene, und kein Mensch hat uns versprochen, daβ sie ausbleiben. Wenn ich nicht tief überzeugt wäre, daβ unsere Mühe sich lohnt, auch wenn es länger dauert, als wir geglaubt haben, wäre ich längst nicht mehr hier.

(p. 84)

At the heart of Die Überläuferin there lies something potentially far more challenging. If the solution that Rosalind Polkowski has devised to cope with her problems is a pathological one—only by retreating from the world can one deal with it—then the brand of anarchic fantasy it proposes, the advocation by the heroine of the irrational and the mystical and her rejection of the notion that salvation may be found in ‘progress’ and scientific functionalism, constitute a profound threat—and not just to the ethos of the GDR and other socialist societies. Monika Maron has observed of her heroine Rosalind Polkowski:

Wenn ich glauben würde, das Problem dieser Figur in meinem Buch läge nur in der DDR, würde ich das Land verlassen. Wenn ich glauben würde, ich wäre frei davon, wenn ich das Land wechselte, würde ich gehen. Ich gehe eher von Grenzen aus, die innerhalb unserer Zivilisation liegen, in der Art der Industriegesellschaft, in der wir leben. Im Westen sind die Mechanismen gewiβ anders, aber sie würden mich auf ähnliche Weise belasten.¹⁸

The need, it would seem, for the liberating effects of fantasy and the poetic imagination is universal. It is, she implies, as potentially subversive to a capitalist as to a socialist way of ordering things.

Notes

1. Gert Neumann, Die Schuld der Worte, Frankfurt/Main, 1979.

2. Monika Maron, ‘Warum zieht es Euch nach Sachsen?,’ ZEITmagazin, 10 July 1987, p. 6.

3. Monika Maron left the GDR in June 1988 (after the completion of this paper) on a three-year visa.

4. See Egmont Hesse, ‘Geheimsprache “Klandestinität.” Gespräch mit Gert Neumann,’ Neue Rundschau, vol. 98, no. 2, 1987, p. 6.

5. Ibid., p. 8.

6. On the cover of Gert Neumann, Elf Uhr, Frankfurt/Main, 1981.

7. Harald Hartung, ‘Der Krieg gegen die Sprache,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 June 1979.

8. Monika Maron, Flugasche, Frankfurt/Main, 1981. Page references in the text are to this edition.

9. Monika Maron, Die Überläuferin, Frankfurt/Main, 1986. Page references in the text are to this edition.

10. Monika Maron, ‘Kein Recht, sondern Gnade,’ ZEITmagazin, 2 October 1987, p. 6.

11. Monika Maron, Flight of Ashes, trans. David Newton Marinelli, London, 1986.

12. See Fritz J. Raddatz, ‘Für jeden Autor ist die Welt anders. Ein ZEIT-Gespräch mit dem aus der DDR ausgewanderten Schriftsteller Thomas Brasch über sein neues Buch Kargo und seine Erfahrungen im Westen,’ Die Zeit, 22 July 1977.

13. In Neumann, Die Schuld der Worte, pp. 16-60.

14. Wolf Biermann, Mit Marx- und Engelszungen, Berlin, 1968, p. 18.

15. Dieter Eue, Ketzers Jugend, Hamburg, 1982, p. 325.

16. See Günter Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt. Eine Ortsbestimmung, Munich, 1986, pp. 115-69.

17. Elsbeth Pulver, ‘Theater im Kopf. Monika Maron: Die Überläuferin,’ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 January 1987, p. 37.

18. ‘Literatur, das nicht gelebte Leben. Gespräch mit der Ostberliner Schriftstellerin Monika Maron,’ Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 March 1987.