Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film (review)

Of the many anthologies and books devoted to literary responses to German unification, this might be one of the best to date. It consists of fourteen articles that span a wide variety of literary and cinematic reactions to the tumultuous developments in Germany after 1989. The anthology is divided into three sections. In the first, “Authors and their Worlds,” each of the five essays deals with a single author and his or her literary response to unification: Helga Schütz, Monika Maron, Günter de Bruyn, Volker Braun, and Thomas Brussig. All these authors come from the GDR, and all, except Brussig, are of the older generation. Even so, they represent different voices from the former GDR, from Maron's harsh criticism of the GDR to Braun's criticism of the West. The authors also use different strategies to deal with their own past in a country that no longer exists and to come to grips with the new Germany. Ann Rider demonstrates that Schütz in her novel Vom Glanz der Elbe is searching for a more balanced relationship between East and West Germany and that the novel rejects a new Germany in which Western dominance and values obliterate everything that once constituted East Germany. As can be expected, Maron, who left the GDR in 1988, does not have such a conciliatory attitude towards the former GDR. Stuart Taberner's article on her works from Flugasche to Pavels Briefe shows that much of her writing is a devastating critique of the GDR. She uses her own troubled experiences in the GDR to create texts that also serve the purpose of liberating herself from her own past. Her fiction can be seen as one example of the sudden increase of autobiographical writing in postunification Germany. James Reece's article on de Bruyn discusses not only theoretical aspects of autobiographical writing but also which roles honesty and memory play in creating a “good” autobiography. Using de Bruyn's theoretical writings on autobiography as well as his two autobiographies, Zwischenbilanz and Vierzig Jahre, Reece shows that a successful autobiography can give reader as well as author new insights on a psychological and historical level. He contrasts de Bruyn's honesty with Hermann Kant's attempts to use autobiographical writing to defend his activities as head of the GDR Schriftstellerverband. In the two remaining articles in this section Rolf Jucker uses Braun's texts to back up his own criticism of western capitalist society, and Rachel Halverson analyzes Brussig's comical best-seller Helden wie wir, concluding that Brussig, even though his novel plays out in the GDR, nevertheless speaks equally to both East and West Germans.

The four articles in the second section, “Multiple Voices – Generational Views,” all focus on several authors. In her article on the intellectual opposition to unification, Karoline Oppen examines how Stefan Heym, Walter Jens, and Helga Köningsdorf intervened into the political debate about reunification from the summer of 1989 to the summer of 1990 and how the media reacted to them. Oppen's thesis is that the West German media succeeded in silencing authors and other intellectuals who voiced opinions different from the mainstream West German opinions. Oppen shows that these attempts to exclude critical authors started long before the well-publicized attacks on Christa Wolf. The media reaction to Heym is particularly revealing. Before the fall of the wall, Heym's critique of the GDR was widely publicized in the West, in particular in prestigious media such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. This changed after the fall of the wall. Despite Heym's conciliatory attitude towards unification, he was attacked as an incorrigible socialist, and his articles calling for democratic reform and a fair reunification process were largely ignored, his literary works disparaged. Similar fates befell Jens and Köningsdorf. Alisa Kasle's article views the process...