Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Einheit 1989–2000. Fremdheit zwischen Ost und West by Arne Born (review)

Fittingly published in the year of the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Arne Born's Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Einheit 1989–2000 is the singular attempt to provide a wide-ranging survey of the literature of the post-Wende years. His guiding question is how German literature reacted to reunification not just with regard to political, societal, and historical criteria, but in its "ästhetische Eigengesetzlichkeit" (12), i.e., by taking into account its genuine aesthetic qualities. Born states early on that Wendeliteratur, limited here to the time frame from 1989 to 2000 (for the reasons, see 26–28), is less characterized by aesthetic innovation than by its attempts to comment on, evaluate, and criticize the processes of profound historical transformation Germany experienced in the first decade post-unification.

In its integration of the socio-historical context in which literature is written, Born follows literary historians such as Horst A. Glaser in his Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur (1980–1991) and Viktor Žmegač's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (1978–1984), who established the close and crucial interconnections between literary production and social and historical developments. Similar to these models, the Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Einheit asks how the momentous changes in the economy, politics, and society that the fall of the Wall and the ensuing unification of Germany brought have been reflected in literature and changed it in the process (24). Differences in East and West German mentalities prove to be the most significant factor here and are at the center of Born's argument: "Fremdheit," he contends, is the main mentality paradigm not just of the first decade after unification; it becomes the most important feature to guide his analysis.

To give depth to this argument, in Chapter Two Born traces theories of foreignness as they have been developed in a broad range of fields, such as political theory, sociology, cultural studies, and psychology; in the process he establishes a theoretical framework for the following literary readings. Studies that research the notion of "Fremdheit" with social-science categories identify as important factors for feelings of estrangement the inner unity of Germany, differing perceptions of the unification process, stereotyping, different lifestyles and mentalities, as well as two distinct cultures in East and West Germany. Born's concise summaries shed much light on the broader societal developments that have shaped the country since 1990 and arguably still have an influence on united Germany today.

Born introduces what he calls a "Prozessmodell" (28) in order to structure his study, with the help of which he characterizes the development of literary texts within the first decade post-unification. He establishes four distinct phases and categories: from texts that politicize and comment explicitly on the early unification process (roughly 1989–1993) to more subjective investigations (1993–95) and literary constructions (1994–97) that pay more attention to aesthetic form and complex social and historical formations than previously published texts. The last phase (1997–2000) shows similarities to the third one but distinguishes itself by consciously referring back to earlier traditions of realism. In a fashion typical of German academic studies, Born creates numerous subchapters, further differentiating texts into "PHASEN, SCHREIBARTEN, Textgruppen und Literarische Haltungen" (35), which he categorizes "nach je spezifischen Aspekten, die induktiv aus den jeweiligen Texten selbst gewonnen werden" (26). While some form of detailed differentiation is certainly necessary to manage the sheer amount of texts analyzed here in different genres, the result is a somewhat pedantic structure that leads to confusion rather than clarification.

Under the heading "Politisierung," Chapter Three comprises readings of a great number of essayistic texts, plays, and early Wende prose written by iconic GRD authors (among them Volker Braun, Stefan Heym, Christa Wolf, Günter de Bruyn, Heiner Müller), West German authors (such as Günter Grass, Peter Schneider, Martin Walser), and East/West German authors who had left the GDR before its demise (Monika Maron, Wolf...