Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein's Literature of Dissent.

By David W. Robinson. Rochester, N. Y.: Camden House, 1999. xvii + 237 pages.

$55.00

This study of the playwright, novelist, and essayist Christoph Hein, is an ambitious book that attempts to situate the author within the political and cultural landscape of the former GDR and post-Wende Germany. At the same time it seeks to discuss Hein's works on their own terms, as literary texts deserving of a reading within but also beyond the immediate historical circumstances of their creation. In doing so, Robinson's study is as much a chapter in the history of East (and later, Eastern) German cultural politics as it is a larger meditation on creativity versus historical contingency, on language and its relation to lived experience.

In approaching an author such as Hein, who constantly couples overt political critique with deeply philosophical self-critique, the prismatic approach is necessary, and perhaps also necessarily problematic. Throughout one thinks of one of the important influence on Hein, the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who wrote of the relation between a phenomenon and its historical context: "Die Zeit Der Geschichte ist unendlich in jeder Richtung und unerfullt in jedem Augenblick. Das heißt, es ist kein einzelnes empirisches Ereignes denkbar, das eine notwendige Beziehung zu der bestimmten Zeitlage hatte, in der es vorfällt." Central to this philosophy of history and key to its reception in Hein's own work is the role of language--its ambiguity, multiplicity, and deferral of meaning--in historical understanding and political critique. This is the complex textual and linguistic aspect of power Robinson seeks to weave into his analysis throughout with varying degrees of success, marking one of the work's most compelling aspects.

Robinson organizes his study through a combined thematic and chronological approach, outlining Hein's turn from "playwright to chronicler." Focusing primarily on Hein's novels, most notably his work best known in the English-speaking world, Der fremde Freund (The Distant Lover), he offers careful readings of the author's most compelling themes. These include the saturation of political ideology into private lives, the role of the individual in larger historical processes, the toll exacted on individual autonomy by the forces of modernity, and, perhaps inevitably, one's social responsibility against the backdrop of an eroded sense of self.

At the center of Robinson's analysis is the concept of "chronicling," a term Hein himself uses for his narrative strategy and which Robinson understands as his most important political and aesthetic gesture. As a union of politics and poetics, Robinson finds the "sober," "distanced" narrator, perhaps used to best effect in Hein's novel Horns Ende, essential to the author's literary voice as well as to his ideological critique. "Speaking the unspeakable became for Hein a strategy for deconstructing the dominant ideology (revealing the gaps in its logic, laying bare the interests at work in it) in order to recover the Enlightenment ideals in whose name it pretended to function," Robinson argues. "And in a country as saturated by ideology as the GDR, this rhetorical strategy was tantamount to hurling bombs at the state itself" (xiii).

While this thesis borders on an anarchist bravado that the ever self-critical Hein has himself downplayed in interviews over the years, fortunately Robinson is careful to back it up with more sophisticated analysis of the effect of Hein's narrative stance. To a large extent this comes from working with Louis Althusser's more nuanced definition of "ideology," a term not limited to official articulations of the party line, but instead encompassing the complex experienced and imagined relationship to state power within individual consciousness. Using this definition, an affront to power is at once a critical examination of one's own belief system, a simultaneous assertion and questioning of identity and individual autonomy.

According to Robinson, this is precisely the labor of Hein's narrative chronicler: generating the distanced, yet insightful voice of the author's most engaged and aesthetically nuanced work. Speaking in removal from central ideological assumptions of the GDR--most importantly, that communism is the clear victor of history and that Germany's Nazi past has been overcome in the creation of a socialist state--the chronicler renders explosive even the most sober descriptions of East German lived experience, as fissures rupture without the cement of ideologically-driven explanations. History thus reveals itself less as a unified progression or verifiable truth and more as an assemblage of highly subjective fragments, with, for example, the supposed transcendence of fascism in the GDR more akin to a willful forgetting.

In making these points, Robinson's analysis is insightful and supportive of his thesis of the deconstructive nature of Hein's work, at least as it regards "chronicling" as narrative stance. The shortfall of his study, however, is that Robinson's emphasis on narrative position comes at the expense of a closer examination of narrative performance, that is, not only how Hein's language is used to situate its critique but also how it enacts or puts it into motion. The adjectives Robinson relies on most frequently to describe Hein's chronicling voice, such as "detached," "clinical," "flat," "unadorned," and "realistic," often do not seem to do justice to a language he affords with a highly destabilizing impact.

Robinson might well be even more effective in arguing for Hein's deconstructive force if he were more adept at tracking its movements and interdependence on a linguistic as well as thematic level. Yet this is a development Robinson does well to home in on Hein's later works, writing: "While it was subversive simply to state the facts in the GDR, Hein's latest writings have shown signs of a move toward indirection, allegory, and ironic self-positioning within German literary and political history. In the brave new world of united Germany, Hein may be finding Kafka an even better model than his much-admired Kleist" (xvii). From the standpoint of authorial intention and stylistic modeling, Robinson's point is indeed reasonable. Yet here and throughout Robinson's study, one cannot help wondering if this "brave new world," with its many unknowns necessitating language's performative critique, did not exist well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, even amid the ideological certainties of the GDR.