Introduction

In the autumn of 1989, I was to deliver a talk at Georgia Southern College on my recent visits to the German Democratic Republic, including six months the previous year and a month the next spring. As the date approached, I found myself writing version after version of the speech, trying to keep up with the torrent of events that the world was watching on television: thousands fleeing the GDR in packed trains, demonstrations on Berlin's Alexanderplatz, beatings of innocent people by the East German secret police, candlelight marches in Leipzig, and, climactically, the opening of the Berlin Wall on the evening of November 9. By the time I gave the talk, a revolution had been accomplished. Afterward, as the GDR faded away into "the new federal states," I endured a modest amount of ribbing from colleagues who wondered whether I still had a field to work in: how, after all, could one be a scholar of GDR life and letters without a GDR?

The question of the place and significance of GDR studies, including GDR literature, is an important one, because by historically and critically accounting for this strange, forty-year episode in German history, we are also accounting for ourselves, i.e., the modern age, the West, and, of course, "Germany." The urgency of this accounting was made evident by the early efforts after 1989 to evade or deny it, to close the book on the uneasy balance of terror and conviction that has marked the twentieth century. In America, State Department analyst Francis Fukuyama created a furor by suggesting that the end of the Cold War amounted to the "end of history." In Germany, parallel controversies erupted among literary critics and historians, with the Kritikerstreit turning on attempts to denounce and dismiss GDR literature as propagandistic tripe, and the Historikerstreit turning on revisionist efforts to "move beyond" the German atrocities of the Nazi era. German popular politics bore a similar stamp of hostility toward remembering and assimilating the past, as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl successfully campaigned on a platform dismissing the East German past as a criminal aberration and promising immediate and seamless Eastern integration with the West. Obviously, these efforts to escape history have not fared well over the last last ten years, and it has again become clear that a sober understanding of the past is needed for even a rudimentary understanding of the present. In the field of literary studies, East Germany now represents both a closed period (like Romanticism) and a still vital movement of writers with a distinctly East German voice or viewpoint. The questions raised in and by this literature have lost nothing of their currency, questions concerning the moral responsibilities of individuals in modern society, the social costs of advanced capitalism, the nature of freedom, the roots of oppression. The analysis here of the writings of Christoph Hein, the most successful of the GDR writers who professionally survived the post-1989 transition to a unified Germany, will delve into all of these areas.

Hein embodies the predisposition of East German writers to seek ways of escaping the confinements of ideological thinking (whether their own or others'). The project is not a trivial one, for it helped prepare the way for the collapse of the communist regime in 1989, a bloodless revolution that could easily have been a bloody replay of Tienanmen Square, had not the GDR leadership lost faith in its own ideology, and with it, the rationale for its rule. However much the GDR's geopolitical significance may have boiled down to serving as a buffer state between the Soviet Union and the West, it also bore an ideological meaning for its founders, its ruling class, and even its beleaguered populace. East Germany was at least a partial realization of Marx's dream of socialism on German soil, symbolizing a vindication of the failed German communist movement, a repudiation of the crimes of the people and leadership of fascist Germany, an assertion of the rights of all people to food, shelter, and employment, and a step toward communist utopia. Not just in the rhetoric of its leaders but often enough in the hearts of its citizenry, the GDR was a civilized alternative to the society based on greed and exploitation that began immediately to the West. The justification, in short, for its existence, was a degree of moral superiority to the West that was proclaimed by official ideology in the face of all economic, social, and political facts to the contrary. Throughout the GDR's existence, the moral force of its Enlightenment ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity) was used to distract attention from those facts, and from the responsibility of Leninist centralism for causing them, and for corrupting the ideals themselves. The legitimacy of the socialist regime, with all it warts, rested on the shaky basis of a vast system of taboos, of truths that could not be spoken, least of all in the national literature that was supposed to be helping the Party build socialism. Christoph Hein's simple maneuver was to find ways of stating the obvious, and thus to break through the deceptions of self and others that allowed his society to function. 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 its constitution) in order to recover the Enlightenment ideals in whose name it functioned. And in a country as saturated by ideology as the GDR, this rhetorical strategy was tantamount to hurling bombs at the state itself. Deconstructing ideology was a means of undermining the state; though a less dramatic form of dissidence than street demonstrations, hunger strikes, and prison-house martyrdom, it was no less effective in bringing down the edifice of power. The conformist, true-believing GDR fell first, not Poland or Czechoslovakia with their cynical leadership and high-profile dissident movements. Hein, with other leading artists and intellectuals, was an important contributor to the mood of disgust and disappointment that erased the GDR from the map of nations.

This book, as an essay in literary criticism, approaches Hein's works by focusing on a number of key thematic concerns, with discussion of historical, political, and other sorts of backgrounds when they are central to an understanding of the works. Among these concerns are the role of political ideology in social and private behavior, the mirroring of political oppression and violence in intimate relations, the impact of history (war, tyranny, revolution) on individual lives, the human costs of modernity, and the nature of social responsibility, especially for intellectuals. Against the continuing tendency, particularly in (Western) Germany, to read everything Eastern as politically corrupted, culturally backward, and morally deficient, my critical gesture here is to treat Hein's works as worthy of close reading and interpretation in their own right, not merely as keys to a Cold War political landscape, or as veiled protests against a now-defunct state.

A concentration on intrinsic aspects of Hein's fiction may seem strange in view of the topicality of so much of Hein's writing, especially the fiction, which strives to reflect a true, unbiased image of everyday GDR reality. Yet, paradoxically, Hein's response to the reality of life and thought in the GDR is revealed precisely in his stylistic striving toward authorial detachment, which is better understood as a flight from ideological distortion than a confident assertion of some personal world view. World views are cheap, and the Cold War provided two severely overrated ones. Hein's subject matter, therefore -- the object of all his purported objectivity -- is really of less political moment than the stance of detached objectivity itself. Hein assumes responsibility for telling his stories, as Tacitus (the first chronicler of the Germans) promised in the Annales, "sine ira et studio" (I.1), without passion or prejudice. This is a stance which is logically untenable but ethically necessary: untenable because pure, detached objectivity can never be more than an ideal, and necessary because in Hein's fictive world, the alternative to the search for truth is the embrace of every kind of falsehood, whether political or personal. And though Hein resists characterization as a moralist, his work everywhere attests to a moral sense that values social engagement, honesty, courage, and endurance. He describes his moral and artistic stance in a post-1989 GDR interview:

I understand myself to be a chronicler, one who describes with great accuracy what he has seen. Thus I stand in an honorable tradition running from Johann Peter Hebel to Kafka. But the writer is not a preacher, someone adding his own commentary to the facts of the case. I avoid preaching, but my own position is sufficiently clear. You can't write and remain concealed at the same time. Without backbone, writing is impossible. ("Die alten Themen" 38)

Hein's resistance to the label "preacher" or "moralist" stems from his rejection of the pedagogical (i.e., moralizing, propagandizing) role forced upon East German authors by Socialist Realist dogma, which enlisted writers in Stalin's project of engineering human souls. Rather than telling his readers what to think, Hein tries to provoke them into thinking their own thoughts, just as the protagonist of his play Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q (The True Story of Ah Koo, 1983), who yearns to make an earth-shaking pronouncement, ultimately confesses that he has no message for the audience. His companion remarks, "They should think of something themselves" (107). In a society marked by Bevormündung, i.e., paternalistic guidance in all aspects of life, this modest aesthetic renunciation announces a moral position amounting to political dissidence. In adopting such a position, Hein participates in a skeptical, anti-ideological project undertaken by many GDR writers, most notably Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. Hein's own distinctiveness lies in his passionate belief in the power of facts to speak for themselves if only given the chance.¹

My emphasis on Hein's fiction comes somewhat at the expense of his plays, which are dealt with more cursorily, but there are both pragmatic and critical reasons for such an approach. A work in English on a German author clearly means to appeal to a broader audience than just German scholars, and accordingly, I hope here to engage students and scholars of comparative literature, post-colonial studies, and theorists of ideology while also satisfying the standards current among Germanists. I am meanwhile cognizant of the fact that Hein's plays remain largely untranslated and unperformed in the United States and (to a lesser degree) in the United Kingdom, whereas two of his novels have been published in the United States in English translations. The pragmatic overlaps with the critical when one further considers that Hein's renown in German-speaking countries has followed more from his fiction than from his plays. Specifically, Hein's novella Der fremde Freund (1983, translated as The Distant Lover, 1989) won him inter-German and international fame.² The same is likely to remain true in the English speaking countries, if only for reasons of cultural and theatrical distance between the East German and Anglo-American traditions. Hein's spare, disquieting fictions have, on the other hand, proved to be far more easily transferable across cultural boundaries. Important scholarly directions that this book will not pursue at length thus include Hein's situatedness within the Brechtian/GDR theatrical culture, as well as Hein's indebtedness to nineteenth-century German predecessors in both drama and fiction.

The chapters that follow deal with the entire range of Hein's thematic concerns. The introductory Chapter One, "A Playwright turns Chronicler," sketches the social and political contexts for Hein's work, surveys the most important among his early plays, and prepares for his transformation from a playwright into (primarily) a fiction writer. Such plays as Schlötel oder Was solls (Schlötel or What's the Use?, 1974), Cromwell (1980), and Lassalle fragt Herrn Herbert nach Sonja. Die Szene ein Salon (Lassalle asks Herr Herbert about Sonja. The Scene a Salon, 1980) break with received Socialist Realist dogma while dissecting the personalities of both historical and fictitious reformer-idealists. By representing the collapse and dissolution of initially idealistic revolutions through the disintegration of the individuals that lead them, Hein begins to map out the relations between public and private that absorb his later efforts. This culminates in Ah Q, where Hein parodies the alleged guiding role of reformer-idealists in historical movements (something already deconstructed in the earlier plays) and lays out the problematic of social engagement vs. social withdrawal that will dominate the longer fiction, beginning with Der fremde Freund.

Chapter Two, "Individuals in the Slough of History: Hein's early Short Stories and Passage," shows the emergence of Hein's trademark stance as a "chronicler," depicting ordinary people in the ordinary extremity of twentieth-century German life. Central to this is the story group "Aus: Ein Album Berliner Stadtansichten" (From: An Album of Berlin Postcards, 1980), where, drawing on Kleist and Hebel as models, Hein perfects his detached, documentary method. Closely related is the play Passage (1987), which can be seen as a dramatic treatment of the moral puzzle haunting the early stories: What is the responsibility of individuals caught up in historic forces that no individual can reasonably hope to change, amid circumstances leaving no room for hope?

Chapter Three, "Power and Repression in Der fremde Freund," is an extended discussion of what probably remains Hein's most perfectly realized work. The seductively reasonable first-person narrator gradually reveals an emotionally sterile interior life that represses and reenacts the political and sexual brutality she has endured, a life totally disengaged from society though eminently "successful." A perfectly adapted and perfectly conforming modern woman, the narrator is an indictment of the many readers who find her world view alarmingly familiar. The chapter also provides a detailed sample of Eastern German critical discourse, illustrating the ideological context alluded to in earlier chapters and showing how the cultural establishment accommodated itself to challenging works.

Chapter Four, "Hein's Historians: Fictions of Social Memory," presents the development of Hein's ideas about history and literature, as worked out both in his essays and in works of fiction including "Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois" (Invitation to the Lever Bourgeois, 1980), Horns Ende (Horn's Fate, 1985), and Der Tangospieler (1989; translated as The Tango Player, 1992). Acknowledging that all historical narratives are personal, partial, slanted, and flawed, Hein argues for a multiplicity of such fragmentary viewpoints, where no single view dominates, and truth may be inferred through comparison, contradiction, and competition. This is what Hein means by his call for Öffentlichkeit, the free and open discussion of ideas, a prerequisite for true culture and something still missing from the GDR during its last decade of existence. The works discussed are all explorations of the potential for courage, cowardice, folly, and cynicism inherent in the key social role of chronicler/historian. "Einladung," an early effort in this vein, consists of an imagined monologue by the French dramatist and court historian Jean Racine, revealing the cost of his personal compromises with absolutist power. Horns Ende was the GDR's first honest look at the reality of everyday life in an ordinary provincial town under Stalinism in the 1950s, including its connections and continuities with the Nazi years and before. The central event -- the suicide of a historian named Horn, who has been accused of espionage -- is told from various contradictory perspectives, such as those of the apparatchik mayor, an embittered local physician, a young boy, etc. The problem of how to tell the truth about history (and the many reasons for not doing so) becomes the theme of the book, and is debated explicitly and implicitly among the different narrators and characters. Der Tangospieler is a satirical account of an apolitical historian's ups and downs in the political situation of the late-sixties GDR. The ultimate point appears to be that the more detached, cynical, and opportunistic a person may be, the better suited he is to the needs and methods of a totalitarian society. The central character is the perfect anti-historian.

The book's concluding Chapter Five, "Chronicling the Cold War's Losers and Winners," looks at Hein's literary contribution to the collapse of the GDR regime and at new directions suggested by the fictive and dramatic work that followed a hiatus brought about by political activism and illness. The chapter discusses the so-called Wende-play Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (1989; translated as The Knights of the Round Table, 1995), which depicts the Grail Knights as a gang of corrupted idealists with more than a passing resemblance to the GDR Politburo; the first post-Wende play, Randow (1994), which paints a bleak picture of exploitation and opportunism in the new united Germany; and the first post-Wende novel, Das Napoleon-Spiel (The Napoleon Game, 1993), which provoked irritation in the West for its unflattering portrait of a West Berlin psychopath. I discuss finally Hein's two most recent books. The first is Exekution eines Kalbes (Execution of a Calf, 1994), a collection of short stories spanning two decades and a dizzying variety of styles, from additional "Berliner Stadtansichten" and dramatic monologues to surrealistic tales that seem to announce a new direction for Hein. The second, Von allem Anfang an (From the very Beginning, 1997), is a "fictive autobiography" set in the mid-1950s rural GDR. Its setting notwithstanding, the book shows Hein applying his GDR-honed chronicling methods for the first time in a totally post-Wende context. In general, the old Hein critical of Western excess, smugness, and rapacity is still in evidence, but his notion of "chronicling" seems to be undergoing revision. While it was already subversive simply to state the facts in the GDR, Hein's latest writings have evinced signs of a move toward indirection, allegory, and ironic self-positioning within German literary and political history. In the brave new world of unified Germany, Hein may be finding Kafka an even better model than his much-admired Kleist.

Many people and institutions contributed to the making of this book. Heidrun Wimmersberg, now of Bäyerischer Rundfunk, first introduced me to Hein's writing and has kept me supplied with research materials. Peter Graetz introduced me to Hein himself. My attendance at the New Hampshire Symposia on GDR Studies in 1987 and 1989 was invaluable. A Fulbright grant in 1988 allowed me to spend six months in the GDR reading, writing, traveling, and learning: in retrospect, precious time spent in a republic about to vanish. I was fortunate to have one of Hein's important East German critics, Frank Hörnigk, serve as my Betreuer (a term spinnable as either mentor or minder) during that stay, along with Elke Hansen, who grew from an advisor into a friend. Georgia Southern University, through faculty development grants as well as financial support from the Department of English and Philosophy, helped fund my further travel to the GDR in 1989 and to the expanded FRG in 1991, 1992, 1994, and 1998. Thanks go as well to Christoph Hein, who has been generous with his time and commentary.