Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage

203 Pages·2017·4.705 MB·English

by  Robert Blankenship

Suicide in East
German Literature
Robert Blankenship
Suicide in East German Literature
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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture
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Suicide in East
German Literature
Fiction, Rhetoric, and
the Self-Destruction
of Literary Heritage
Robert Blankenship
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2017 Robert Blankenship
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation,
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2017
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-574-2
ISBN-10: 1-57113-574-X
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blankenship, Robert, 1980– author.
Title: Suicide in East German literature : fiction, rhetoric, and the self-destruction of
literary heritage / Robert Blankenship.
Description: Rochester, New York : Camden House, 2017. | Series: Studies in German
literature, linguistics, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017022531| ISBN 9781571135742 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 157113574X (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Suicide in literature. | German literature—Germany (East)—
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PT3710.S85 B53 2017 | DDC 830.93548—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022531
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Rhetoric of Suicide in East Germany 1
1: Suicide as an Antifascist Literary Trope: 1945–71 14
2: Suicide and the Fluidity of Literary Heritage: Ulrich
Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. 25
3: Remembering to Death: Werner Heiduczek’s Tod am Meer 47
4: Suicide and the Reevaluation of Classicism: Christa Wolf’s
Kein Ort. Nirgends 71
5: Suicidal Voices: Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine and Sibylle
Muthesius’s Flucht in die Wolken 95
6: Specters of Suicide: Christoph Hein’s Horns Ende 110
Conclusion: The Reality of Fictional Suicides 138
Epilogue: The Literariness of East German Literature 144
Notes 147
Bibliography 171
Index 185
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Acknowledgments
MANY PEOPLE HAVE HELPED ME with this project, so many, in fact, that
it would be impossible to list them all here. I am truly grateful to
all of them. I must, however, expressly mention a few people who have
helped in extraordinary and enduring ways. Richard Langston has long
been a key mentor for me and was crucially helpful in the formative stages
of this project. He deserves special thanks. I am grateful to the Berlin-
based graphic designer, muralist, and general guru of all things visual,
Alexis Laskaris, for creating the image on the cover of this book, an image
that I believe supports the underlying claim of this monograph. I thank
my colleagues and students at California State University, Long Beach,
for providing me with a welcoming and energetic place to read, write,
teach, learn, and productively argue about German literature and cinema.
In the parlance of our institution, Go Beach! The entire team at Camden
House has been fantastic. Jim Walker has been particularly helpful. He
has been a reliable and enthusiastic champion of this project for a long
time. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for providing
thoroughly helpful reviews. A few brief passages in chapter 6 are adapted
from my chapter “Hamlet as Unmarked Intertext: The Imperative of
Remembrance in Horn’s End” in The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet
for European Cultures, edited by Ruth J. Owen (Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 189–96. As always, I am grateful for the sup-
port and love I receive daily from Courtney and Jeremiah.
Robert Blankenship
Long Beach, California
April 2017
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Introduction: The Rhetoric of Suicide
in East Germany
FICTIONAL SUICIDES FROM the German Democratic Republic have been
greatly misunderstood. One assumption seems to be that suicide in
GDR fiction was primarily a direct reflection of real suicides in GDR soci-
ety. Several scholars and critics who have dealt with this issue have main-
tained that view.1 Further, conversations I have had while working on this
project, both with scholars of German literature and with interested non-
academics, have revealed that many people assume that suicide in GDR
literature must represent some realistic reflection of politically motivated
suicide in the GDR. Such assumptions seem fair on the surface. It might
seem that suicide was rampant in the GDR, given the regime’s attempt to
hide suicide rates. The quantity of major works of GDR literature, espe-
cially in the 1970s and 1980s, with suicide as a major theme might also
cause one to surmise that suicide rates in the GDR were anomalously
high. It might seem too that writers used literature as a secret code to
communicate about the real problem of suicide. And Florian Maria Georg
Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film Das Leben der
Anderen only reinforces these assumptions. However, such assumptions
about the nature of suicide in GDR literature are mostly false. While sui-
cide was a taboo topic in the GDR, the fictional suicides do not primar-
ily reflect a problem of suicide in GDR society, perceived or real. These
fictional suicides are much more complex. Above all, they are literary.
Read closely, they reveal a wealth of literary devices and theorizations of
literary problems. Taken together, they form an interesting literary his-
tory, one that is situated among other developments in GDR literature,
including, for example, the movement from socialist realism toward a
belated modernism, the toying with taboos following Erich Honecker’s
1971 assertion that there were to be no taboos in GDR literature (with
the problematic caveat that the writer must write as a socialist), and
the movement of intertextuality from the notion of cultural and literary
heritage (Kulturerbe) as an antidote to fascist aesthetics toward the use
of intertextuality as a method of reevaluating and eventually eroding
literary heritage.
The story of intertextuality in GDR literature is a particularly impor-
tant parallel to the story of suicide in that literature. Most suicides in
GDR literature, at least in the 1970s and 1980s, are intertwined with
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