Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Disease, Death, and Desire Pre-1989: Christa Wolf’s Symptomatic GDR Bodies
- 2 Christa Wolf’s Goodbye to Socialism?: Illness, Healing, and Faith since 1990
- 3 Retrospective Imagination in Post-GDR Literature: Gender, Violence, and Politics in Medical Discourses
- 4 Haunted in Post-Wall Germany: Sickness, Symptomatic Bodies, and the Specters of the GDR
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Disease, Death, and Desire Pre-1989: Christa Wolf’s Symptomatic GDR Bodies
- 2 Christa Wolf’s Goodbye to Socialism?: Illness, Healing, and Faith since 1990
- 3 Retrospective Imagination in Post-GDR Literature: Gender, Violence, and Politics in Medical Discourses
- 4 Haunted in Post-Wall Germany: Sickness, Symptomatic Bodies, and the Specters of the GDR
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
IN ANTJE RÁVIC STRUBEL's Sturz der Tage in die Nacht, Erik is called the heir to the East (39)—the heir to a country he cannot even remember. Even in 2009, the young man who was five years old when the Berlin Wall came down identifies as an Ossi, the colloquial term employed particularly by East Germans who proudly self-identify as having been raised in the former GDR (37). It is important to him to know whether Inez is also from the East—quite a surprise for the forty-one-year-old woman, who has tried for years to escape her GDR past (36). She explains her dislike of the categorization “East German,” which she feels turns her into the abject who does not conform to the West German standard—even for Erik, a young Ossi:
Du willst hören, wie das Leben und die Liebe und die Hoffnung zerstört werden, … so dass du … denkst, in so einem Arbeiterund Bauernland möchtest du aber nicht gelebt haben, wie gut, dass das vorbei ist, dass das bloß eine Geschichte ist. Nur der Mensch, der täglich auf seinen zwei Beinen durch diese Geschichte gelaufen ist, hat nicht auf einmal zwei neue Beine … Und das kränkt ihn, Erik. Und es kränkt ihn auch, dass er gezwungen ist, sich auf diese Weise an sein Leben zu erinnern… . Es kränkt ihn, dass das sein Leben gewesen sein soll. (111)
[You want to hear how life, love, and hope are destroyed … so that you … think, you would not have liked to live in such a workers’ and farmers’ country, fortunately, this is all past and just a story. But the person who every day walked on their two legs through this story doesn't suddenly have two new legs … And that hurts, Erik. And it also hurts that they are forced to remember their life in such a way… . It hurts that this is supposed to have been their life.]
In her defensive response to Erik's inquiry, Inez exposes the emotional suffering of East Germans who are continuously confronted with interpretations of the GDR as a dictatorship and an Unrechtsstaat.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Inscription and RebellionIllness and the Symptomatic Body in East German Literature, pp. 188 - 196Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015