Michael Kleeberg’s novel Ein Garten im Norden (A Garden in the North), published in 1998, is one of the major novels of German reunification, a reflection on the way that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and the coming together of the two parts of a previously divided Germany opened up a space for Germans to imagine a better country and a more positive identity. Ein Garten im Norden is also about the role of art generally, and literature specifically, in making possible and instantiating such imaginings. Kleeberg’s work is a novel of the Berlin Republic not just because it is about reunification and takes place largely in Berlin, but also because it conceives of German reunification as a coming together of Germany’s past with its present for the purpose of forming a more productive future.

Ein Garten im Norden also partially reflects the life of its author. Like the novel’s protagonist and narrator Albert Klein, Kleeberg was born in southern Germany (in Baden-Württemberg) at the end of the 1950s but spent his adolescence in Hamburg. Also like his protagonist, Kleeberg left a divided Germany in 1983 and spent over a decade living elsewhere before returning to a reunited Germany in the mid-1990s. Kleeberg wrote about his protagonist Klein’s return to Germany before he himself returned to his native land from France, however, and in this sense Ein Garten im Norden actually prefigured its author’s own life – an ironic twist, since the novel is also about the way that fiction prefigures, and influences, reality. Kleeberg currently lives in Berlin, just as his protagonist Klein winds up in Berlin. Other details in Ein Garten im Norden suggest an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical account. For instance, Chapter 44 of Ein Garten im Norden tells the story of a young married man named Volker, a friend of Albert Klein’s, whose wife leaves him not for another man but for a woman; a similar story forms the basic plot line of Kleeberg’s novel Karlmann (2007), an extended reflection on masculinity in the Federal Republic during the decade before German reunification. The names Klein and Kleeberg start with the same three letters. All these similarities suggest that Kleeberg imagined his protagonist Albert Klein as fundamentally similar to himself, but with a twist. Finally, both the names Kleeberg and Klein can be Jewish, and this fact hints at the non-Jewish Kleeberg’s desire for a reimagination of German and Jewish history and identity.