In The Opening Essay in this volume Peter Fritzsche notes how different start dates produce different historical narratives: temporal perspective shapes the contours and fixes the boundaries of a field of inquiry. Perspective, contours, boundaries, and field are, of course, spatial metaphors. If the events of 1989 marked an epochal revolution, they also precipitated a geographical revolution: along with the institutions of actually existing socialism the whole geography of power collapsed. The sheer suddenness encouraged arguments in favor of the hardness of culture: spaces mapped by cultural geography perhaps trump times chronicled by political history. To quote an early geographer, however: “Geographie without Historie has life and motion but at randome, and unstable; Historie without Geographie like a dead carcasse has neither life nor motion at all.” This essay will explore the mediation through literary form of time and place in novels reflecting a historico-geographic revolution in a selection of novels by East German authors, one earlier work, Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster (A model childhood, 1977), the others written since unification: Wolf’s Leibhaftig (In the flesh, 2002), Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys (1998) and Adam und Evelyn (2008), Ante Rávic Strubel’s Unter Schnee (Under snow, 2001), Jens Sparschuh’s Eins zu Eins (One to one, 2003), and finally Wolf’s most recent work, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (Town of angels or the overcoat of Dr. Freud, 2010).

At issue will be how shadows from the past shape the contours of the present and conversely how shadows from the future fall back across preunification landscapes in novels written since unification. What indeed are the landscapes now that a geographical revolution has freed up movement in Europe and cheap travel and the electronic media are opening up ever more places and spaces of real and virtual encounter? Where are the “Erinnerungsräume,” the spaces of memory, in this ever-expanding — or should it be contracting? — world? All the novels portray real locations that become “Gedächtnisorte,” memorial places that trigger remembering. Much has been written of the spatial turn: in literature, intertextual allusion creates spaces of cultural encounter. Along with when and where, who sees or tells is crucial. Wolf’s narrators often address themselves qua protagonist in the second or even third person. In Adam und Evelyn, third-person narration is focalized through Adam, though Eve occasionally emerges from Adam’s rib.