Twenty Years After The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the culture of East Germany seems more remote than ever. Exactly what communism or Marxism or even socialism was is hard to even imagine now, let alone know in detail. Shortly after the fall of the Wall, the West German author Patrick Süskind, writing in the quintessential West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, declared that almost any other country in the world was closer to him and his generation of West Germans than the country on the other side of the German-German border: “Österreich, die Schweiz, Venetien, die Toskana, das Elsaß, die Provence, ja selbst Kreta, Andalusien oder die Äußeren Hebriden lagen uns —um nur von Europa zu sprechen — unendlich viel näher als so dubiose Ländereien wie Sachsen, Thüringen, Anhalt, Mecklen-oder Brandenburg.”

That distance has not decreased over the intervening years; it has increased considerably. Now it is probably difficult even for many people who live in the five new Bundesländer—especially those born after 1980— to remember or imagine the culture of the GDR. For those of us who live elsewhere it is now probably easier to understand the culture of Hitler’s so-called Third Reich or of the Weimar Republic, or even of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany than it is to understand the culture of a state that existed for forty years right next to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and whose territory has long since become part of the FRG. “Es muß ATLANTIS heißen,” says Hinrich Lobek, the protagonist of Jens Sparschuh’s 1995 novel Der Zimmerspringbrunnen, after he has invented a new fountain that features a map of the former GDR and a model of East Berlin’s television tower. It is fitting that Uwe Tellkamp, in his novel Der Turm (2008), which won the 2008 German Book Award, also describes the GDR as a kind of socialist Atlantis, a mythical island state that operated by completely different rules and used a different time system, “das un sichtbare Reich hinter dem sichtbaren, … einen Schatten unter den Diagrammen dessen, was wir Die erste Wirklichkeit nannten, ATLANTIS: Die zweite Wirklichkeit.” Even in the 1970s and 1980s the GDR’s capital seemed like “eine untergegangene Stadt, hatte etwas von einer archäologischen Stätte,” as Gundula Schulze-Eldowy noted in her contribution to the 2009 exhibit “Übergangsgesellschaft” at Berlin’s Academy of the Arts.