Helga Schütz 1988

Summary

HELGA SCHÜTZ, THE 1988 Max Kade German Writer-in-Residence, lives and works in Potsdam, East Germany. Her background is crucial to her work: she describes her novels as not quite autobiographical, but as creations which use her life story as a chessboard on which figures who arise out of her fantasy can move about. She has written five novels, and she says that a continuity connects their characters. The figures take on a life of their own, and their stories do not end with the end of the book. Thus, Anna (of her latest novel) and Julia (of her previous novels) could conceivably be sisters.

Through her characters, Schütz wants first and foremost to express a certain “life feeling” — even an “everyday feeling” — that her readers can sense as they follow the story. She is not primarily a “political writer,” refusing to write according to expectations of either the “official” or the “oppositional” line. She feels that literary critics are often overeager to find the “political” elements within a work, looking for a type of formulation that is blind to the complexities of human experience, to that which can perhaps strike a responsive nerve in the reader.

Nonetheless, her latest novel, In Annas Namen, is written primarily for an East German audience. Behind the story of a problematic relationship between a man and a woman lies an engagement with the tensions of the East/West situation. One question with which Schütz is especially intrigued is whether readers in the West can sense the pain and concerns portrayed in the novel — sensitivity to the specific problems of one society make it difficult and even artificial for an author to build a bridge to “outside” readers. As an East German, Schütz feels a responsibility to remain in her own land and to represent accurately the specific mood of life of the people of her country.

It was the work of Johannes Bobrowski, a German writer originally from Poland, that introduced Schütz to the concept of literature as something that springs from within the individual. Bobrowski used events of the past to reflect upon, mirror, and explain his own experiences. However, Schütz's fascination with literature actually began when she was a child in Dresden, where she grew up after spending her earliest years with her grandparents in a small village in Silesia.