12 - Dances of Death: A Last Literature from the GDR

Summary

Aber manchmal auferstehen

die Toten erneut

mit fremder Miene und falscher Stimme

wie jede Wiederkehr sich gewöhnlich vollzieht.

— Günter Kunert

This Chapter Examines what might be termed the last literature of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It is not so much concerned with the Ostalgie that has governed many films and texts that remember the socialist state or provide a “requiem for Communism,” to cite Charity Scribner’s influential work. Nor does it consider the texts of the “Zonenkinder” boom that set out, more or less successfully, to re-imagine the GDR in retrospect. Instead it gestures toward a body of post-Wende literature that performs the last rites of the GDR more literally.

I have argued elsewhere that contemporary German culture has seen a fundamental paradigm shift from looking forward to looking backward. Certainly this has to do with the loss of certainties after 1989 and the need to come to terms with the legacy of the GDR. But we are also witnessing a much more significant renegotiation of history, and especially modernity, that writers such as Peter Fritzsche, in Stranded in the Present (2004), and Anne Fuchs, in Phantoms of War (2008), have examined in different contexts. This has manifested itself in a concern with a nexus of lateness, belatedness, mortality, death, and apocalypse that has been seen especially but not exclusively among older writers. But it has also engendered a fascination for the way in which what has been left behind or suppressed by history manifests itself in the present.

This might be termed “spectrality” in its broadest sense. Ghosts or revenants are often literally at the center of such works, with significant implications for psychoanalytic readings more broadly or the particular role of (inter-)textual recall. It also has a political aspect and chimes with Derrida’s notion of “hauntology,” the exploration of resolutely liminal modes of being between different times and spaces, in his Specters of Marx (1994). The fascination with spectrality has been noted in contemporary writers and filmmakers from both East and West and has been interpreted broadly as a symptom of a post-Holocaust awareness. However, two things are worth pointing out. First: its roots are certainly deeper than this. As a phenomenon it draws on a rich and powerful tradition in German culture reaching back to the Middle Ages, but also embracing the Gothic.