David W. Robinson Livres

Crowded within the insular world of 1988 East Berlin, their lives conducted amid the cracks in the German Democratic Republic?s approved social vision, the nine subjects interviewed in this book formed a loose social network. Ten years later and in a different German state, the stories they tell restore subjective experience to our historical grasp ofcommunism and its collapse. The interviewees include Otto Emersleben, Frank Hirnigk, Ljuba Kirjuchina, Bernd Wedel, Heike Wedel, Peter Graetz, Christoph Hein, Gerlinde Salomon and Thomas Braun. This work preserves the English expressions verbatim and indicates them with bold-face type. German expressions of particular interest are retained in the text and indicated by italics. At the end of the book there is a comprehensive glossary that includes explanations of geographic, biographical, and historical references made by the interviewees.

Playwright and novelist Christoph Hein, who enjoyed tremendous popularity in both Germanies during the 1980s, remains the East's most successful post-unification writer. Critical both of Soviet-style communism and Western consumer capitalism, Hein chose to remain in East Germany and work toward the liberalization of the communist system. Although his pre-1990 works implicitly reject the skewed reality promoted by the regime, his methods appear at first glance to be totally apolitical: he tells the material truth as he sees it, describing characters and their social settings and allowing these things to speak for themselves. This sort of honesty would seem to be nothing remarkable; yet it proved fatal to the state's rhetoric of progress, personal fulfillment, and moral superiority to the West. Today, Hein uses the same literary tools with which he once deconstructed communist rhetoric to attack the complacency of unchecked capitalism. Robinson concentrates on Hein's prose fiction rather than his dramas, since, among other reasons, his plays are little known in the U.S. and U.K., while his novels and many novellas have been translated into English and have brought him a measure of fame in the English-speaking world.