On 9 November, Hans-Ulrich Treichel was at the dentist’s. His schedule records a Gottfried Benn Seminar the next morning at the Freie Universität Berlin, and he has no doubt that it did actually take place. Work to rule. Without his schedule, Treichel would not remember such minor points. When Marcel Beyer recalls that date, he thinks of the “first car he ever owned”. Ulrike Draesner was in Munich doing her dissertation and only realized that the Wall had fallen when the first Trabi drove into the city. Katja Lange-Müller, who moved from East to West Berlin in 1984, was on a reading tour and spent the evening in a hotel in Bochum unaware of events. Most German writers, at least those in the West, somehow missed the German “night of nights”. The 9 November took place without them. At least that is what can be deduced from the anthology Die Nacht, in der die Mauer fiel, which brings together writers’ recollections of that auspicious day.
By contrast, the young East German writers were either completing their military service with the National People’s Army, like Jochen Schmidt, Uwe Tellkamp or André Kubiczek, and therefore could not be “wall-dancers” at that historic moment. The mood was rather ambivalent among their comrades of the same age. The fall of the Wall brought to an end a phase of revolutionary élan, during which the participants believed they were subjects of history. To their own astonishment, they realized that they could actually have an effect, but scarcely had they realized this, when it was already over. For those born later, the stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall sound like fairytales. In the course of time, a concrete historical event sinks into history and assumes increasingly mythical features. The nebulous and none too appropriate term “Fall of the Wall” has become established, and yet it shifts the events into the realm of the unreal. Did it fall, or was it pushed? Certainly the term no longer seems to envisage an actively defiant subject.
What a strange, unimaginable world: a city divided by a wall. Part of the stock in trade of mythical figures are people shot while trying to escape across the border, the dancers on the wall, the “wall-peckers” who caused the concrete to crumble, and the stammering GDR delegate who had to somehow read the news about the opening of the border from a piece of paper, as if unable to fully comprehend what was actually happening. The political scientist Herfried Münkler, who has just been awarded the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair for his Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen, laments that since its foundation in 1949 the Federal Republic has had no major myth to which it might have referred and which might have shaped its identity. For the new Germany, the fall of the Wall could close that gap. And literature, that great story-teller, has an important role to play here.
For years, people in the culture sections of newspaper and magazines have been waiting impatiently for the “great novel of the transition era”. Yet regardless of how often books were published under that label, the waiting continued. And quite a number of books, such as Annett Gröschner’s Moskauer Eis, Christoph Hein’s Landnahme, Kurt Drawert’s Spiegelland or Jens Sparschuh’s Zimmerspringbrunnen, were not even recognized as such. Now however, over the past four or five years, that sense of expectation has eased somewhat, so that literature finally has the air that it needs in order to breathe.
Meanwhile a whole series of books have appeared that deal quite naturally with 1989 and its consequences, without also having to be the great novel of the transition: Julia Schoch’s short work Mit der Geschwindigkeit des Sommers might be mentioned first – a requiem to the GDR, focusing on a small town in Mecklenburg once dominated by the troops of the National People’s Army, where the narrator’s sister once loved a soldier. The fact that she later takes her life in New York is the reason why the narrator seeks out traces of her life. The stoicism of former times finds a correspondence in the excessive demands of freedom. In this way, Schoch spans a wide arc from then to now.
In 1995, when Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir was celebrated as the “first novel of the transition”, the 9 November was not all that long ago. Brussig approached the pathos of the historical moment and the ideological excitations of the post-transition era with derision and mordant irony. He described the fall of the Wall as a grotesque, the overthrow of the regime as history’s staircase wit. In 2009, Angelika Klüssendorf addresses the erotic aspect of that revolutionary moment with a precision that is not so much strident as psychological. Amateure is the title of the collection of new stories by this author, who was born in West Germany in 1958, arrived in the GDR in 1961, grew up there, and then moved back to the Federal Republic in 1985. Her impressively clearly composed stories are closely linked with the East-West context and extend from autumn 1989 to a strange celebration of the day of German Unification on 3 October 1990 and further on into the 1990s. The process of unification is described in ever new variations by means of stories of loving couples. The men are always “Wessies”, dentists, television-people or pretentious Jaguar-drivers. One of these couples meets on that fateful 9 November up on top of the Berlin Wall. He climbs up from the West she from the East, and once there, they spontaneously kiss and exchange telephone numbers. The subsequent love story is one of misunderstandings and alienation, and in this it is surely symptomatic of German-German rapprochement, as seen by the author. Klüssendorf tells the story of the fall of the Wall as a new version of the fairytale of the royal children who simply cannot be united with one another.
The most comprehensive and important novel of the transition era is surely Ingo Schulze’s Neue Leben. Fifteen years had to pass, for him to be able to look at the demise of the GDR with the necessary distance. Schulze describes the year 1989 as a turning point in the life of his letter-writing narrator Enrico Thürmer. In the GDR Thürmer worked as a dramatic adviser, but later ends up as the editor of an advertiser. Someone who was once devoted to language, becomes a man of figures and commerce. This happens without him really intending it. The transition itself is what directs the course of people’s lives. Strangely enough, the parts of the novel that take place in autumn 1989 are the most boring. Perhaps we have already read so much about that period in history, and even a great storyteller like Ingo Schulze can garner only very little that is surprising from it. The motifs – be that the Monday protest marches in Leipzig or the meetings of the Round Table – are all too familiar and worn to be able to provide a novel with that vital spark. In literary terms, it is definitely more productive to avoid the well-trodden paths of the political everyday. Schulze’s summer 2008 book Adam und Evelyn exemplifies this with great elegance. It is a light-handed ‘caprice’ about an escape to the West that seems like an exit from paradise. Only, where was paradise actually located? Was it really in the West? Or did it rather originate – which is Schulze`s view – in the fact that you could always wish yourself out of the GDR into another, better world, a state of affairs that came to an abrupt end in 1989. According to Schulze, with the West, transcendence got lost.
The, for the moment, last novel about the transition era is Der Turm by Uwe Tellkamp, who received last year’s German Book Prize. Tellkamp portrays the final years of the GDR from the viewpoint of the educated middle class in Dresden’s villa district known as Weißer Hirsch, where you defended yourself against the impositions of everyday life in the GDR with string quartets and classical poetry. The author describes the overall exhaustion of that society, its mendacity and its morals, its cowardice and its courage and all the tactical manoeuvres of compliance which were necessary even though all you wanted to do was keep yourself to yourself. The novel ends in autumn 1989, in the great “maelstrom of history”. The moment is fateful, but things do not get much beyond murmured intimations. Perhaps Tellkamp was afraid of running into clichés. Perhaps after the phase of agony, the fall of the Wall was just not worth writing about any more. Things only get interesting again after it. But that is a different story altogether.
