Abstract
This monograph is focused on the theme of suicide in East German literature between the early 1970s and the middle 1980s in works that have significant intertextual dimensions. Robert Blankenship’s approach to the topic is based on Gérard Genette’s taxonomy – set out in his volume Palimpsests – of what he called ‘transtextual’ relationships between original works and their subsequent hypertexts. Blankenship rightly views such transtextuality as a relatively unexplored aspect of East German literature. He sees suicide as a key ‘site of dissent’ against an official doctrine of literary heritage that was monolithic, sclerotic and ultimately also suicidal.
The blame is placed at the feet of Georg Lukács, who ‘invented and contrived, largely dictated’ a dogma apparently unchallenged until Erich Honecker decreed in 1971 that there would no longer be taboo subjects for committed socialist authors. This created an opening for exploring the ultimate taboo of literary suicide – broadly defined here as self-destructive forms of behaviour – claimed by Lukács to be an essentially pre-socialist phenomenon in essays he wrote between the 1930s and the mid 1950s, on subjects as diverse as Goethe’s Werther, Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig, Kleist’s drama, Karoline von Günderrode’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The post-1971 texts selected for close analysis by Blankenship – notably Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Neue Leiden des jungen W., Werner Heiduczek’s Tod am Meer, Christa Wolf’s Kein Ort. Nirgends, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine and Christoph Hein’s Horns Ende – are all viewed as subverting this rigid Lukács doctrine in distinctive ways.
The outcomes of Blankenship’s sequence of analyses are, for the most part, very impressive. Heiduczek’s achievement is seen to lie in his transformation of the Thomas Mann hypotext into a first-person novel that combines the ruthless self-analysis of a dying author with his critique of the self-destructiveness of the Stalinist system. In contrast to earlier intertextual readings of Kein Ort. Nirgends in terms of Wolf’s use of the correspondence of Kleist and Günderrode, Blankenship highlights her subtle transvaluation of key motifs from his Penthesilea and her poetry. Hamletmaschine is persuasively viewed as the most radical of these works in the way it demolishes the official construct of literary heritage without seeking to legitimize an alternative tradition. A previously overlooked dimension of Horns Ende – Hein’s proximation of the dialogues between Hamlet and his father’s ghost from Shakespeare’s play in the exchanges between his protagonist Thomas and the dead Horn – is illuminated authoritatively in the final chapter.
The thesis is, however, overplayed. The presentation of Plenzdorf’s Neue Leiden as the story of a modern-day Werther who ‘subversively kills himself’ flies in the face not just of the protagonist’s self-analysis from beyond the grave but of the virtually unanimous critical opinion (including Genette’s) that his actions are foolhardy rather than suicidal. Its transtextuality undoubtedly subverts the conservative view of literary heritage – as Blankenship again skilfully demonstrates – but by essentially humorous means. The taboo of suicide may be mocked, but it is not challenged head-on the way it is in the later texts. This qualitative difference is never addressed.
Blankenship also appears to have been drawn into starting with Die neuen Leiden because its publication immediately after Honecker’s ‘no taboos’ speech makes it look like a work written specifically to test its validity. But that would be to misunderstand the relationship between creative processes and cultural policy decrees in the GDR. As standard works like Wolfgang Emmerich’s Kleine Literaturgeschichte have long since established, the new literature exemplified by Plenzdorf’s work was being created from the mid 1960s and Honecker’s speech was a belated attempt to legitimize its existence. An acknowledgement that Die neuen Leiden originated as a film-script of 1968–9 would also have served to counter that temptation.
The ‘no taboos’ speech also signalled that literary doctrine (including those aspects relating to cultural heritage) was already under pressure in 1971. Lukács may have laid down the rules, but his was a name barely mentioned from the late 1950s because of his involvement in the Hungarian uprising and his theoretical rethink in Wider den mißverstandenen Realismus. The counter-view of heritage for which Anna Seghers had argued in the 1930s re-emerged in the mid 1960s and was already gaining traction. Her essay ‘Vaterlandsliebe’, with its endorsement of the allegedly ‘sick’ poets (Hölderlin, Kleist, Günderrode, etc.), who had ‘rubbed their heads raw against the wall’ of a hostile society, created a broader agenda for transtextual writing on the theme of intellectual despair that was already being pursued before 1971. (Johannes Bobrowski’s Boehlendorff as an evocation of Büchner’s Lenz would be one obvious example.) If the framing of this monograph had taken some account of these earlier experiments in transtextuality – and the increasingly fluid cultural context – the later wave of literary suicides could have been presented more convincingly as a radical intensification of this process.