Vol. 20 · No. 4 · Issue 65 · Winter 2002

Julia Hell
Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

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Abstract

Sascha Anderson, Sascha Anderson (Cologne, 2002)
Jörg Magenau, Christa Wolf. Eine Biographie (Berlin, 2002)
Christa Wolf, Leibhaftig. Erzahlung (Munich, 2002)

Volker Weidermann, a journalist writing for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, seemed somewhat puzzled when he reviewed the spring 2002 literary season. After having just told his readers that for many years the GDR had been curiously absent from discussions in the Federal Republic, he exclaimed with a palpable sense of surprise: "But now it's back again, the GDR." (Doch jetzt ist sie wieder da, die DDR). Weidermann is not the only journalist to have reacted this way to the sudden accumulation of books about life in the former GDR, which included the first postwall biography of Christa Wolf, written by Jörg Magenau; Christa Wolf's novel Leibhaftig, and several autobiographical novels by the former GDR's most unsavory authors: Hermann Kant, the long-time president of the GDR's author's union and an active Stasi collaborator, Fritz Rudolf Fries, author and Stasi informer, and, finally, Sascha Anderson, the infamous poet and cultural manager of the Prenzlauer Berg, who presented his autobiographical novel Sascha Anderson to a public eager to learn the details of his strange life as avant-garde artist in the service of the Stasi. Finally, a group of younger authors entered the scene with stories about everyday life in the GDR of the 1980s.