I had to read this in my senior-level German literature course on post-war German literature. It was the one book I went into completely blind. I knew nothing about the author or the piece. Christoph Hein is not one of the greatly-known German novelists of the century, like the other novelists studied in my class: Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch, Christa Wolf, Siegfried Lenz, and Günter Grass. But his work is illuminating.

The book is simply the story of a young to middle-aged woman trying to figure out who she is and what she wants following the death of her lover. It has great insights into the female mind (strange coming from a man!) and into the general human psyche. It isn't as dark as the German novel usually is, and the geopolitical themes (so common in German literature) are non-existent.

I don't know if it has been translated into English or not (I had to read it in German). If you can find it, please read it.

Why should one read books about a political system that is dead and gone? The answer is, of course, that it is not so dead and gone after all. Communism may have collapsed as a political force, but the countries of eastern Europa are still full of the people it has created. People who have just been released from prison are like an ownerless dog, Hein's narrator says, constantly looking for a new master to caress and beat them. Maybe that is how quite a lot of people feel after the Iron Curtain has come down... Peter Dallow has just been released from prison in the East Germany of 1968; he had played the piano in a political cabaret, and a tango about the ageing ruler of the country had so infuriated the authorities that all members of the group are sentenced to spend two years in prison. Dallow still feels he was innocent, because he wasn't even a member, he had just stepped in for the man who usually played the piano. Hein's book is about the months after Dallow's release from prison.

The mood is similar to the one in Coetzee's "Disgrace": Dallow used to be a lecturer at Leipzig university, and his attitude towards his students seems to have been one of contempt and cynicism. Now he is in a state of disgrace, people feel uneasy in his presence and want to get rid of him. The Communist state, however, will not let go of him: The authorities, the secret service, the police, are annoyed that Dallow does not want to live on as if nothing had happened. Nobody could escape the system, no matter how hard he or she tried. Actually they keep trying to force Dallow to return to his post at the university. Maybe people like him are even more useful for a dictatorship than those who never got into trouble: Dallow is broken and cynical, he will never resist the government again; in contrast to practically all the people around him he is completely indifferent towards the hope for reform embodied in the Prague Spring.

Dallow's perspective offers a shocking picture of the state of human relationships in his country: Here too cynicism abounds. Love is only mentioned once - as an impossible dream. Sex is regarded as a purely physical need ("I feel like having sex with you."), and young girls gladly trade it for a place to spend the night. People leave each other just like that. Most characters seem to be scarred after lost battles. This, of course, is Dallow's perspective, and he refuses to cherish any hopes at all. Maybe Hein wanted to show what East Germany was like without the hope for change. The book was first published in 1989, when this change was finally happening...