Monika Maron: Love and writing in a political climate

Monika Maron: Love and writing in a political climate This paper explores the relationship between the love story and official history in Animal triste by the German novelist Monika Maron. Despite suggestions that the love story could have happened at any time or place, a strong case can be made for a special interwovenness o f the personal and the political in this Wende novel. Timelessness thus gives way to the intertwinement o f a love story with a period in history, the Wende, the period o f political change in Germany in 1989-1990. On the other hand, the love story's political dimensions contribute to another form of 1 “More than Maron admits to herself, her love-story is a novel o f our time, maybe the most impressive German Wende-Novc\ until now” (Kurier, 1996-02-18). I use the German word Wende (“transition”; Afr. “oorgang”), without translation, for the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in the night o f 8/9 November 1989 and the unification o f both German states on 3 October 1990. During this time East Germany has been jokingly called: “Die noch DDR”; “The still GDR”. I call the literature o f around or during that period Wendeliteratur without translating the term. DDR is the acronym for “Deutsche Demokratische Republik”, in English usually called “GDR": “German Democratic Republic” . I wish to thank Annekc van Luxemburg-AIbers and Madeleine Kasten for their keen suggestions. I also wish to thank Leo Ikelaar o f the German library o f the University of Amsterdam, Das Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marburg and the Pressedienst o f the S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main for their bibliographical and documentary help. I thank the referees o f Literator for their helpful advice. All translations from the German are mine Literator 18(3) Nov. 1997:129-140 ISSN 0258-2279 129 Monika Maron: Love and writing in a political climate timelessness, a kind o f religious belief in the eternity o f love. Before discussing Animal triste, I trace the relationship between love and politics in Maron's earlier novels.


Introduction
In 1996 the German writer M onika M aron published her fourth novel, Animal triste, the story o f an amour fou in East Germany ju st after the Wende.M aron relates a passionate love affair, its ending and its fatal consequences.
The novel has received both praise and harsh criticism from German reviewers.Ulrich Schlacht describes the novel as a "great love story" ("groBartige Liebesgeschichte"; Welt am Sonntag, 1996-02-18).According to Kerstin Hensel, Animal triste offers many opportunities for identification to w om en w ho have or have had a love affair with a married man (Freitag, 1996-02-23).Rainer M oritz is impressed with the intense and poetic description o f physical desire, although he feels that the story o f the love affair does not justify the intensity o f the longing (Rheinische Merkur, 1996-02-23).O ther critics, how ever, consider the novel close to kitsch, and W erner Fuld even characterises its tone as "whining and morose" ("wehleidig-muffig"; D ie Woche 1996-02-16).
Exuberant praise cam e from M arcel Reich-Ranicki in the influential ZDF television program D as literarische Q uartett (1996-02-22) and in his review in the prominent German weekly D er Spiegel (1996-02-12).In his w ell-know n authoritarian style, Reich-Ranicki declared Animal triste to be the m ost important love-story that he had read in years.In his opinion (R eich-Ranike, 1996:187) the book was: ... exceptional: exciting and effervescent and yet charming, passionate and hot-blooded, while nevertheless distinctive in its striking tranquility and maturity.

... aufierordentlich: aufregend und aufbrausend und dennoch anmutig, hitzig und heifiblutig und doch von erstaunlicher Ruhe und Reife.
This paper explores the relationship betw een the love story and official history in Animal triste.A ccording to the jacket o f the first edition, Animal triste is the report o f the "radical change o f life in a time o f radical changes" .D espite the suggestions o f critics and o f M aron herself that the love story could have happened at any time or place, I believe that a strong case can be m ade for the interwovenness o f the personal and the political in this Wende novel, this novel o f the German transition.Tim elessness thus gives w ay to the intertwinem ent o f a love story with a period in history.
M oreover, the love story's political dimensions contribute to another form o f tim elessness, a kind o f religious b elief in the eternity o f love.
Animal triste w as first published in February 1996.A shadow w as cast on its reception by earlier reports in D er Spiegel and several daily papers about M aron's short cooperation with the Stasi.The uproar about these relevations has influenced and even biased several reviews o f the novel.Jorg M agenau e.g.interprets the narrator's plea in Animal triste for the right to forget and for the therapeutic pow er o f forgetting as an "indirect defence" for the w ay M aron has "forgotten" to come out about her Stasi period honestly and o f her own accord ( Wochenpost, 1996-02-22).However, from w hat I view as a literary perspective, a perspective that allows for literature's autonomy, confusing w riter and narrator in such a w ay is rather unfortunate.2

Combustion dust for Antigone
Before w e proceed to a further discussion o f Animal triste, I will trace the intraliterary relationship between love and politics in M aron's earlier novels.The novel Flugasche ("Combustion dust"), when first submitted for publication, was rejected by East German censors and therefore published in W est Germany in 1981 (M aron, 1995a).Flugasche contains a kind o f Antigone theme: it relates a conflict betw een private and public duty or betw een w oman and state.The  (Walther, 1996: esp. 307-308 and 523-525).In the case o f Maron nothing serious seems to have happened, but nobody who has admired M aron's courageous novels can possibly have welcomed the news.Nobody -Maron least o f all -was happy about the episode.
In an emotional interview with Ursula Escherig, Maron stressed that she deserved some credit for her radical break with the party in which she grew up (in the DDR her stepfather was a minister o f the interior): (They should have accepted] that I had broken [with the system] unequivocally and without compromise.If such actions suddenly lose all meaning and hardly seem to have happened, I wonder: what are they really out for?They may be apostles o f truth.But they clearly cared little about the nature o f the truth. [Man htitie akzeptieren miissen] dafi ich ganz eindeutig und ohne Kompromisse meinen Bruch vollzogen habe.Aber als das plOtzlich Uberhaupl nichts mehr wert sein sollle, als das so gut wie ungeschehen war: da dachie ich: Worum geht es ihnen eigentlich?Das sind ja diese Wahrheitsapostel.Aber ganz offensichilich ging es ihnen dabei nicht um Wahrheit (Escherig, 1996:11) M aron, 1995a:36).In the ensuing conflict with editors and party bosses, she resigns from her prestigious and comfortable position and decides to earn a living as an assembly line worker instead.She refuses to make the com prom ises that her colleagues have learned to accept and is equally unwilling to submit to w hat w e might call C reon's wishes.
Nevertheless, the intermingling o f private and public life in this novel extends beyond its Antigonean conflict.On the one hand, Josefa tries to believe in the separation o f private and public life.This becom es clear w hen she reflects on the night she has spent with her old friend Christian after returning from B.: This night suddenly drew a straight line from her birth to her death and separated the natural from the absurd.Josefa found almost everything related to her profession on the side o f the absurd; all these things seemed to her to be unnatural and designed to occupy her and others with a purpose that exceeded the scope of her natural life.(p. 155-156).

Diese Nacht plótzlich zog eine gerade Linie von ihrer Geburt zu ihrem Tod, teilte Naturliches von Absurdem, und fast alles, was Josefas Beruf ausmachte, fand sie auf der Seite des Absurden, erschien ihr widernaturlich und ausgedacht, um sie und die anderen zu bescháftigen mit einem Sinn, der aufierhalb ihres naturliches Lebens lag
After Josefa has abandoned her professional life, not even her love for Christian can help her.Though sympathetic to her public stand, he adm onishes her to seek a professional compromise.She sends him aw ay because his love no longer measures up to the standards o f sovereignty and strength that she had com e to expect (p.239).She w ants an absolute love like that o f her Christian grand mother who followed her Jew ish husband to the ghetto in Poland w here the N azis had banished him.

Away from realism and back
Die Oberláuferin ("The [female] deserter").M aron's next novel, w as published in 1988 (M aron, 1995b).It is not the kind o f political or A ntigonean novel suggested by the title.4The issue goes w ay beyond a political desertion to encom pass desertion from life itself.The protagonist, Rosalind, quits her jo b and stays home in her room in the Pankow quarter in East Berlin.Bom during a bombing in W orld W ar II, she suffers from "insufficient lust for life" ("mangelhafte Lust zu leben"; M aron 1995b: 16) and a fascination with death.5 In D ie Oberlduferin dreams, everyday life and hallucinations come together and get mixed.Rosalind seems split into tw o personalities: "Rosalind" herself, a woman in touch with society but always searching and insecure, and her friend M artha, an exploring, independent and even anarchistic woman.The narrative voice sw itches back and forth between the first and the third person and even gives w ay to dramatic dialogues in four interludes.This surrealist novel may rightly be described as Kafkaesque without resorting to the term 's stereotypical use.It is legitimate to compare Rosalind, enclosed as she is in her Berlin room, to G regor Sam sa awakening in his room in "D ie Verwandlung" ("The metam orphosis" ; cf.Mahlendorf, 1988:256).
Like Kafka, M aron in D ie Oberlduferin does not adopt a transparent political position as w as the case in the more direct and at times even journalistic Flugasche.H ow ever, the novel can be read as a political allegory and has been interpreted as such by reviewers including Elsbeth Pulver in the Neue Ziircher Zeitung and Jurgen P. Wallmann in D er Tagesspiegel (Schoning, 1993:15) confession o f lapsed love would have been.
To her "the tem porality o f this love acquired its meaning through the barbarism o f those days" (p.75).
Stille Zeile Sechs w as first published in 1991, some time after the Wende.Nevertheless, it is set in Berlin under the German Dem ocratic Republic (M aron, 1995c).The novel's title refers to an address in an affluent East Berlin quarter, Das Stddtchen, where party officials live: " Stille Zeile Sechs/Silent Row # 6" .
In this novel M aron has sw itched back "from surrealism to realism " (Schmidt, 1994:247).

Animal triste: Love should not be missed
Neither irony nor distance from love is to be found in Animal triste (M aron, 1996).The novel has more in common with the tragic story o f the unhappy w orker from F. in Stille Zeile Sechs.Such seriousness led W erner Fuld to describe the novel's love story, in an etymological pun, as "ohne Feuchtigkeit" i.e. "dry, hum orless" (D ie Woche, 1996-02-16).But w hat else can one expect?
"Omne animal post coitum triste" .6Readers are offered the story o f an absolute love.Such a tale sometimes needs absolute term s and does not automatically contain the kind o f humour Fuld seems to expect.
According to M aron, the advice from the critic Reich-Ranicki w as among the factors that led her to write a real love story.She w anted to prove that she was not, as she had first suggested to Reich-Ranicki, "too shy or m odest" ("zu schamhaft") to write a love story (Escherich, 1996:10-11).W ith the w ords o f the workm an from F. fresh in our minds, her accomplishment w as predictable.
In Animal triste, the love story is narrated by a very old w oman who looks back on w hat happened in the year o f the Wende.A year prior to this political upheaval the narrator has suffered a mild stroke or loss o f consciousness on the street.This moment marks a change in her life.
Had this attack not been the simulation o f my death, and had I actually died that evening, what would I have missed?What else can one miss in life besides love?That was the answer.

Ware der Anfall nicht die Simulation meines Todes gewesen, sondem ware ich an diesem Abend wirklich gestorben, was hátte ich versáumt? Man kann im Leben nichts versaumen als die Liebe. Das war die Antwort (p. 23; emphasis added).
The italicised w ords -"Man kann im Leben nichts versaumen als die Liebe"have been interpreted by most critics as the epitome o f the book's thematics.The love story itself starts a year later in the M useum o f Natural History, w here the narrator w orks as a paleontologist.An enormous brachiosaurus is housed there.Franz,7 a W est German active in the reorganization o f the museums in Berlin, is there on a professional visit.He is one o f the many W est Germ ans who cross the border to reorganise the "O ssis" .Franz and "she" m eet in the room o f the gigantic skeleton.Three w ords mark the beginning.His first w ords to the I persona are : "A beautiful animal" ("Ein schones Tier"): 1 was not in search of [Franz] and had not expected him.One morning he simply appeared at my side.The brachiosaurus grinned down at us, just as 6 From the Latin translation o f Aristotle's Problemata XXX 1: "Every animal is sad after making love."

7
The narrator cannot actually remember his name.She calls him Franz, a word that has the same dark sound to her as "Grab" ("grave") or "Sarg" ("coffin") p. 18) The symbolism is obvious but nevertheless telling.

Ich habe [Franz] nicht gesucht, und ich habe ihn nicht erwartet. Eines Morgens stand er neben mir, der Brachiosaurus grinste auf uns beide herab wie sonst auf mich allein, und Franz sagte leise und unvergefilich: 'Ein schones Tier
These three words become an oracle for her.In "Ein schones Tier" she recognizes someone related to her, a person interested in the anim al's life and not in its death.She answers " Yes, a beautiful animal."("Ja, ein schones Tier", p. 27.)She will remember this moment "two thousand times or m ore" as the most precious moment o f her life.These w ords are the pledge o f a love that must last forever.W hen Franz strokes her cheek with the back o f tw o o f his fingers some time later to show her w hat made him love her at first sight and w hat probably made her trust him ("It w as this w ay" : "D as w ar es", p. 37), she is strongly reminded o f the time she first touched the brachiosaurus during a childhood visit to the museum: the start o f a lifelong fascination.
Franz is a married man.His work m akes it possible for him to visit her regularly, tw o or three times a week.Each tim e he has to leave her at h alf past midnight.At that instant he always asks her the time, even though he knows.Then he lights a pipe to dispel her scent before he goes back to his wife.
When Franz and his wife suddenly go on a holiday to Scotland to visit H adrian's Wall -it may have been in the same summer or one or tw o years later: the narrator has forgotten such details -the w om an is seized by jealousy.Feeling helpless and deserted, she w atches in the hall o f the airport as Franz and his petite blonde wife pass through customs and sees Franz smile kindly at his wife.W hen Franz telephones her a few days later, she cannot hide her jealousy.She vulgarly assures him that she hopes he cannot get an erection when he is with his wife.In what may be an indirect answ er Franz tells her that H adrian's W all separated civilization from barbarism, w ords that to her symbolise her separation from Franz.In the following days, she tracks the holiday on a map and through tourist guides.She telephones all hotels along the road.O nce she reaches the right hotel, but does not w ait until Franz answ ers the telephone in his room.
Once the married couple is back in Berlin, she starts to follow F ranz's wife.She waits in her car till the wife com es home; she follows her into the superm arket to see what she buys for Franz.Then one day she addresses the w ife, has herself invited and tells about her love affair with Franz.This is the beginning o f the end.The end o f the book lends itself to several interpretations.The narrator remembers that Franz told her he no longer resented his father for leaving his mother for another woman.She does not rem em ber w hether Franz then drew the obvious conclusion regarding his own life.She thinks that she remembers that Franz left his things at her house and promised to come back and live with her.He even left his guitar in her room.That night at half past twelve, the ominous moment o f all their love nights, she accom panies Franz to the bus stop, she realises that he will not return.In her memory she is unsure whether she pushed him, or whether he fell before being killed by the oncoming bus.

Tim elessness and time
In Animal triste the narrator who relates the love story is a hundred years old.She tells the events she has lived through, fifty years ago, in the time that the "gangster band", the "band o f criminals" ("G angsterbande", p. 30; " Verbrecherbande", p. 43) w as obliged to give up its power.Actually she is not sure w hether she is a hundred years old or younger; she might as well be ninety or eighty or even less.The love story she remembers could also have happened forty or thirty or even few er years ago.Through this hesitancy about time, the w riter introduces a tim eless quality in the narration and, on a thematic level, also in the time o f the love tale.The events that occurred during the Wende period could have taken place at another time as well.Or could they?That is the question I am trying to answ er here.
The narrator's former profession also inspires a sense o f tim elessness.H er main concern, as a paleontologist, is the skeleton o f the brachiosaurus.This animal, another animal triste, has lived some one hundred and fifty million years ago, an impressive length com pared to the forty-year history o f the D D R or the short transition period after the Wende: forty years o f "gang rule" ("Bandenherrschaft") in world historical perspective is even less than the time the brachiosaurus took to lift its foot (p. 31-32).
Counterbalancing these connotations o f tim elessness is a specific denotation o f time: the time when Germany changed, die Wende.The love story o f Animal triste starts in the summer after the Berlin wall came dow n, the summer o f 1990.
On several occasions the narrator connects private and love life with official life.
In the year o f the Wende people in East Germany lost all certainty.Everything familiar changed: There was new money, there were new passports, new authorities, new laws, new uniforms for the police, new stamps, new owners, who were in fact the old ones.In her earlier novels M onika Maron meticulously docum ented life in communist East Berlin and its implications for everyday, professional and emotional life, perhaps nowhere so subtly as in Stille Zeile Sechs.In Animal triste as well, the extensive consequences o f political claims and lack o f freedom in everyday life are often manifest.I mention the impossibility for the narrator, in the days when she was working in the museum, to travel and to m eet her academ ic peers in other countries or to visit the famous brachiosaurus relics at Pliny M oody's G arden in South Hadley, M assachusetts.On the other hand, these restrictions preserved her loyalty to her own brachiosaurus, a requirem ent for meeting Franz.Although Maron has stated in interviews that as a novelist she is no longer interested in the implications o f the DDR politics (Escherig, 1996:10), this novel ow es much o f its interest to such connections between love and politics.

Es gab neues
One such connection merits a more detailed description.Franz and she often sing together.Contrary to Franz's expectations, they know many o f the same songs, like Laurentia, liebe Laurentia mein and Wahre Freundschaft (p.103).But thanks to her communist education she does not know any religious songs.One night, when their love affair is still in its prime, she offers an alternative to Franz's church songs and sings the Stalin hymn in Russian, the w ay she learned it at school when she w as eleven or twelve years old.She kneels w hile singing the 138 ISSN 0258-2279 Literator 18(3) Nov. 1997:129-140 song.In the process, she vaguely realises that she is making a mistake in singing this song and singing it this way: "twice dreadful, depraved in my faith and unbounded in my treason" ("doppelt furchtbar, verdorben im Glauben und hemmunglos im V errat", p. 105).
The blasphem ous delivery o f the Stalin hymn is not merely -as the narrator suggests -a pivotal scene in the love story.It is also crucial to my interpretation o f M onika M aron's writings.The narrator regards the singing o f the hymn as "w anton self-ridicule" ("mutwillige Selbstverhóhnung", p. 106).She suspects that Franz considers her rendition an attempt to hide the "void that the innocent grandiose m istake had left in her soul" ("das N ichts, das [ihr] unschuldiger grandioser Irrtum in [ihrer] Seele hinterlassen hatte").W hen East meets W est after forty or more years o f separation, it becomes apparent that the two worlds have grown apart.We have learned o f the political and economic aspects o f the separation through papers and on television.The segregation has also permeated literature and the eternal theme in literature: love between two people.
H ow ever, the situation is more complex.According to the narrator, Franz no longer believes in his God but at least does not ridicule Him.His religious hymn asking G od to guide him toward a happy and eternal hereafter (" fiihre mich bis an mein selig Ende und ewiglich" , p. 106) still has a serious impact, in the sense that it can be interpreted as a statement about their love.
Franz considers the w om an's rendition o f the Stalin hymn both shocking and disloyal.In my interpretation, however, the kneeled perform ance as part o f an exchange between lovers also consecrates her love in a manner reminiscent o f John D onne's "The Canonisation", where love canonises the lovers to eternity.
There is no reason to attribute -as the narrator does -all the pow er o f religious perform ance to Franz.The w om an's kneeled singing o f the Stalin hymn, which elevates Stalin into eternity, can also be heard as a hymn o f love.In a deconstructive way her "prayer" shows a means o f hallowing love into a true eternity through the derision o f the tim eless pretenses o f the communist period.

2On 7
August 1996 Der Spiegel published an article disclosing that Monika Maron had cooperated with the Stasi under the name "Mitsu" from October 1977 until May 1978.The facts have been documented by Joachim Walther in his impressive work on the countless relations between the Stasi and German writers.The Stasi spied on writers, censored them, and tried to employ them at the same time Thus tim elessness and temporal boundaries tw ice come together.If w e find a tim eless love ("W hat else can one miss in life besides love?"), w e cannot protect it from the implications o f place and time, e.g. the implications o f living in different parts o f Germany or o f the Wende.Time and place are responsible for having m ade people different even if they know every muscle and every nerve o f each others' bodies, as Franz and " she" do.At the same moment the tim eless ness o f the Stalin hymn exposes its own temporality w hile establishing the tim elessness o f love.Literator 18(3)Nov.1997:129-140   ISSN 0258-2279 .
Though love and lost love are never far aw ay, Stille Zeile Sechs is first o f all a political novel.In 1992, when M aron received the K leist Prize for her novels Flugasche and Stille Zeile Sechs, M arcel Reich-Ranicki called M aron a goddess o f vengeance ("eine Rachegóttin") in his baroque eulogy.H e characterised her novel Stille Zeile Sechs as "an epic settlement, no longer with the D D R but with communism as such" (" eine epische A brechnung nicht mehr mit der DDR, sondem mit dem Kommunismus" ; Schóning, 1993:7).Stille Zeile Sechs is the broken-off affair between Rosalind and her former husband Bruno.The facts o f this ruptured relationship are related with great distance and irony, but R osalind relates her satisfaction about Beerenbaum 's death to another love story involving the tragedy o f a thirty-year old w orker in F. about whom she has read in the paper.Jilted by his inamorata, the w orker could not bear that she live on without loving him: "DaB sie w eiter lebte, ohne ihn zu lieben, konnte er nicht ertragen" (p.209).So he killed her.Likewise, Beerenbaum seems to have lost the right to live.
This "epic settlem ent" crystallises into the confrontation betw een the historian Rosalind Polkow ski, who has quit her jo b to do mindless clerical w ork (p.18), and the retired party boss, H erbert Beerenbaum, whom she assists in w riting his memoirs.She discovers that Beerenbaum once had her friend " The C ount" ("D er G ra f') sent to prison for three years for smuggling a scholarly m anuscript on Chinese literature out o f the DDR.Rosalind confronts the old man with the facts.The same day Beerenbaum suffers a fatal heart attack, but only after trying to defend his action to Rosalind: " Your sinologist is a thief.A th ief belongs in prison" ("Ihr Sinologe [ist] ein Dieb.Ein D ieb gehórt ins Gefangnis" , p. 206).The love story in the background o f

Geld, neue Ausweise, neue Behórden, neue Gesetze, neue Uniformen fur die Polizei, neue Briefmarken, neue Besitzer, die eigentlich die alien waren
People clung to what they had, to w hat they knew, especially in m atters o f the heart.M arried couples about whom everybody knew that they w ere hardly on speaking terms suddenly appeared hand in hand.People on the verge o f divorce reconciled their differences.Karin und Klaus are two such friends o f the narrator's, who describes them with much cynicism and humour.O ne can mention the way Karin changes the articulation o f her name "Liideritz" when she answers the telephone, as her love life changes, and how she sw aps her gardening outfit from a bikini to an old shirt o f K laus'.W hen the wall com es dow n, the couple forgets its problems and K laus' adultery and appears hand in hand in front o f the shop window o f "W iesenhavem am K u'damm Ecke K nesebeckstraBe" (p.97).Others fall back on different familiar and trusted aspects o f life.H er friend Emile breaks off his relationship with Sabine, a w oman from W est Berlin w ho always had to leave East Berlin by midnight, to take on a political career and a new partner in the East Berlin he knows and trusts.To the narrator, the fall o f the Wall signifies the moment at which the love that had seemed on the verge o f blossoming since her loss o f consciousness a year ago breaks loose: " I met Franz" : " Ich traf Franz" (p.99)."I often believed", she says, "that the Berlin Wall had been destroyed exclusively to enable Franz to find m e" ("M anchmal glaubte ich sogar, daB auch die M auer in Berlin nur eingerissen wurde, damit Franz mich endlich finden konnte", p. 51).