Enjoy stories about East Germany? Here’s a list of contemporary fiction dealing with, or set in East Germany (sorted by author surname).
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Rummelplatz by Werner BräunigWerner Bräunig was once regarded as the great hope of East German literature-until an extract from Rummelplatz was read before the East German censorship authorities in 1965, and fierce opposition summarily sealed its fate.</p>
<p>The novel's sin?</p>
<p>It painted an all too accurate picture of East German society. Rummelplatz, translated here by Samuel P. Willcocks, focuses on a notorious East German uranium mine, run by the Soviets and supplying the brotherland's nuclear program. Veterans, fortune seekers, and outsiders with tenuous family ties like narrator Peter Loose flock to the well-paying mine, but soon find their new lives bleak. Safety provisions are almost nonexistent and tools are not adequately supplied. The only outlets for workers are the bars and fairgrounds where copious amounts of alcohol are consumed and brawls quickly ensue. In Rummelplatz, Bräunig paints his characters as intrinsically human and treats the death of each worker, no matter how poor, as a great tragedy.The Berlin Crossing by Kevin BrophyThe Wall is down, Germany is reunified and school teacher Michael Ritter's life is falling apart. Disenfranchised and disenchanted, he heads home to care for his mother. Before she dies, she urges him to seek out a priest who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. Michael is taken on a journey of dark discoveries.Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Susan BernofskyBy the side of a lake in Brandenburg, a young architect builds the house of his dreams - a summerhouse with wrought-iron balconies, stained-glass windows the colour of jewels, and a bedroom with a hidden closet, all set within a beautiful garden. But the land on which he builds has a dark history of violence that began with the drowning of a young woman in the grip of madness and that grows darker still over the course of the century: the Jewish neighbours disappear one by one; the Red Army requisitions the house, burning the furniture and trampling the garden; a young East German attempts to swim his way to freedom in the West; a couple return from brutal exile in Siberia and leave the house to their granddaughter, who is forced to relinquish her claim upon it and sell to new owners intent upon demolition. Reaching far into the past, and recovering what was lost and what was buried, Jenny Erpenbeck tells a story both beautiful and brutal, about the things that haunt a home.West by Julia FranckScientist Nelly Senff is desperate to escape her life in East Berlin. The father of her two children has supposedly committed suicide, and she wants to leave behind the prying eyes of the Stasi.</p>
<p>But the West is not all she hoped for. Nelly and her children are held in Marienfelde, a processing centre and no-man’s-land between East and West. There she meets Krystyna, a Polish woman who hopes that medical treatment in the West will save her dying brother; Hans, a troubled actor released from prison in the East; and John, a CIA man monitoring the refugees for possible Stasi spies.</p>
<p>All lives cross here, and the cramped confines of the camp breed defamation and violence.
Purity by Jonathan FranzenConfession With Blue Horses by Sophie HardachTobi and Ella's childhood in East Berlin is shrouded in mystery. Now adults living in London, their past is full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family's daring and terrifying attempt to escape. But what happened next? Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses?</p>
<p>In contemporary Germany, Aaron works for a Stasi archive, making his way through old files, reconstructing the tragic history of thousands of families. But one file in particular catches his eye; and soon unravelling the secrets at its heart becomes an obsession.</p>
<p>When Ella finds a stash of her mother's notebooks, she and Tobi embark on a search that will take them back to Berlin. Her fate clashes with Aaron's, and they piece together the details of Ella's past... and a family torn apart.Dance By The Canal by Kerstin Hensel, trans. by Jen CalejaA tragicomic satire from the heart of East Germany. Gabriela grows up in the East German town of Leibnitz. Her father is a famous surgeon, her mother a respected society hostess. The girl, however, struggles to fulfil their expectations. She shows no talent as a violinist and, worse, she fails to choose the right friends at school. When her father falls out of favour with the communists, Gabriela drops out of school. Eventually she ends up living beneath a canal bridge. Then the Wall falls. Can Gabriela seize a second chance in the new, united, Germany?Stealing The Future by Max HertzbergTooltip contentStasi Vice by Max HertzbergFor Lieutenant Reim of the Stasi, life in East Berlin is a satisfying blend of days behind a desk and nights in front of a bottle.<br />
But when a senior officer has a messy affair, it falls to Reim to do the clearing up.</p>
<p>It should be a straightforward job. Lean on a few people to get them to shut up. Intimidate neighbours, bribe officials and appeal to the socialist conscience of Party members. But when Reim starts his interrogations, he realises his boss is hiding more than just a lover.</p>
<p>Lieutenant Reim begins to investigate his superior—and what he uncovers puts his own life at risk.The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang HilbigDoppelgängers, a murderer’s guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances—these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons.</p>
<p>Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation’s trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once himself and so many of his fellow Germans.</p>
<p>Evoking the eerie bleakness of films like Tarkovsky’s Stalker and The Lives of Others, this titan of German letters combines the Romanticism of Poe with the absurdity of Kafka to create a visionary, somber statement on the ravages of history and the promises of the future.The Moment by Douglas KennedyThomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine - in touch only with his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset - his solitude is disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The name accompanying the return address on the box - Dussmann - disquiets him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-five years ago in Berlin - at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War.Eros by Helmut KrausserTooltip contentSilent Close No. 6 by Monika Maron, trans by David MarinelliTooltip contentMotherland by Jo McMillanI hadn't expected the Berlin Wall to be clean and white and smooth. It looked more like the edge of the swimming baths than the edge of the Cold War.</p>
<p>On the grass of No-man's Land, fat rabbits ate and strolled about as if they'd never been hunted and nothing could disturb them. This was their land and they ruled it, and there were three parts to Berlin: East, West and Rabbit.Distant Signs by Anne Richter, trans. by Douglas IrvingDistant Signs is an intimate portrait of two families spanning three generations amidst turbulent political change, behind and beyond the Berlin Wall. In 1960s East Germany, Margret, a professor's daughter from the city, meets and marries Hans, from a small village in the Thuringian forest. The couple struggle to contend with their different backgrounds, and the emotional scars they bear from childhood in the aftermath of war. As East German history gradually unravels, with collision of the personal and political, their two families' hidden truths are quietly revealed. An exquisitely written novel with strongly etched characters that stay with you long after the book is finished and an authentic portrayal of family life behind the iron curtain based on personal experience of the author who is East German and was 16 years old at the fall of the Berlin Wall.The Leipzig Affair by Fiona RintoulThe year is 1985. East Germany is in the grip of communism.</p>
<p>Magda, a brilliant but disillusioned young linguist, is desperate to flee to the West. When a black market deal brings her into contact with Robert, a young Scot studying at Leipzig University, she sees a way to realise her escape plans. But as Robert falls in love with her, he stumbles into a complex world of shifting half-truths – one that will undo them both.</p>
<p>Many years later, long after the Berlin Wall has been torn down, Robert returns to Leipzig in search of answers. Can he track down the elusive Magda? And will the past give up its secrets?In Times of Fading Light by Eugen RugeIn Times of Fading Light focuses on three generations. The grandparents, still convinced Communists, return to the fledging East Germany at the beginning of the 1950s to do their part in establishing the new state.</p>
<p>Their son returns from the other direction, having emigrated to Moscow and found himself banished to Siberia. He returns with his Russian wife to a country mired in petit bourgeois values, yet also brings with him an unwavering belief that they can be changed. The grandson, meanwhile, feels increasingly constricted in a heimat that was not of his choosing, and heads to the West on the very day that his grandfather, the family patriarch, turns 90.</p>
<p>The glittering lights of a political utopia that once shone enticingly seem to be gradually fading as time wears unwaveringly on.A Square in East Berlin by Torsten SchulzComedy and tragedy intertwine in this entertaining account of life in communist East Berlin as seen through the eyes of a teenage boy.</p>
<p>Published originally in German, Harry Guest has provided a funny and engaging translation. The story is sprinkled with outlandish characters, from Granma Otti perpetually in search of her next husband, to Fishface Winkler, whose demise at the hands of an unknown assailant scandalizes the square and leads to the search for the perpetrator. At times a mystery, at others a cultural travelogue, A Square in East Berlin reveals the reality of life beyond the Berlin Wall.The Valley of the Unknowing by Philip SingtonIn the twilight years of Communist East Germany, Bruno Krug, author of a single world-famous novel written twenty years earlier, falls for Theresa Aden, a music student from the West.</p>
<p>But Theresa has also caught the eye of a cocky young scriptwriter who delights in satirizing Krug’s work.The Tower by Uwe TellkampIn derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989.Plan D by Simon UrbanOctober, 2011: while West Berlin enjoys all the trappings of capitalism, on the crowded, polluted, Eastern side of the Wall, the GDR is facing bankruptcy.</p>
<p>The ailing government's only hope lies in economic talks with the West, but then an ally of the GDR’s chairman is found murdered—and all the clues suggest that his killer came from within the Stasi.</p>
<p>Detective Martin Wegener is assigned to the case, but, with the future of East Germany hanging over him, Wegener must work with the West German police if he is to find the killer, even if it means investigating the Stasi themselves. It is a journey that will take him from Stasi meeting rooms to secret prisons as he begins to unravel the identity of both victim and killer, and the meaning of the mysterious Plan D.The Mussel Feast by Birgit VanderbekeA mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues that are tearing this family apart.The Girl In Berlin by Elizabeth WilsonIt's May 1951 in England and Burgess and Maclean have recently disappeared. Elisabeth Wilson's novel is set against the background of the public's surprise and shock over the news of spies defecting, and concerns the hunt to find other spies, particularly the one believed to be in MI5</p>
<p>In London Anthony Blunt's staff at the Courtauld Institute of Art adore him, and are shocked at the suggestions that he could be involved in any spying scandal. The book's character Dinah works at the Courtauld, so gives an insight into Blunt's life at this time. Dinah's husband works at the BBC and is also, unwittingly, drawn into the world of spies and espionage. He, like many of the other characters in the book also has another side hidden from his wife and friends. Wonderful examples are given of social behaviours in the 1950s, as the charade of normality covers investigations and goings on that are (according to the book) common at this time. (From http://emmabbooks.blogspot.nl)Stasi Child by David YoungEast Berlin, 1975<br />
When Oberleutnant Karin Müller is called to investigate a teenage girl's body at the foot of the wall, she imagines she's seen it all before. But when she arrives she realises this is a death like no other: the girl was trying to escape - but from the West.</p>
<p>Müller is a member of the national police, but the case has Stasi written all over it. Karin is tasked with uncovering the identity of the girl, but her Stasi handlers assure her that the perpetrators are from the West - and strongly discourage her asking questions.</p>
<p>The evidence doesn't add up, and Muller soon realises the crime scene has been staged. But this is not a regime that tolerates a curious mind, and Muller doesn't realise that the trail she's following will lead her dangerously close to home . . .
Can you help make this list better? To keep the list to a manageable size I’ve arbitrarily limited it to contemporary fiction (written after 1989) in the English language (incl. translations into English), and first in series only.
Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?
Know any books that should be on this list (fiction, post-1989, actually about life in the GDR – more than a few scenes set there, in English)?
Have I missed anything? Please let me know if you think I’ve missed a novel set in the GDR.
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