Modernist Awareness and Responsiveness to Socio-Political Change in the Work of Christoph Hein
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University of Bath PHD Modernist awareness and responsiveness to socio-political change in the work of Christoph Hein Bevan, Simon Award date: 2002 Awarding institution: University of Bath Link to publication Alternative formats If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact: [email protected] General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 09. Oct. 2021 Modernist awareness and responsiveness to socio-political change in the work of Christoph Hein submitted by Simon Bevan for the degree of PhD of the University of Bath 2002 Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with its author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author. This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purposes of consultation. 1 UMI Number: U602127 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U602127 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ■ > ■ ; jf !^ o 2 0 NOV 2002 Pktt ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have helped me to produce this thesis. Firstly, I am grateful to my parents for their encouragement. Friends and former colleagues in the teaching and research communities at the University of Bath ensured that my three years there as a postgraduate student were a rewarding and enjoyable time. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Dennis Tate for his patient supervision. And, finally, my biggest word of thanks is reserved for Kerry, for supporting me in so many ways over the last few years. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER TITLE PAGE Introduction 5 Chapter 1 Explorations o f ‘small* history: an apprenticeship 25 in prose writing - Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois Chapter 2 “Wir mtissen immer wieder in die Flammen gehen”. 51 The distant protagonist and the responsibility of the reader in DerJremde Freund Chapter 3 “Lbschen Sie das Ged&chtnis eines Menschen, 84 und Sie ldschen die Menschheit*’. ‘Kontingente Wahrheitsmbglichkeiten’ in Horns Ende Chapter 4 “Hein hat jetzt zum dritten Mai das gleiche Buch 124 geschrieben”. Continuity and change in Der Tangospieler and Exekution eines Kalbes Chapter 5 “Christoph Hein hat wie kein zweiter Schriftsteller 163 aus der DDR das begleitet und befbrdert, kommentiert und kritisiert, was vielleicht etwas zu eifrig als ‘Revolution’ bezeichnet worden ist”. Hein and the ‘ Wende’ Chapter 6 “Ich habe [...] das Geftihl, daft ich so bis 1989 etwa 186 das geschrieben habe, was ich zur DDR sagen wollte”. Fresh challenges in Das Napoleon-Spiel Chapter 7 “Das alte Gebilde DDR ist vorbei, nicht aber mein 217 Leben. [...] Ich werde den Teufel tun, und auf all diese Erfahrungen verzichten”. A return to the GDR - Von allem Anfang an Conclusion 249 Bibliography 259 3 SUMMARY Christoph Hein is among the best known of the former GDR’s middle generation of authors, with an international reputation deriving from his playwriting and, in particular, his prose work. This thesis concentrates on two distinctive features of his prose-writing career. Firstly, his style has derived from modernist influences, notably Camus, in a way which contrasts markedly with the often prolonged struggle of his contemporaries to liberate themselves from the conventions of socialist realism. Secondly, Hein has combined creative success with a vigorous public role as an intellectual, an achievement which deserves serious attention in the context of the socio-political transition from the GDR to reunified Germany. The thesis integrates a study of these two features within a structure which devotes a chapter to each of his main publications. It begins with an examination of Hein’s first collection of short stories, Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois (1980), which reveals experimentation with narrative perspective and a greater debt to the traditions of Hebei and Kleist than to modernism. The major breakthrough in Hein’s prose-writing career is then shown to have occurred with a strikingly innovative piece of modernist writing, Der Jremde Freund (1982). The momentum is maintained in Horns Ende (1985), a rich collage of eyewitness accounts of events in a small East German town in the 1950s. Hein’s third major prose-work, Der Tangospieler, published shortly before the ‘Wende’, shifts to a third-person perspective on a GDR-based figure who is characterised by boredom. After looking in detail at Hein’s important public role in the reunification process, we will see him break new ground in portraying a chillingly calculating character in Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993). Finally, the setting returns to 1950s GDR in Hein’s most autobiographical work, Von allem Anfang an (1997), which confirms his status as one of the leading writers in reunified Germany. 4 INTRODUCTION BIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW Christoph Hein was bom in Silesia on 8 April 1944. Following the end of the war, after a brief spell in Thuringia, his family settled in Bad Dtiben, near Leipzig, where he spent his childhood. Hein left Saxony for West Berlin in 1958 in order to study for his ‘Abitur’, after having been prevented from attending ‘Oberschule’ in the GDR due to the ideological unsuitability of his father’s profession as pastor. He was spending his summer holidays in the GDR when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, which meant that he could not return to complete his school education in West Berlin. Throughout the 1960s, he took various part-time jobs in addition to studying at evening classes for his GDR ‘Abitur’, which he passed in the mid-1960s. After again encountering problems with the state authorities over his preferred choice of university studies (he was barred from taking courses in dramaturgy), he decided to study philosophy and subsequently logic at the University of Leipzig. In 1970 he moved to East Berlin, where he worked throughout the following decade at the ‘ Volksbtihne’, firstly as dramaturge and then ‘Hausautor’. Hein left his job at the theatre in 1979 after Benno Besson and other members of staff at the theatre had resigned over government interference in their work: in that year alone, productions of plays by Hein had been postponed fifteen times. Hein’s first piece of prose was published the following year. My thesis will pick up Hein’s career at this point and will focus on his prose writing throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with a chapter devoted to each of his main prose works: Einladung zum Lever Bourgeois (1980), Der Jremde Freund (1982), Horns Ende (1985), Der Tangospieler (1989), Das Napoleon-Spiel (1993) andVon allem Anfang an (1997). The chapter on Der Tangospieler will contain a subsection on the short stories Exekution eines Kalbes which, although not published as a collection until 1994, were written between 1977 and 1990. Today, Hein is one of the best known of the former GDR’s middle generation of authors, with a reputation which has derived largely from his innovative prose writing. In contrast to many GDR writers who had difficulty in breaking away from the conventions of socialist realism, Hein’s prose style has, from an early stage in his career, derived from modernist influences. In addition to producing innovative prose, Hein has also performed a vigorous public role as an intellectual during the period under examination here, particularly around the time of the ‘Wende*. I will examine this period in a separate chapter, which fits in a neat chronological way between Der Tangospieler and Das Napoleon-Spiel. My thesis will seek to combine an analysis of these two elements - modernist awareness and responsiveness to socio-political change - in Hein’s career. I will expand upon the precise focus later in this introduction. Before then, in order to clarify the context for Hein’s prose works, I will outline the main cultural 6 developments in the GDR up to his first publication and introduce the principal features of the modernist movement, which will be central to my analysis. I will then summarise the research already undertaken on Hein in order to provide a framework for my study. MODERNISM AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SOCIALIST REALISM As the title of the book Modernism 1890-1930} edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, indicates, modernism has its roots in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.