|
|
|
Foreign Policy
Spring 1999
Simple Stories: Ein Roman aus der
ostdeutschen Provinz
(Simple Stories: A Novel from the East German
Provinces)
By Ingo Schulze
Reviewed by Josef Janning *
Any novel that succeeds in capturing the spirit of our life and times inspires thousands of personal stories even as it aims to tell one for everyone. Ingo Schulze’s acclaimed new hardcover, Simple Stories, is no exception. Beginning with a bus tour of Italy eight weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the author builds a mosaic of fleeting, often disconnected, images and personal encounters that depict the daily lives of provincial East Germans in the first years after communism. But within this narrative lies a more private story, a collage of memories that will differ with each of Schulze’s German readers.
As I traveled through the Germany of Simple Stories, my recollections mingled with the author’s. Scenes from my first trip to the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) joined memories of growing up in West Germany during the Cold War, trying to make sense of both the stark anticommunism of my parents and teachers and the naive, idealized “real existing socialism” of East Germany. Along with these memories were snippets of the reality I finally witnessed in March of 1990—the frustration and anger of millions of East Germans living in a country exhausted by authoritarianism and bankrupted by communism.
Simple Stories comes as a successor to Schulze’s debut novel, 33 Moments of Happiness, in which the East German author, now 37 years old, first demonstrated his unique style. His writing has been compared with American director Robert Altman’s film, Short Cuts, in the way his books portray the ordinary lives of ordinary people in brief, dialogue-driven chapters. Simple Stories is made up of 29 of them, each one a miniature scene connected to other scenes only as Schulze’s characters meet, talk, and interact in everyday settings.
On the surface, Schulze’s stories seem to ignore politics altogether, yet the book is profoundly political. Skinhead violence disrupts the lives of his characters: a Cuban taxi driver recalls an assault as he discusses reemployment with his dispatcher after five weeks in the hospital. And the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police, preoccupies former informants and victims alike—such as Martin Meurer, who visits his father in Munich for the first time since fleeing the gdr in 1969, leaving his wife and sons behind. Meurer’s stepfather, a devoted communist appearing in another chapter, loses his job over his involvement with the Stasi. He spends his time repairing a rundown summer house given to him by a former colleague whose ties to the Stasi never became public.
Schulze’s East Germans are unhappy people trying to make their way in a society where nothing fits and everything is changing. Muffins, music, a trip to New York, and English slang all suggest a kind of frontier quality, which rapid Westernization has brought to East German life. But the East Germans of Simple Stories have no frontier spirit at all. They travel to Italy with their new German passports as if they are traveling to a new world. Yet, they bring canned food and beverages with them, a holdover from the old days when a holiday meant a trip to the lakes and mountains of “socialist brother states.” Other chapters deal with the ambiguities of socialist upbringing and the competitive spirit after national unification. In one of them, three young men vie for a job at the local furniture superstore.
Some chapters might seem familiar to any reader. A night scene at a remote, rural gas station feels like an East German adaptation of an American road movie. Other scenes, a handful about camping and fishing in particular, will strike readers in the know as uniquely East German. For instance, cars play a significant role in the book, as do road accidents—no wonder to anyone who has driven a Trabi, the small, slow, and foul-smelling vehicle most East Germans were happy to drive after a decade or longer on a waiting list. Nevertheless, Schulze’s work has won wide appeal throughout Germany. Simple Stories has already sold 100,000 copies, impressive for a German novel, and an English edition is due for release this fall.
Schulze’s writing is autobiographical at times. But really, Simple Stories is the biography of a time and a place. Schulze has preserved this strange and traumatic moment of Germany’s history in the professional anxieties, petty dramas, and love lives of ordinary people. It is not surprising that the book has resonated with German readers today. Even as communism becomes an increasingly distant memory, many in the East remain caught in passage, like Schulze’s characters, between a dismal past and an uncertain future.
Endnotes
*: Josef Janning is deputy director of the Center for Applied Policy Research, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich. Back.