More Evidence—and a Brief Comparison

This book has set out to dispel the idea that flight and expulsion were taboo topics in GDR literature, by example of GDR prose. If there are still readers who remain unconvinced of the extent of this literary portrayal, despite the evidence so far provided, then I can only emphasize again that the texts explored in this study are examples, albeit key ones. There are numerous other texts I could have chosen, many of which, beyond all individual differences, and in their own ways, would confirm the patterns identified. Thus to demonstrate that GDR prose gradually began to give due weight to the problems involved in integrating refugees, I could have pointed, for instance, to George Gunske's novel Verstrickungen (Entanglements, 1978), which explores the aberrations of the Belaschke family, refugees from silesia for whom integration in the GDR proves a difficult path; or to Harald Schleuter's collection of stories METAS Hochzeit und andere Dorfgeschichten (METAS Wedding and Other Village Stories, 1984), featuring, for instance, a corpulent Upper Silesian Catholic teacher called Stefan Molewski, who is spurned by the villagers when he makes a local girl pregnant. Helga Schütz's In Annas Namen (In the Name of Anna, 1986) could have been cited, a novel whose narrator, Anna, was found apparently abandoned under a Dresden bridge as a baby in February 1945. She had survived flight from Breslau, and the bombing of Dresden.