CHRISTOPH HEIN IS ONE OF the most influential contemporary East German writers and public intellectuals before and after German unification. He was born in 1944 as the son of a Protestant minister in Heinzendorf, Silesia, and relocated with his family to Bad Düben, a small town near Leipzig, after the Second World War. Although Hein became a playwright, as well, he is best known for his novels. As an essayist, first president of the unified German PEN center (1998–2000), and former copublisher of the weekly Berlin newspaper Freitag, he does, however, frequently address political and societal developments in Germany in a nonfiction format as well.

The relatively fast pace of German unification was not welcomed by many East German intellectuals and writers such as Hein. In November 1989, many of them spoke at a large demonstration at Berlin's Alexanderplatz, indicating that they would have either preferred a slower unification process or maintained two separate German states, with East Germany attempting a “Third Way” as imagined by Rudolf Bahro in Die Alternative (1977; The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 1978) in the previous decade. Following German unification, this skepticism remained regarding the unification process, and questions of social justice were not only addressed by intellectuals and fiction writers. In her famous statement from 1993, “[w]e wanted justice and got the constitutional state” (quoted in Löw 26), the painter Bärbel Bohley also voiced East German civil-rights activists’ fundamental disappointment with the course of unification. Her statement refers not only to the impact of the governmental and legal changes on East Germans but also to problems related to real-estate ownership and the very high unemployment that followed the introduction of West German currency in East Germany in 1990.

In this chapter on two of Christoph Hein's recent novels, I investigate how literature written after the fall of the Berlin Wall treats both the discontent with past East German policies and, even more so, the pace, political direction, and effects of unification. Frau Paula Trousseau (2007) portrays the life of an East German painter and her untimely death a decade after unification in 2000, while Weiskerns Nachlass (Weiskern's Legacy, 2011) depicts the unstable employment situation of a middleaged part-time lecturer at the University of Leipzig.