AT THE CLOSE OF HANNS-JOSEF ORTHEIL'S Abschied von den Kriegsteilnehmern (1992), the narrator — a writer who shares a great deal of his biography with Ortheil — relates how he went to Prague in the autumn of 1989 to deliver a letter to an East German couple who, along with hundreds of their compatriots, had taken refugee in the West German embassy and were demanding to be allowed to travel to the FRG. He tells of how he bribed an enterprising East German within the embassy compound to find the addressees of the letter, written by friends who had crossed from Hungary to Austria. On handing it over to the exhilarated defectors, he insists that they travel to Vienna and be reunited with their friends, and with him, as soon as they made it to the West. This would be “eine ganz unglaubliche Freude, namenlos, eine namenlose Freude,” for all concerned.

“Eine namenlose Freude” — the unification of East and West Germans embodied for the narrator, in late 1989, at least, a joy so improbable, so unthinkable as to be unidentifiable. Yet he may also have been alluding to the prospect of a joy whose name Germans had, for so long, not dared to pronounce, that is, delight in national unity and a desire for redemption of the past, sentiments summarized by Martin Walser in 1993: “deutsche Geschichte darf auch einmal gutgehen.”