IN AN INFLUENTIAL ESSAY of October 1997, “Der Herbst des Quatschocento. Immer noch, jetzt erst recht, gibt es zwei deutsche Literaturen: selbstverliebter Realismus im Westen, tragischer Expressionismus im Osten,” first published in Die Zeit, resident critic Iris Radisch pointed to the difference between fiction from the east of the now united Germany and that from the west: “Der Osten ist tragisch, der Westen lustig.” In the east of the Republic, writers were prone to draw on the “metaphysischen Traditionen der deutschen Geistesgeschichte”; in the west, they were more likely to imitate an “amerikanischen Pragmatismus.” Radisch describes Matthias Politycki's Weiberroman (1997), for instance, as deliberately banal in its focus on the fashions of the 1980s in the “old” West Germany, as “nostalgisch, ein wenig ironisch und minimal gedrechselt” and, she concludes, “von unschlagbarer Diesseitigkeit” (DHQ, 183). Hundsnächte (1997) by east German writer Reinhard Jirgl, in contrast, is commended as a “gelaufenes, kreischendes, psalmodierendes, blutiges, unerträgliches, aggressives, faszinierendes, wütendes, obsessives und intelligentes Buch” (DHQ, 186). Set in the deathstrip along the now defunct inner-German border, this novel tells of the encounter between an engineer sent to convert the former no-man's-land into a bicycle path and an Untoten, the zombie lawyer and exile from East Germany — now turned writer — metaphorically trapped in the desolate landscape between the ideals of the GDR and the depressing reality of the post-1990 Federal Republic.