SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK BEGINS HIS MONOGRAPH Welcome to the Desert of the Real by relating a joke from the GDR in which a person who is sent to Siberia promises to write to his friend and tells him that if the letter is written in blue ink everything in it is true. If the letter is written in red ink the statements made in the letter are false. The letter arrives in blue ink and explains how wonderful Siberia is and lists many nice things that are readily available in Siberia. In conclusion, the friend writes that the only thing not available in Siberia is red ink. Žižek asserts that the punchline of the joke indicates that the friend in Siberia found a way to communicate the incommunicable. The letter-writer, lacking the language needed to express his discomfort, finds an alternative way of communicating. While Žižek relates the joke in order to describe matters at work in twenty-first century, Western capitalism, it can be reapplied to the GDR to describe literary works from the GDR that make use of the theme of suicide. That is, fictional suicide in GDR narrative fiction is a literary theme that communicates ideas that are otherwise difficult to communicate. This study demonstrates that those suicides allude to suicides from canonical works of literature in the wrong color ink, as it were. Unlike the letter written in blue ink, however, these works are not merely tricks to fool the censors (suicide would likely not have been the best way to do that)—they are rich in interpretive potential. Above all, they are literary. Not only do they broach the taboo topic of suicide, but they perform transformative readings of GDR literary heritage, revealing the slippery power of literature, and leading the sclerotic literary heritage of the GDR to destroy itself.

Read narratologically, the fictional suicides examined in this study together comprise a literary historical trajectory. The ways in which those fictional suicides transform earlier texts that deal with suicide become increasingly abstract. Before the 1970s they are richly literary, but not primarily transtextual.

WHY MIGHT A HISTORIAN KILL HIMSELF? And what would his ghost tell us? These questions are at the core of Christoph Hein's Horns Ende. In 1985, fourteen years after Honecker's “No Taboos” speech, and following two years of struggle with the censors, Christoph Hein's second major prose work appeared. Horns Ende deals with difficult issues of history and memory, asking, for example, what became of the Nazis who previously dwelt in the territory that became East Germany, and evoking memories of Stalinist show trials in the GDR in the 1950s. The presence of such issues in the novel delayed its publication. Aufbau and Luchterhand publishers, the former in the East, the latter in the West, had worked out a deal to publish the novel in East and West simultaneously. This is the same deal negotiated between the same two publishers that led to the publication of Wolf's Kein Ort. Nirgends in 1979. The Ministry of Culture, however, temporarily inhibited publication. Klaus Selbig, one of three censors who screened the novel, wrote a letter to Klaus Höpcke, the Minister of Culture from 1973 until 1989, dated May 10, 1984, in which he provided the following reason, among others, for halting publication of the book: “The impression remains that the story carries over into the present as a history of human cruelty. To be sure, the dialogues which precede the individual chapters and the concluding dialogue provide a kind of contrapunkt, but it requires an extremely thorough reading and a great deal of good will not to interpret this novel in the aforementioned sense.” The censors were correct in noting that the novel presents a “history of human cruelty,” part of which “carries over into the present,” that is, into the GDR. They were mistaken, however, in their reading of the dialogues between chapters, which include the posthumous voice of Horn, as a counterpoint to that history. Their misreading of those dialogues is further evident in the fact that they persuaded Hein to change the original title, Horn, to the title under which the work was later published, Horns Ende, because they thought that emphasizing Horn's death would demonstrate a disconnect between the histories of fascism and Stalinism, on the one hand, and the contemporary situation in the GDR, on the other.

REINER KUNZE's three-line, twelve-word poem “Selbstmord” (Suicide) was composed in 1971, the year that Erich Honecker gave his “No Taboos” speech, and the poem was published in 1972, the year that Ulrich Plenzdorf first published Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. Kunze's poem compares suicide to a door, states that it is the last door, but then counters that no one has ever knocked on all of the other doors. On the surface, it is an inspirational poem concerned with suicide prevention. At first glance, it concretizes suicide as a “way out” and then gives the hope that there is another, less violent way out. Implicit in this reading of the poem is also the idea that no one should ever reach for the door of suicide, an idea that may strike some as condescending and moralistic. Jean Améry, for example, deplored both psychological and sociological approaches to suicide, because they take the volition away from the person who commits suicide. Michel Foucault, furthermore, defends one's right to take one's own life. In other words: Who is Reiner Kunze to say that there are always other open doors? Such a debate, however, is about real, historical suicides. But such readings are not the only possible ones. After all, this is a poem.

Read somewhat differently, Kunze's poem provides an appropriate image for this study. The poem does not indicate where the door of suicide leads, nor does it indicate whether it is an exit, as most readers might assume, or whether it might be an entrance. Each door has two sides. For the study of GDR literature, fictional suicides are not only a way out but also a way in. The poem indicates, furthermore, that there are a myriad of such doors. Fictional suicides allow the scholar, as well as the writer and the reader, to enter into issues of memory and transtextuality in the GDR, as much as transtextuality provides a way into the idea of suicide. Suicide is one of many doors into GDR literature, but it is one that has, until now, remained largely shut.

This study has opened a door into suicide in GDR literature, but it has not knocked on all possible doors of suicide in GDR literature. There is no shortage of such texts. There are also GDR films that deal with suicide.

WHILE THIS STUDY IS primarily about fictional suicides and the crisis of literary heritage beginning with Honecker's “No Taboos” Speech in 1971, this first chapter briefly outlines the representations of suicide in East German literature before 1971. In a sense, this chapter is a summary of a book that I did not write but could have written had this study been a two-volume set. In short, the fictional suicides in East German literature before the 1970s do not primarily struggle with literary heritage, as those of the 1970s and 1980s do. Further, they tend not to be central to the work in which they appear, and some of them are not clear cases of suicide. Working more or less chronologically, I subdivide the fictional suicides in East German literature of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s into four sections: antifascist suicides, workers’ suicides, hints of suicide in the works of Christa Wolf before Kein Ort. Nirgends, and one cleverly literary suicide in Rolf Schneider's 1968 short story “Imagination.”

This progression from antifascist suicides to workers’ suicides through Wolf's works of the 1960s and Schneider's “Imagination,” leading toward the caesura of the early 1970s, also moves by and large from fictional suicides as relatively realistic representations of society (although they were never quite that simple) to fictional suicides that are many steps removed from being mere reflections of society. This chapter, then, recounts the prehistory of the story I tell beginning in chapter 2. While chapters 2–6 offer analysis of transtextual relationships and their relations to representations of suicide, this chapter is a relatively straightforward literary historical overview of suicide in East German literature in the 1940s, 1950, and 1960s. I should add the disclaimer that fictional suicides can be difficult to identify as such. I make no promise that I have included all fictional suicides in GDR literature.

Antifascist Suicides

While most of the fictional suicides described in this book are not primarily realistic representations of real suicides, some of the fictional antifascist suicides—suicides related in some way to the horrors of fascism, the portrayal of which is antifascist, regardless of whether the character who kills himself is fascist or antifascist—may to some degree be inspired by real suicides that took place in the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust.

ON JUNE 9, 1978, THE SOVIET AMBASSADOR to the GDR, Pjotr Andrejevich Abrassimov, and his Bulgarian counterpart showed up at the home of none other than Erich Honecker to protest the appearance of Werner Heiduczek's novel Tod am Meer in December of 1977. Although censorship was rampant in the GDR, appeals for censorship made directly in the residence of the First Secretary of the SED were rare. What is it about this novel that Abrassimov found so subversive? In his official statement, Abrassimov cites the portrayal of Soviet soldiers as “ungehobelte Grobiane, als brutale Leute und Ignoranten” (crude brutes, as brutal people and ignoramuses). He goes on to cite passages in which Soviet soldiers rape German women and otherwise insult the German people. And he reports an absence of the atrocities committed by German Fascists in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Indeed, as Carsten Wurm indicates, the novel was barely approved by the censors, and was likely approved as a result of the censors being hesitant to cause another stir in the immediate wake of the Biermann affair, the massive response to which had created a real political crisis. As Michael Hametner states, the novel was, for many readers “ein Kultbuch—für die Zensur in der DDR ein Ärgernis” (a cult book—a nuisance for the GDR censors). Abrassimov's visit to the Honecker residence had consequences. The novel was banned and not rereleased until 1987 in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika. From Abrassimov's appeal to Honecker in 1978 until the collapse of the GDR, Heiduczek published only children's literature.

While Abrassimov's observations of the novel's offensiveness are accurate, Tod am Meer is also subversive in its rewriting of Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), Mann being an otherwise accepted writer in the Lukácsian realist paradigm that was favored by GDR cultural authorities. Much is subversive in the novel's relationship to Mann's novella. One could point to the fact that the novel's main character, Jablonski, kills himself rather than having to return to the so-called workers’ and peasants’ paradise on German soil. In addition, the novel is subversive in its constant hinting that the Stalinist system is itself self-destructive. These three points: the rewriting of Mann; Jablonski's self-destruction; and the representation of the Stalinist system as self-destructive are, furthermore, interconnected.

CHRISTA WOLF's KEIN ORT. NIRGENDS (1979) was influenced by the November 1976 expatriation of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. Whereas Heiduczek's Tod am Meer was written before the Biermann affair took place (and published two months after the affair), Wolf's novel was written after the affair, an event that had a profound effect on Wolf. She had signed a petition against the decision to expatriate Biermann and consequently faced restrictions and later dismissal from her leadership position in the Schriftstellerverband (Writers Union). Wolf purportedly felt as though she had her back against the wall, a statement she made during an interview with Frauke Meyer-Gosau for the West German periodical alternative in the winter of 1982, implying that Wolf felt that her political and literary possibilities had become limited in the GDR. But neither Biermann nor Wolf wanted out of the country, at least not permanently. In November 1976, Biermann gave a concert in Cologne and wanted to return to the GDR, but he was forced to remain outside the country. Like Biermann, Wolf had some freedom to travel, visiting Greece in 1980, for example, but she always willingly returned to the GDR. For Wolf, being in the GDR and being a writer were intertwined. She made a pact with Franz Fühmann that if one of them became incapable of writing, that person would leave the GDR. She continued to write and remained in the country. As David Bathrick describes, writers such as Wolf understood that leaving the GDR would only strengthen the rhetorical binaries of the Cold War, in particular the literary historiographical binary of ill, irrational, capitalist literature versus healthy, rational, communist literature. If her literary works are any indicator, Wolf wanted to reevaluate the literary heritage of the GDR, rather than merely run from it. Indeed, Kein Ort. Nirgends, written after the Biermann affair, is the first major instance in Wolf's oeuvre of such reevaluation. Others were to follow. The impact of the Biermann affair on Kein Ort. Nirgends has long been acknowledged. Ann Stamp Miller, for example, writes:

THESE TWO WORKS SEEM, on the surface, to counter my claim that suicide in East German literature of the 1970s and 1980s is primarily fictional and imaginative; both of them, however, are wildly transtextual. Moreover, they are an unlikely pair. Heiner Müller's play Hamletmaschine (1977/78) and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken (1981) are both inspired, in part, by real suicides. Although each of these two works is extraordinarily rich on its own, they also become even more interesting when they are placed alongside the other literary representations of suicide in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s. Both works also employ a large number of hypotexts that at times run counter to one another, and both use some combination of hypertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, and Kristevan intertextuality. Indeed, Genette's taxonomy of transtextuality, as useful as it is, is not entirely equipped to describe these two works. The wealth of transtextuality functions in both works to resist interpretation and simplification, constituting what Jeff Todd Titon calls “intertextual overload” or what Georgina Paul, writing specifically about Hamletmaschine, calls “cultural overload.” Whereas Plenzdorf 's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. and Wolf 's Kein Ort. Nirgends, for example, employ the trope of suicide to instigate a shift in literary historiography, causing literary heritage to be rewired, Hamletmaschine and Flucht in die Wolken shortcircuit the idea of literary heritage altogether. Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken uses literary history primarily to cope with the loss of a loved one through suicide. And while Müller's Hamletmaschine alludes to real suicides, among many other things, it does not constitute a comingto- terms with suicide. Instead, it is a dramatic, comparative exploration of suicidal voices and various intellectual strands of self-destruction. In short, in Hamletmaschine Müller uses the theme of suicide in an attempt to explore the failures and impossibilities of co-opting literary heritage in the GDR, and in Flucht in die Wolken Muthesius uses allusions to literature in an attempt to make some sense of the author's daughter's suicide and the GDR context in which it happened.

Although no character in Hamletmaschine explicitly commits suicide during the action of the play, suicide and self-destruction are the primary themes in the work. Indeed, the play consists largely of a polyphony of suicidal voices. Scholarship on Hamletmaschine tends to fall into one of two categories.

FICTIONAL SUICIDES FROM the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. One assumption seems to be that suicide in GDR fiction was primarily a direct reflection of real suicides in GDR society. Several scholars and critics who have dealt with this issue have maintained that view.1 Further, conversations I have had while working on this project, both with scholars of German literature and with interested nonacademics, have revealed that many people assume that suicide in GDR literature must represent some realistic reflection of politically motivated suicide in the GDR. Such assumptions seem fair on the surface. It might seem that suicide was rampant in the GDR, given the regime's attempt to hide suicide rates. The quantity of major works of GDR literature, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, with suicide as a major theme might also cause one to surmise that suicide rates in the GDR were anomalously high. It might seem too that writers used literature as a secret code to communicate about the real problem of suicide. And Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck's 2006 film Das Leben der Anderen only reinforces these assumptions. However, such assumptions about the nature of suicide in GDR literature are mostly false. While suicide was a taboo topic in the GDR, the fictional suicides do not primarily reflect a problem of suicide in GDR society, perceived or real. These fictional suicides are much more complex. Above all, they are literary. Read closely, they reveal a wealth of literary devices and theorizations of literary problems. Taken together, they form an interesting literary history, one that is situated among other developments in GDR literature, including, for example, the movement from socialist realism toward a belated modernism, the toying with taboos following Erich Honecker's 1971 assertion that there were to be no taboos in GDR literature (with the problematic caveat that the writer must write as a socialist), and the movement of intertextuality from the notion of cultural and literary heritage (Kulturerbe) as an antidote to fascist aesthetics toward the use of intertextuality as a method of reevaluating and eventually eroding literary heritage.