Introduction: The Rhetoric of Suicide in East Germany

Summary

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.