3 - Remembering to Death: Werner Heiduczek's Tod am Meer

Summary

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.