6 - Specters of Suicide: Christoph Hein's Horns Ende

Summary

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.