1 - Suicide as an Antifascist Literary Trope: 1945–71

Summary

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.