Der Anteil der sozialistischen Utopie an der Beendigung der DDR-Literatur. Am Beispiel Christoph Heins

‘Unverhofftes Wiedersehen’: Narrative Paradigms in Christoph Hein’s Nachtfahrt und Fruher Morgen and Exekution eines Kalbes

“…In Exekution eines Kalbes this 'justice' sometimes has a clearly moral dimension, recalling White's view that narrative emplotment is the literary expression of the desire for moral meaning. The narrative which confronts past and present is a reassertion of the imperative of individual responsibility for one's own involvement in time and history; it is the literary form for what Bernhard Spies has described as 'die Behauptung eines unverwechselbaren Selbst, die Bewahrung einer humanen Qualität', 43 However, to make explicit individual responsibility before history the chronicle would not do; a different form was needed, hence the circularity of narrative noted in Exekution eines Kalbes. The juxtaposition of two moments divided by many years in 'Unverhofftes Wiedersehen' and 'Die Vergewaltigung' shows Schulze and Ilona confronted by the lies and omissions which have gone into the construction of their personal and the state's collective narratives and illustrates their failure to assert their own true 'Lebensgeschichte'.…”