We hope you have withstood the storms in the first few days of the year unscathed. As the weather hardly allows for anything other than cosy reading in heated rooms, we give you ten reading tips below. Today under the motto "Fiction for contemporary historians" or "Contemporary history in novels":
Lutz Seiler: Kruso (ZZF 26246)
This novel, published in 2014 and awarded with the German Book Prize, tells the story of Edgar Bender, who, fleeing his life, becomes a dishwasher on Hiddensee, that fabled island that is, as they say, already outside of time and "beyond the news". There he meets Alexander Krusowitsch Kruso. A difficult, tender friendship begins. Kruso, the master and godfather of the island, initiates Ed into the rituals of the seasonal workers and the laws of their nights, during which Ed experiences his sexual initiation. The secret driving force behind this community is Kruso's utopia, which promises to lead every shipwrecked person of the country (and of life) to the "roots of freedom" in three nights. But the autumn of 1989 shakes the island. In the end, there is a fight to the death and a promise.
Anne Hahn: Gegenüber von China (Opposite China) (ZZF 26073)
When the Berlin Wall falls in autumn 1989, it meant liberation for Nina: not only from the restrictive structures of the GDR, but above all from the Stasi prison in which she was imprisoned after a failed escape. An escape that was to take her via Azerbaijan and Iran to Turkey and from there to West Berlin. Soviet border guards put an end to Nina's plans and return her to the GDR and the reality of East German justice. This autobiographical (debut) novel about punk in the GDR, escape and Stasi imprisonment was reissued in 2014 by the small, fine Mainz-based publisher Ventil Verlag.
David Eggers: The Circle (ZZF 25977)
Huxley's Brave New World reloaded: 24-year-old Mae Holland has landed a job at the hippest company in the world, "The Circle" an internet company based in California that has swallowed up the business fields of Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter by providing all customers with a single internet identity through which everything can be handled. With the elimination of anonymity on the Internet – one of the goals of the "three wise men" who run the corporation – there will be no more dirt on the internet and no more crime. Mae becomes a model employee and takes the delusion that everything must be transparent to the extreme. But an encounter with a mysterious colleague changes everything ... Eggers has written a clairvoyant novel about contemporary networking mania, which quickly became a cult book, went through several editions and was widely reviewed.
Hanns-Josef Ortheil: Die Berlinreise. Roman eines Nachgeborenen (ZZF 25718)
In the summer of 1964, the then twelve-year-old narrator travels with his father to West Berlin. A few years after the construction of the Berlin Wall and one year after Kennedy's visit to Berlin, the trip to Berlin presents father and son with the reality of the Cold War and at the same time becomes a journey back in time to the Second World War. In 1939, the newly married parents had moved from a small Westerwald town to the former capital of the Reich; the father was employed by the Deutsche Reichsbahn and they lost their first child in air raids. Day after day, father and son explore the traces of this time, visit the former family home, meet acquaintances and read the household account books that the mother kept during the war years. The twelve-year-old writes a travel diary about his impressions, in which he dramatically recounts his own young body's experience of the past. A novel to accompany the exhibition "Biotope Berlin"!
Marc Schweska: Zur letzten Instanz (ZZF 25354)
Recommended reading, especially for Dept. II: This debut novel from 2011 provides an insight into the previously unknown scene of electricians, hobbyists and tinkerers in the GDR. The author combines the fictional records of the young electrician Lem, State Security reports and essayistic passages into a multi-layered, colourful, varied portrait of the times that en passant tells us a lot about the youth, everyday life and the subculture of the GDR. In its review, the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" particularly emphasised the references to the GDR's history of science of the 1950s and 1960s, especially to the East German cyberneticists of the time.
Yannick Haenel: Das Schweigen des Jan Karski (The Silence of Jan Karski) (ZZF 22277)
Jan Karski was smuggled into the Warsaw ghetto twice because, as a courier for the Polish resistance, he was supposed to report to the world about the murder of the Jews. He travelled to England and America on this mission, even meeting President Roosevelt. The Polish exile government requested the Allies to act. But why didn't they do it? This question tormented Jan Karski throughout his life, and the answers he found left him in silence after the war. Yannick Haenel gives Karski a fictional, moving voice. In his unusually constructed and highly controversial novel in France, the author merges memory, history and fiction.
Christa Wolf: Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (ZZF 22132)
In the early nineties, the narrator spends a few months in Los Angeles, the city of angels, at the invitation of the Getty Centre. Her research objects are the letters of a certain L. from the estate of a deceased friend, whose fate she traces – a woman who emigrated to the USA from National Socialist Germany. She observes the American way of life, immerses herself in the German-speaking émigré colony and is repeatedly asked about the situation in reunified Germany: Is the "virus of contempt for humanity" being revived in the new, uncertain German conditions? In her daily reading, in conversations, in dreams, the narrator confronts an event from her past and struggles for the truthfulness of her own memory. The last great novel by the grande dame of GDR literature.
Peter O. Chotjewitz: Mein Freund Klaus (My friend Klaus) (ZZF 22111)
"Peter O. Chotjewitz' grand biographical novel “Mein Freund Klaus” ("My friend Klaus") fights on familiar fronts, cultivates entrenched friend-foe schemes and yet, the surprising result of this book is that it has become the valuable contribution to the tediously deadlocked RAF discussion, what was not necessarily to be expected: it is an oppressive document of Klaus Croissants’ idealistic, certainly very ideological, but self-sacrificing struggle against the constitutionally questionable treatment of the contemporary radical opposition by the West German judiciary", says Kevin Vennemann, for WDR 3 about the last novel by the author, who passed away in 2010.
Uwe Tellkamp: Der Turm. Geschichte aus einem versunkenen Land (The tower. History from a sunken land) (ZZF 20129)
Dresden's villa district, long since covered in the grey of decay by real existing socialism, isolates itself. Anne and Richard Hoffmann are in conflict between conformity and rebellion: Can they seekp refuge from the idemands of the system in Dresden's nostalgia? Or has the time come to choose to leave? Christian, their eldest son, feels the harshness of the system in the NVA. His uncle Meno Rohde is caught between two worlds: He has access to the "Ostrom-" district, where the nomenklatura resides, people's life paths are managed and German democratic law is administered. In epic language, Tellkamp describes the downfall of a social system. A monumental panorama of the declining GDR, in which members of three generations drift towards the maelstrom of the 1989 revolution, some shaping it, others helpless.
Karl Mickel: Lachmunds Freunde (Lachmund's friends) (ZZF 18504)
In his only novel, Karl Mickel tells the story of three friends - adventurers, boxers, racing cyclists, students, drifters in pubs and womanisers. The setting is a poetic kingdom of Saxony that has nothing to do with the 40 years of the GDR and yet, in an intricate way, everything to do with it. The realistic, the fantastic, the surreal, the tragic and the hilarious go hand in hand. Long before the publication of the first part, which was repeatedly delayed by censorship, "Lachmund's Friends" had become a myth. When the novel was finally published in 1989, people in the GDR were less concerned with reading. The response remained limited and the author set about continuing the stories of his three heroes in the light of new historical developments. "Lachmunds Freunde 2" ("Lachmund's Friends 2") remained Mickel's most important literary project until his death in 2000.
All these books and many more can of course be found with us, in the ZZF library! Best regards from the library team. P.S.: From now on, we will be informing you occasionally about treasures in our collection in this way.