Dennis Tate

The East German novel : identity, community, continuity

the east german novel identity community continuity is available in our digital library an online access to it is set as public so you can download it instantly. Our book servers saves in multiple countries, allowing you to get the most less latency time to download any of our books like this one. Merely said, the the east german novel identity community continuity is universally compatible with any devices to read.

Uwe Johnson's awkward legacy. A sympathetic secret policeman of the pre-Stasi era

The secret policeman Rohlfs, one of the central figures in Uwe Johnson’s first published novel, Mutmassungen uber Jakob (1959), made an unexpected reappearance in the spotlight of contemporary German culture in the late autumn of the year 2000, when Margarethe von Trotta’s fourpart film adaptation of Johnson’s Jahrestage was shown on ARD, attracting an audience of over three million viewers.1 Although Rohlfs is a marginal figure in Johnson’s 1892-page epic (itself published in four parts between 1970 and 1983), he is given a significant role in the third and fourth parts of the film version. In the novel Rohlfs is briefly recalled by Johnson’s protagonist Gesine Cresspahl as the officer who, in the autumn of 1956, first tried in vain to recruit her, using her close friend Jakob Abs as an intermediary, and then met her to talk about Jakob after the latter’s perplexing death under the wheels of a train. What Gesine Cresspahl tells her daughter Marie is simply: ‘In eine Nachbarschaft geriet ich, von der wollte Jakob mich bewahren. Das war ein Herr Rohlfs, der wunschte mit mir Jakob zu bereden, hatte mich auch in den Akten […].’2 A few pages later Gesine adds another detail, telling Marie that it was Rohlfs’s attempt to get information about Gesine from Jakob’s mother during the same period which led the latter to leave the GDR (J, 1870).