Ms. Gneuss, your debut novel “Gittersee” has just been published, which is set in Dresden in 1976 and tells of a sixteen-year-old who falls into the clutches of a Stasi man. You were also nominated for the German Book Prize for this. What’s striking is your language, which sometimes doesn’t sound at all like the time in which the action takes place. You don’t know the GDR from your own experience and grew up in the West. Was the material just too far away for you?
No, it is a literary technique. When I write, I look for words that touch on the objects and situations I’m concerned with, but I don’t necessarily use words that people used at the time. If I were writing a novel about the Middle Ages, I probably wouldn’t use the word “woman.” Because it evokes different associations with us today than it did back then. In “Gittersee” I was looking for a language that made the experiences of a sixteen-year-old on the outskirts of Dresden in the 1970s accessible. That’s why for me it’s not a mistake when someone says “It’s fine”, but rather a clear reference to the relevance of my material. I’m surprised that some people find it so difficult to recognize this stylistic device.
Have you ever thought about a different literary approach?
Those born later who tell stories from a long time ago often frame it as an epistolary novel or manuscript fiction. A character then discovers an old piece of writing or a letter, and the actual story unfolds from there. You can do that, but I wanted to put myself and my readers in the situation that my protagonist was in at the time. I wanted to tell the story directly and bring it to life. This is the freedom of literature. Nobody in the East could have written the story of “Gittersee” in 1976, especially not in the West. I have so far been missing a text like “Gittersee”, in which identifying figures work in the state security and the reader is entangled in contradictions. These are the experiences of our parents and grandparents that I write about, but it is also our heritage that we have to deal with.
Why did you even write the novel?
To understand how something like this can happen. How a young girl could end up in the clutches of the Stasi. She’s not an adult, she has no ideology. She is unhappily in love and has a lot of problems at home. The manipulation by their command officer Wickwalz can work through this. I also came across the topic of young people in the state security through the story of Angela Marquardt. She was only fifteen when she was recruited by her command officer, from whom she then experienced sexual violence. After the fall of communism, she was a member of the PDS and had to leave when her Stasi file became public. I found it crazy that no one asked how a fifteen-year-old could even get into state security and what kind of constraints individuals often found themselves in. People in the state security were often perpetrators and victims at the same time, that’s interesting. That’s what concerns me, this world in which so many have looked the other way and in which even young people have been infiltrated. These are the questions we would have to negotiate: how something like this could happen and how we can ensure that it doesn’t happen again. When I now read that the use of the word “plastic bag” is being discussed in the reception of my novel, we are obviously still at the very beginning of the process. It is almost perfidious that a novel that deals with the activities of the state security should be damaged by a list of alleged errors that has been passed on. This feels like real satire.
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