WWhen I started talking to the audience directly after readings in recent years, we always seemed to agree: We are all very familiar with the evil of the SED dictatorship. The (East German) audience from my own experience, myself – born in 1984 – based on research and conversations. So when people who spent a significant part of their lives in the GDR told me about this time, the topics were always the same: Stasi surveillance, scarcity economy, youth work centers… We – the reading public and I – had a certain routine , when it came to these topics. There was nothing to add to the image of the GDR and the systematic oppression, or to put it another way: we were very familiar with the monster that was the SED dictatorship, and nothing could surprise us.
But then I met Karin S. from Saxony-Anhalt, who told me what had happened to her in the GDR. She has reasonable suspicion that her child was declared dead but is still alive today. This story seemed so outrageous to me that I could hardly believe it. The fact that children were first declared dead and then given to other families was definitely not part of the canon of what is commonly said about the forty years of the GDR dictatorship. I'm interested in the aftereffects of this time on our present – and I immediately began to think about how I could transform this incomprehensible process into a novel. But I knew one thing right away: if what happened to Karin was just an isolated incident, I wouldn't write about it. In fact, it wasn't difficult to find other women who shared Karin's fate. And each time the cases were strikingly similar. When I realized this, at the beginning of 2021, I knew that Karin's desperate search for her child, who was declared dead, would be the basis for my novel “May Fly Time”.
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