In this extraordinary, prizewinning novel, Monika Maron says farewell to the East Germany where she grew up as the stepchild of an élite communist official not unlike retired Professor Beerenbaum, who hires disaffected writer Rosalind Polkowski to transcribe his memoirs.
Maron’s sharp feminist vision, intellectual power and honesty remain essential to understand the Germany of today, where old demons are rising, especially in the East.
‘Icy prose.’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘Maron writes with wit, economy and stylistic assurance.’ THE VILLAGE VOICE
‘One of the best writers of her generation.’ LE MONDE
Table of Content
Silent Close No.6
About Monika Maron
About the Translator
About Readers International
About the author
MONIKA MARON was born in wartime Berlin in 1941 to an anti-fascist mother of Polish Jewish ancestry and a German father. She moved in 1951 from West to East Berlin with her mother and stepfather, Karl Maron, who rose to become a GDR Minister of the Interior. She grew up as a member of the communist élite of East Germany, rebelling as a teen against her stepfather but joining the Party in 1965, thinking as she said to oppose its ‘anti-democratic’ tendencies from within. She quickly understood, she said, that ‘you cannot close up a people in a wall.’ She left the Party, studied drama at the East Berlin Theater School, and then worked as a journalist for Für Dich (For You), a women’s magazine, then for six years at the weekly Wochenpost, and later as a freelance. Between 1976 and 1978 while working on Flight of Ashes, her first novel drawing on her experience as a journalist on an official weekly, she co-operated with the HVA, the foreign intelligence service of the STASI, East Germany’s infamous secret police, according to an exposé of her STASI file in 1995. According to the notes on her file published by Der Spiegel, she agreed to report on West Germans whom she met, but refused to compromise East German friends, in return for the ability to travel to West Berlin to research the autobiographical background to her novel. She did not get the travel pass, despite showing chapters of the manuscript of Flight of Ashes to her spy handler. The book was banned and later published in West Germany in 1981 to acclaim and controversy for exposing the environmental degradation – extreme even by East German standards – of the industrial/chemical factory town Bitterfeld, now called Bitterfeld-Wolfen in Saxony-Anhalt in the former GDR. In 1988, ten years after the STASI judged her an unreliable contact, Monika Maron managed to leave the GDR on a three-year visa. A year later in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly thereafter East Germany disappeared. After living in Hamburg, Germany, until 1992, she returned to a reunited Berlin, where she still lives and writes. With Flight of Ashes, Readers International introduced the writing of Monika Maron into English. RI went on to publish two other important works of hers, The Defector (1988) and – after the fall of the Wall – Silent Close No. 6, both with a disaffected female journalist like Monika Maron herself as the central narrative voice watching and commenting on history as it unfolds. On the publication of Silent Close No. 6 in 1992 she was awarded the Kleist Prize, awarded annually to a prominent German author.
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