Deconstructing East Germany: Christoph Hein’s Literature of Dissent

Playwright and novelist Christoph Hein, who enjoyed tremendous popularity in both Germanies during the 1980s, remains the East’s most successful post-unification writer. Critical both of Soviet-style communism and Western consumercapitalism, Hein chose to remain in East Germany and work toward the liberalization of the communist system. Although his pre-1990 works implicitly reject the skewed reality promoted by the regime, his methods appear at first glance to be totally apolitical: he tells the material truth as he sees it, describing characters and their social settings and allowing these things to speak for themselves. This sort of honesty would seem to be nothing remarkable;yet it proved fatal to the state’s rhetoric of progress, personal fulfillment, and moral superiority to the West. Today, Hein uses the same literary tools with which he once deconstructed communist rhetoric to attack the complacency of unchecked capitalism. Robinson concentrates on Hein’s prose fiction rather than his dramas, since, among other reasons, his plays are little known in the U.S. and U.K., while his novels and many novellas have been translated into English and have brought him a measure of fame in the English-speaking world.