Trümmerliteratur Redux

Abstract

In an essay entitled ‘The Foreign Gaze: On the Melancholy of East Germans in the Second Life’,¹ Jana Hensel recalls an evening at which a fellow East German writer, Thomas Rosenlöcher, remarked that he didn’t know a single East German who now gave an honest account of his or her biography; that, in accordance with the demands of the ‘new time’, East Germans have either polished, roughened or straightened out their life stories. Hensel maintains that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans still look at themselves through foreign eyes, through a gaze that emerges

when a world falls apart and overnight new and hitherto unfamiliar values come into force. When people from one day to the next are forced to look at their lives differently. … It’s the feeling of having already died once. It is the experience that wanting to begin life for a second time, as if it were the first, just doesn’t work. Because one always ends up dividing one’s life into a before and after and sees oneself in both.²