Gerti Tetzner’s novel “Karen W.” Rediscovered in 1974 | EUROtoday

A girl lies awake. A person is loud night breathing subsequent to her. She is aware of that she has to go away proper now, this very minute. Into one other life. “Magazines next to the opened suitcases. Unopened letters. The damp bathing suit in the bag. I should have unpacked and washed his things first, he can’t deal with things like that,” says the girl. Her identify is Karen Waldau and he or she is the daughter of a Nazi who needed to do lots of work to denazify. Like the writer of the novel, Karen comes from a village in Thuringia. She is the one one in her background to have attended secondary college and now works within the metropolis as a notary. She has a daughter together with her boyfriend, a philosophy scholar.

The three of them have been dwelling collectively within the college city of L. – for a very long time now, they’ve lived extra previous one another than with one another. Because Peters, that is the identify of the younger thinker, turns into a phrasemonger as a part of his educating work. His as soon as so open questions, his analysis into the revolutionaries of world historical past, for instance, has ebbed away: scenes of common desolation that Gerti Tetzner spells out in her first novel.

And if it wasn’t clear from the blurb, you’d be shocked to seek out out as you learn that this exhausted couple was on the soil of the GDR originally of the Sixties. That it is not nearly breaking apart with a person with whom you are not getting anyplace, because it quickly turns into clear, however about having the braveness to do one thing that does not serve the collective, however somewhat a personal want. This was not a given in GDR literature on the time. Nevertheless, the novel was enormously profitable not solely within the West but in addition within the East.

Gerti Tetzner, who belonged to Christa Wolf’s interior circle, wrote, to place it bluntly, an East German model of the well-known Nouvelle Vague movie “Le Mépris” in 1974. There, Jean-Luc Godard levels a pair, performed by Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot, whose love turns to contempt as a result of Piccoli throws himself at an American movie producer – the enemy of French auteur cinema. Here it isn’t capitalism, however text-book socialism, which, from the attitude of the principle character Karen, has too normal recipes for the issues of its people.

At the start of the e book, Karen W. offers up her life with Peters to return to her Thuringian residence village of Osthausen together with her daughter Bettina. She left at fourteen to attend highschool. She owed this to the opinion of a neighboring farmer who had stood up for her. Later, when she went to L., she usually thought in regards to the circumstances at residence and her childhood sweetheart Günter: “And I looked at the lives of all the women in the village where my childhood had ended: fifty years of feeding pigs, making soup and blowing the children’s noses… Why should I live like that just because I was supposed to live with Günter?”

In Osthausen, the city-dweller now hopes to get again to the necessities. The folks listed below are strong and down-to-earth. Working in a cooperative guarantees social progress, but in addition trustworthy work and a connection to the earth with which you grew up. “Now I’m going to the field with Osthausen farmers for the second month. Like them, I put my forearm behind my back when I get up. I handle the forks like them and use their pocket knives at breakfast at the edge of the field. Some share with me samples of their own pickled cucumbers. Some whisper behind me. I only hear what I want to hear, and I feel good in this long late summer autumn, where the leaves rest quietly and brightly on the earth as if for all time.”

The native veterinarian Steinert, who lives as a lodger in Karen’s late aunt’s home, is just not completely harmless of this sense of well-being. He rapidly makes Karen his assistant, and so the 2 of them journey by means of the East German villages as a vaccination-erotic clinic. Uwe Johnson would have loved the fantastically matter-of-fact tone on this regard. Unlike Tetzner, he had left the GDR in everlasting quarrels earlier than the wall was constructed. Tetzner additionally acquired into bother with the state. She campaigned towards the expatriation of Wolf Biermann. Her second novel, “The Oasis,” was about an idealistic kindergarten trainer who fights towards authorities windmills. The e book was a thorn within the aspect of the Stasi and was rejected by Mitteldeutscher Verlag. Luchterhand Verlag then despatched a contract from West Germany.

In the GDR, Tetzner was given to know that she may pack her issues if she signed this contract. Tetzner stayed. The West had by no means been an possibility for them. She had buddies and a daughter within the East. In an interview following the brand new version, the now eighty-nine-year-old reviews that she had already stopped imagining the West as the large different. Everything that folks of her technology mentioned within the East was instantly utilized to the West. That was horrible. And that is why she determined sooner or later: “Now you’re getting out of the boxing ring. Because in the boxing ring you always have to pay attention to your opponent’s tactics. And then the opponent’s thoughts are forced on you, whether they interest you or not.”

Gerti Tetzner determined that they did not curiosity her. Unlike the books by Johnson or Wolf, “Karen W.” is just not in regards to the West. It’s in regards to the East. And in regards to the issues of lecturers, legal professionals, docs, farmers, a few of which come from a special time – a time earlier than collectivization. Tetzner’s e book about folks’s on a regular basis issues leaves room for interpretations that will also be seen as criticism of the circumstances, however with out instantly asking the large query in regards to the system.

“Karen W.” tells of generational conflicts, of girls who’ve labored their manner up within the cooperative or as public prosecutors who can’t deviate an inch from a doctrine that’s often far faraway from life. Through her taciturn poetics of hints, which discover their pure hiding place in flashbacks and modifications of location, Tetzner succeeds in drawing consideration to the inside of the GDR. The West truly would not seem as a reference right here. Instead, you may watch a younger GDR citizen, who was influenced by the struggle technology, wrestle for a place on this society of latest folks – and discover one for herself.

Gerti Tetzner: “Karen W.” Roman.
Aufbau Verlag, Berlin 2025. 398 pages, hardcover, €24.