eJournals Colloquia Germanica 50/2

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Although East Germans voted overwhelmingly for reunification in 1990, the liquidation of East German businesses and properties by the Treuhand agency tasked with fusing the economies of the formerly separate nations, shady business practices, and mass layoffs caused many ex-GDR citizens to regard themselves as victims of neocolonialist exploitation. The formerly West German author Günter Grass and the previously East German authors Christa Wolf and Volker Braun wrote novels in which resistance to this perceived neocolonialist evisceration of East German identity, businesses, and institutions takes place. Grass fuses the first and the second epochs of unification in his novel Ein weites Feld in the personage of the Theodor Fontane revenant Theo Wuttke to underscore the malevolent realties of a politically rather than culturally integrated German state, while Wolf configures the West German colonization of East Germany through the palimpsest of the Ancient Greek Corinth state’s colonialist treatment of Colchians in their territory in Medea. In Die hellen Haufen, Braun creates an imaginative revolt by East German workers against their West German overlords. In all three novels, resistance is shown as futile, but the utopia of democratic socialism is nevertheless invoked. By way of contrast, the positive view of reunification by authors Martin Walser and Monika Maron is also briefly presented.
2017
502

Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany by West Germany in Novels by Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, and Volker Braun

2017
John Pizer
Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany by West Germany in Novels by Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, and Volker Braun John Pizer Louisiana State University Abstract: Although East Germans voted overwhelmingly for reunification in 1990, the liquidation of East German businesses and properties by the Treuhand agency tasked with fusing the economies of the formerly separate nations, shady business practices, and mass layoffs caused many ex-GDR citizens to regard themselves as victims of neocolonialist exploitation. The formerly West German author Günter Grass and the previously East German authors Christa Wolf and Volker Braun wrote novels in which resistance to this perceived neocolonialist evisceration of East German identity, businesses, and institutions takes place. Grass fuses the first and the second epochs of unification in his novel Ein weites Feld in the personage of the Theodor Fontane revenant Theo Wuttke to underscore the malevolent realties of a politically rather than culturally integrated German state, while Wolf configures the West German colonization of East Germany through the palimpsest of the Ancient Greek Corinth state’s colonialist treatment of Colchians in their territory in Medea . In Die hellen Haufen , Braun creates an imaginative revolt by East German workers against their West German overlords. In all three novels, resistance is shown as futile, but the utopia of democratic socialism is nevertheless invoked. By way of contrast, the positive view of reunification by authors Martin Walser and Monika Maron is also briefly presented. Keywords: neocolonialism, democratic socialism, reunification, Treuhand , “Abwicklung” German reunification was and continues to be perceived in some quarters as an instance of neocolonialism. Several works, such as the essay collection Kolonialisierung der DDR (1996), Andrea Geier’s “Der Kolonialisierungs-Diskurs in 206 John Pizer der Literatur nach 1990” (2008), and Paul Cooke’s Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (2005) have discussed this perception. Dan Bednarz’s ethnographic study East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany , largely a summary of interviews conducted with leading East German academics in 1990/ 91 as well as follow-up interviews in 2014, indicates that a large majority of these intellectuals regarded their treatment by West German university representatives (who fired most of the GDR academics after cursorily conferring with them shortly prior to official reunification) as an instance of neocolonialism. Cooke’s and Geier’s studies show this view has been given voice in the cultural sphere. My essay will compare how three canonic German-language authors of the later twentieth century, Günter Grass, Christa Wolf, and Volker Braun, articulate an imagined resistance to the colonization of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) they saw as having occurred through reunification. With respect to Grass, resistance is evident in his novel Ein weites Feld (1995) when the protagonist, Fonty, thunderously denounces the Treuhand (the organization created to deal with the economic aspect of reunification, particularly the sale of the German Democratic Republic’s state-owned concerns and with managing West Germans’ private claims on property confiscated after the Second World war by the GDR government) on the occasion of its thousandth liquidation settlement of East German property, the process encapsulated in the term Abwicklung . Fonty’s denunciation is strongly and clearly manifest in the novel. Christa Wolf’s novel Medea. Stimmen (1996) represents the ancient Colchians as allegorized East Germans treated as colonial subjects in Corinth, the allegorized FRG (Federal Republic of Germany). In a 1992 diary entry, “Santa Monica, Sonntag, den 27. September 1992,” composed when she was researching Medea , Wolf draws an implicit parallel between the Western colonization of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and that of Colchis. Precisely this parallel is portrayed in Medea . In Die hellen Haufen (2011), Braun conjures an imaginary 1992 East German workers’ revolt against the capitalist West. This novel underscores Braun’s continued support of humane socialism as an alternative to Western capitalism. Though prior to reunification Grass was a West German author while Wolf and Braun wrote and lived in the GDR, all three were deeply dissatisfied with the process of reunification and its aftermath, and imaginatively represented resistance to this process in their novels. Grass, Wolf, and Braun were certainly not unique in composing imaginative works directly or indirectly advancing the proposition that reunification is to be regarded as a form of colonialism, though the three texts discussed in the present essay are the most cohesive examples of this poetic polemic employing the genre of the novel. Broadly speaking, the number of literary compositions expressing either mild or strong opposition to the way reunification was actu- Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 207 alized and is viewed as an instance of colonialism is quite large. Ruth J. Owen has shown that poetry written after reunification by Heiner Müller, Steffen Mensching, and Bert Papenfuß in the 1990s rejects the crassness, immorality, commercialism, hopelessness, and alienation these authors perceived as having become manifest through the “colonizing West’s” economic and political takeover of the territory encompassing the former German Democratic Republic (113—26). However, the three novels by Grass, Wolf, and Braun which are the focus of the following essay are, I would argue, the most cogent examples of works which imaginatively conjure a resistance to this perceived colonization. In connection with Grass, I will also briefly articulate German rejections of the equation of reunification with colonialism on the part of, particularly, Monika Maron. Before examining the three works which suggest that the territory encompassing the former German Democratic Republic was effectively colonized by the government and private enterprises in what, at the time, was referred to by some as the Bonn Republic, the capital of West Germany, we must consider if there is any real justification in referring to the incorporation and integration of East Germany into an expanded Federal Republic of Germany as a form of colonialism. By any traditional definition of this term, such a categorization seems out of place. After all, what distinguished the former GDR citizens from the indigenous peoples across the globe who were subjected to territorial expropriation, authoritarian rule by foreign nations, and often slavery from the Age of Columbus until well into the twentieth century, is that East Germans did vote for reunification in March 1990, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The widespread demonstrations precipitating the fall of the Wall did not have reunification as their goal but were focused on introducing democratic reforms to socialist East Germany and lifting restrictions on travel outside the Soviet Bloc nations. While figures such as Wolf and Braun fully embraced such liberalization in the socialist state during the period between the fall of the Wall and full reunification known as the Wende , and even beforehand, the broader GDR populace began to focus on the alleviation of their material deprivations in late 1989 and early 1990. Their relatively easy access to West German television broadcasts in the 1980s and even earlier, as well as the high-quality goods they received as care packages from Western friends and relatives, exposed the lie that real existing socialism allowed them to enjoy a better standard of living than their counterparts in the West. After the fall of the Wall in November 1989, East Germans’ untrammeled ability to travel in the FRG made them all the keener to enjoy the Western lifestyle they could now directly, personally experience in such cities as Coburg, Lübeck, and West Berlin. The vote for reunification was, fundamentally, a vote for this lifestyle. 1 208 John Pizer Almost immediately after the fall of the Wall, East Germans, naïve about the treacherous aspects of capitalism, became victims of Western exploitation. Exultance at the sudden availability of Western goods turned rather quickly to disillusion when deceptive sales practices became immediately apparent. As Andreas Staab remarks: Dubious Western business opportunists claimed the East as the new frontier of Capitalism, and East Germans came to be acquainted with credit sharks, overpriced used cars, or disproportionate insurance policies. The markets of Eastern towns were packed with stands offering clothes and food products whose value-for-money ratings were all too often simply ridiculous. (116) Staab further notes that these practices led to a rather abrupt attitude reversal with respect to preference for Eastern or Western commodities; whereas products from the East had been stigmatized as inferior to Western goods at the very outset of the Wende , already by 1991 most former GDR households came to prefer products manufactured in their former country and now in the new Länder (Staab 116). Though Staab does not say so, this change of heart very soon after reunification, when East Germans reacted to a neo-colonialist exploitation by Western marketers and began to embrace Eastern goods because of their familiarity and - at least with respect to price - dependability, may be the true origin of what came to be called Ostalgie . At any rate, such Western economic exploitation even in the period prior to formal political reunification marks the beginning of what we can call a form of inner colonialism. In their suggestively titled book Kolonie im eigenen Land , published in 1991, as the negative aspects of Westernization in Eastern Germany were becoming clear to its residents, Peter Christ and Ralf Neubauer cite a poll taken in that year which indicated that 2/ 3 of the GDR’s former citizens believed the West Germans had engaged in a colonial-style conquest of their homeland (208—9). Christ and Neubauer argue that there are indeed a number of parallels between earlier European colonization of indigenous people and the political and economic integration of the new Eastern federal states into an expanded FRG. 2 As with previous colonization, they assert that the “missionary enthusiasm” of the outsiders is unlimited, that the achievements of their own society constitute the absolute standard for evaluating all aspects of life in the new territories, which are found to be backward and primitive. The conquerors do not understand the culture and behavior of the population in the new territories and therefore reject them out of hand. The process of colonization is accompanied by the immiseration and exploitation of the colonized population. Christ and Neubauer see evidence of all these epiphenomena, the arrogance and complete rejection of Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 209 the native population and its life ways, as manifestations of colonialism in the West German treatment of the new Eastern Länder (216—17). In his article on “Die verheerende Wirtschaftsentwicklung in Ostdeutschland in der Zeit von 1990—1994,” Andreas Büttner lists four political acts made in the period quickly following what he terms the “abrupten Vereinnahmung der DDR” that brought about the economic colonization of the new Eastern Länder : the overly hasty currency union, the wide-ranging selloffs and privatizations undertaken by Treuhand , the rendering valueless of East German enterprise largely through a fictional “Altschulden’-Belastung,” and the turning over of the Eastern market to Western concerns and chains (118—19). This last element mirrors a tendency cited by Staab, but while these deeds took place early in the wake of and - with respect to private enterprise depredations described by Staab and Büttner - even prior to formal reunification, they occurred during the Wende , when there was still a pervasive sense of optimism in the East. As Ben Gook notes, for many GDR citizens this was “a period of release and unimagined novelty,” though experienced by some in a manner he describes as “rueful” (25). Gook notes that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had a choice between Article 23 and Article 146 of the West German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) as the legal foundation for bringing about reunification. It was expected that Kohl would choose Article 146, which would have essentially nullified the Basic Law upon the adoption of a constitution by the German people. Instead, he invoked Article 23, which placed the new Länder under the jurisdiction of the West German Basic Law rather than instituting a mechanism which would have brought about the requirement to draft an entirely new constitution. As Gook notes, because of Article 23’s “language of ‘accession,’ some saw it as akin to a colonial act” (27). However, this accession can be viewed very differently. As Cooke notes: “The German federal government saw it as its place to welcome the new eastern members into its fold, rather than to merge with the GDR. Clearly the East German population was also largely happy with this arrangement because the vast majority voted for reunification under these terms” (4). In other words, there was somewhat of a lag between the implementation of economic and political unification and its perception as a colonializing act by a significant segment of the East German populace. Staab provides a particularly cogent argument as to why East Germans, including its intellectuals such as Wolf and Braun, had legitimate reasons to perceive themselves as victims of Western colonialism in the aftermath of reunification. What makes Staab’s argument convincing is its objectivity and balance, because Staab is far from being an apologist for the GDR regimes. While he recognizes that the leaders of East Germany provided the country’s citizens benefits such as free, universal health care, free education, virtually guaranteed employment, 210 John Pizer etc., he is unsparing in his critique of the government’s authoritarian style of rule, seeing it as a continuation of Germany’s dictatorial past. In their general intolerance of dissent and debate, Staab sees the leaders of the GDR during its 40-year existence as in harmony with the approach to governance taken by the rulers of the Third Reich. To be sure, the populace of any nation, or some significant segment of it, might perceive itself as colonized; Staab notes that this is the belief of many people in the European Union member states toward Brussels, with its propensity for imposing measures previously issued by discrete nation states (11). In this sense, the perception of some German intellectuals that East Germany was a victim of colonization found a parallel grievance among citizens of the European Union nations, due to the intrusions of this organization into the decision-making process of its respective sovereign states. One might add that this sentiment is even stronger today than when Staab wrote his book in the late 1990s, as is evident in much political discourse in Europe in the second decade of the 21 st century, with its clamor for the dissolution of the European Union. However, such collectivist laws have been made gradually over the years for and by European Union member states, while changes brought about by reunification took place quite rapidly. The takeover of Eastern businesses and the concomitant replacement of local political and educational directors by individuals imported from the West, corruption and a failure to take local concerns into consideration, as well as Treuhand ’s heavy-handed practices, led the populace in the new Länder to perceive “a colonization of the East by the prosperous and unscrupulous West” (35). Staab’s balanced approach to the cause of the problems attendant to reunification is evident when he notes that the “people’s impression of a colonization of the East by merciless Western capitalism” resulted from a feeling of helplessness in the face of aggressive enterprises driven solely by the profit motive when doing business in Eastern Germany without any attention to regional concerns, while also indicating that such passive attitudes, the sense of futility, can be traced to the rigid top-down hierarchy evident in the political and business spheres in the GDR. In other words, the citizens of the country were trained to be obedient unquestioning subjects, apathetic in the face of economic dictates issued by a government which brooked no opposition or even questions regarding its supreme authority (43). If the general populace of Eastern Germany felt unable to resist what they not unreasonably perceived to be colonialist appropriations by Treuhand and other Western concerns, Staab suggests, it is because they were taught to be unresisting subjects by those who had been in power in the GDR. Certainly, many East Germans had exhibited initiative and defiance in the June 1953 uprising against the imposition of higher industrial production standards and then much later in the 1989 demonstrations leading to the fall of the Wall, but these positive qualities evaporated in the face of what Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 211 became essentially a takeover of the Eastern political sphere by the parties of what had been the “Bonn Republic.” On the political level, the “superimposed” GDR socialist/ communist system was replaced by “another superimposed one,” that of the capitalist FRG, and this also contributed to “the feeling of colonization by the West” (95—96). 3 There was somewhat of a lag between the general sense of euphoria in the East attendant to the fall of the Wall as well as reunification in 1990 on the one hand, and the disillusion that led many former GDR citizens to regard themselves as victims of Western colonialism on the other. After the Wende , intellectuals such as Grass, Wolf, and Braun were opposed to reunification as colonialism from near the beginning of this process. I use the term “near the beginning” because, as David Clarke and Ute Wölfel point out in their introduction to Remembering the German Democratic Republic , “even Helmut Kohl, the self-styled ‘Unity Chancellor,’ at first envisaged only a federation of the two states, leading to eventual unification.” They note that leading West German intellectuals such as Grass and Jürgen Habermas saw in a complete rather than federated merger of both Germanys the danger that the reunified country would revert to the nationalistic orientation and aggressive moves toward territorial expansion that characterized past German governments (5). With respect to the nineteenth-century drive for expansion of German territory through colonialism, the protagonist of Grass’s Ein weites Feld , Fonty, as his name suggests, channels the voice of - even serves as a Doppelgänger of - the late 19 th century canonic German author Theodor Fontane, who enunciated such misgivings as the nation moved toward its initial unification in 1871. As Jan-Werner Müller has indicated in his book on German intellectuals and reunification, Grass favored a confederated form of German statehood, a gradualist approach to reunification for which he had argued since the 1960s. The ties binding the states in such a confederation would ground German identity and unity in a Kulturnation , as Grass argued following the events of November 1989 (68). German intellectuals prior to the establishment of the Second Empire but particularly in the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries had also sought to establish German identity as rooted in its cosmopolitan culture, a historical circumstance drawn upon by Grass and Habermas in their polemics against complete political reunification in 1989. Indeed, these earlier German intellectuals paradoxically sought to ground the national character of Germany in the “mythologizing construction” of a universal, or at least pan-European, approach to literary culture, which such figures as Herder, Hölderlin, Novalis, Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel regarded as unique to the German-speaking lands. 4 This mildly chauvinistic embrace of Germany as a Kulturnation was certainly borne in part out of frustration that the German-speaking lands did not constitute a unified political 212 John Pizer nation state, and in this period, during the late Napoleonic Age, the will toward creating such a nation state began to emerge. Grass’s own embrace of Germany as a Kulturnation does not share in this chauvinism. Instead, in the wake of the Holocaust, Grass felt that any unification beyond a confederated system and an inner-border transcending culture would lead to the aggressive political nationalism and expansionism that reached acute forms beginning in 1871 and 1933, the respective onset of the Second and Third Empires, the Germanys of Fontane’s mature years and of Grass’s youth. Maya Jaggi’s review in 2000 of the English translation of Ein weites Feld notes that Grass, in this novel, “writes scathingly of how the velvet revolution segued into what he portrays as colonial annexation.” She also cites one of the most misinterpreted passages in the novel, namely, the reference to the GDR as “a comfy dictatorship.” The phrase is uttered by Hoftaller, who, with respect to the novel’s temporal dimension, seamlessly constitutes a shadowy spy in dictatorships from the eras of the Wilhelmine Empire, Hitler, and East Germany. He is the novel’s other chief protagonist, a constant minder of Fonty. This latter figure broadly toils in the fields of culture and his given name is Theo Wuttke. Superficial readings of Ein weites Feld have associated Hoftaller’s description of the GDR state as “eine kommode Diktatur” with Grass’s view. While Grass certainly saw the East German dictatorship as more benign than that of the Third Reich, Hoftaller, as a servant, indeed henchman, of German dictatorships writ large cannot be regarded as a spokesman for his author. Indeed, Hoftaller darkly suggests that the GDR government itself brought about the fall of the Wall in order to block the emergence of the sort of genuinely democratic socialism in East Germany favored by authors such as Wolf and Braun. As Stephen Brockmann has noted: “In his novel Ein weites Feld , whose publication coincided with the fifth anniversary of German reunification, Grass suggested that the GDR’s leaders had let the Wall fall in order to prevent the advent of a ‘third path,’ the utopian social and economic concept longed for by so many writers and dissidents in the GDR” ( Literature and German Reunification 51). Brockmann explains that, in the view of these writers and dissidents, this third path would ideally constitute a balanced approach between the extremes of Western capitalist oppression of the masses and the East’s reliance on communist dictatorships (51). It is important to underscore what Brockmann implies here, namely, that the ideal of this third way was espoused by GDR authors such as Wolf and Braun. Grass was sympathetic to this approach and uses the figure of Hoftaller to imply the GDR’s political elite triggered the fall of the Wall to bring about a form of reunification that would render the third path impossible, hinting broadly that this nomenklatura could take advantage of the advent of untrammeled capitalism, like so many Warsaw Pact elites after Eastern European state Communism Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 213 collapsed. While Grass was a strong proponent of democratic socialism in the FRG, 5 how this approach to economics and politics might be enacted in the GDR was not a primary focus for this West German writer. Instead, he concentrated on articulating the vision of a confederated form of government giving the East German Länder relative autonomy and establishing unification in the cultural rather than political sphere. This preference was largely based on his fear that reunification would lead once again to his country’s tendency, as in the Wilhelmine and Third Reich periods, to embrace authoritarianism and colonialist expansion. Grass was consistent in holding this view before and during the Wende . 6 Already in his 1979 novel Das Treffen in Telgte , Grass evinces an embrace of the ideal of a nonpolitical Kulturnation in a tale where the nation’s greatest Baroque-age authors overcome extreme obstacles in coming together for productive, witty, and insightful dialogue, while their territories are being torn ever further asunder during the Thirty Years War (see, for example, 7—14). Literary culture, not politics, is seen to bind the nation. By the time Grass composed Ein weites Feld , his long-cherished dream of a loosely confederated Germany united primarily within the contours of an apolitical, or, as Friedrich Meinecke would have it, “vegetative” Kulturnation , 7 had been dashed, and in his chronologically comprehensive novel, shuttling back and forth not only between the present and Fontane’s late 19 th century Germany, but to the Prussia of the late 18 th century, Grass gives vent to his fear that a militaristic Prussian form of nationalism is reemerging. The novel evokes a continuity among Friedrich II’s Prussia, Bismarck’s Prussia and Second Empire, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Kohl’s newly reunified Germany (see Pizer, “Kleist”). While Ein weites Feld weaves a rich, temporally intertwining tapestry, Fonty’s speech in the “Kulturbrauerei” on the occasion of the Treuhand ’s thousandth liquidation settlement (“Abwicklung”), constitutes the novel’s climactic episode and culminates in the conflagration of the Treuhandanstalt ’s building, a scene redolent in Grass’s novel with both poetic justice and apocalyptic warning. As Jutta Heinz argues, the speech also represents the high point of a key narrative thread in that Fonty’s disassociation from his lifelong figure of identification, the novelist Fontane, had been growing in the last few chapters. The speech underscores Fonty’s liberation from the pure reproduction of Fontane’s motifs and figures, for characters from the 19 th century author’s collective “Romankosmos” appear in the speech in new, daring, imaginative constellations. Thus the roles of Fontane and Fonty would be definitively reversed: “Fonty wäre nicht mehr eine Figur, die Fontane spielt, sondern Fontane wäre eine Figur aus Fontys neuem Bilderbogen mit Szenen der deutschen Wiedervereinigung geworden” (33—34). We can add that through this liberation not only from Fontane as a figure worthy of unquestioning emulation, but also from his malevolent minder 214 John Pizer Hoftaller, Theo Wuttke can emerge as a genuinely independent, authoritative voice against the colonization of the former GDR. Nevertheless, Fonty, as Heinz indicates, does not take leave of Fontane in the climactic scene in simply ceasing to stand in for this author. Instead, he draws from a broad palette of characters from Fontane’s novels, using them in the service of his tirade against the Treuhand and its massive enactment of what many, including Grass, saw as colonialist liquidation settlements. In doing so, he completely imbricates the militarist pomp Fontane gently critiqued in the Wilhelmine Germany of his age with the Prussian traditions of the era of Friedrich II and its revival in the present time of the narrative, a revival allusively suggested in a lengthy delineation in the novel of Friedrich II’s real-life ceremonious reburial in 1991 in the grounds of Sans Souci castle. His remains had been removed from this castle after the Second World War because the Germans feared their desecration by Soviet troops. As Brockmann notes in summarizing this chapter: “The return of Frederick the Great to Sans Souci allowed Helmut Kohl and the unified Germany to publicly proclaim a connection to a supposedly noble Prussian tradition” (“Günter Grass and German unification” 135). While Fontane wrote somewhat nostalgically on Friedrich’s age in his novels and in his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862—1882), Grass weaves eighteenth-, nineteenthand late-twentieth-century Prussian-style militarism into a continuity in Ein weites Feld by fictionally narrating the reburial and then having Fonty draw on the martial ceremoniousness represented in the late 19 th century author’s prose fiction. Grass implies that this tradition is spiritually tied to the predatory, colonialist practices of the Treuhand Agency in the wake of reunification. In order to illustrate the complexity of this historical imbrication, its climactic moment in Fonty’s lecture must be cited in full: Und bestimmt, nein, sicher mischt irgendwo Mathilde Möhring mit. Da ist sie und nähert sich Frau Jenny Treibel, um ihr mit unschuldigstem Gemmengesicht die tausendeinste Abwicklung vorzuschlagen: ein ganz besonderes Schnäppchen. Welch ein Gedränge! Ordensbrüste, Schleppsäbel, Stehkragen. Geheim- und Kommerzienräte, hinter denen die Vorstände der Großbanken stecken, glänzen durch Anwesenheit, gleichfalls der Schwefelgelbe, erkennbar am Kragen der Halberstädter Kürassiere, der seinen Bleichröder mitgebracht hat, einen Krösus, den heutzutage die Dresdner Bank stützt. Kredithaie und Bankrotteure, Pumpgenies! Sie können sicher sein: Rubehn, gestern noch pleite, ist heute in Festlaune und obenauf … (754) Grass’s portrayal of reunification as a form of colonialism provoked much controversy among contemporary German intellectuals, including authors such as Monika Maron. Before proceeding to a discussion of how such perceived colonialism is articulated and resisted in works by Wolf and Braun, it is worth Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 215 examining the counterargument made by proponents of reunification in order to present a more complete picture of attitudes toward the issue of reunification in general and reunification perceived as colonialism in particular. Jan-Werner Müller has shown that, in the West, Martin Walser saw the incorporation of the GDR into an expanded FRG as a “triumph” that “vindicated” the people (“ Volk ”) and criticized the pessimists among his fellow intellectuals for their gloomy perspective on the Wende (171—73). 8 Among former GDR writers, the most eloquent critic of the tendency to equate reunification with colonialization was Maron. Her novels such as Stille Zeile Sechs (1991) portray former GDR leaders in a harshly denunciatory manner. In Animal triste (1996), the narrator refers to the Soviet Bloc ruling Communist elite as a “Gangsterbande” disguised as an international liberation movement (30). In an article inspired by the publication of Grass’s post- Wende diary, which he had resolved to keep on the first day of the New Year 1990, Maron notes the cataclysm he predicted at that time as the result of reunification did not come to pass. Thus, the warnings about this process nested in his 1992 novel Unkenrufe were misplaced, in her view; hence the title of Maron’s essay, “Die Unke hat geirrt.” That is to say, the toad has erred when its prophecies are seen from an early twenty-first century perspective. For while there was a certain amount of chaos and much unemployment in the immediate years after reunification, partly due to Treuhand ’s centralized and opaque structure, the Eastern German territory is flourishing in 2009, in Maron’s view. She criticizes Grass for treating the GDR population as a duped “kolonialisierte Masse.” She finds it absurd that Grass believes the region’s civil rights advocates are all depressed because Grass’s dreams of a confederated state were not realized, that the globally-oriented activities of the German economy, and indeed of the entire world - a context which meant that East Germany could not exist as a self-contained, self-enclosed domain - are to be equated with mutual colonization on a universal scale. 9 Maron indicates that Grass’s imperious attitude, his belief that he knows what is best for Eastern Germans, is itself a form of mental colonizing. She notes the development of a solar energy enterprise in Bitterfeld-Wolfen is flourishing. 10 While Grass might complain that the owners of the Bitterfeld-Wolfen complex come from across the globe, the GDR he hoped would continue to exist would have caused this region to remain heavily polluted and rundown. Finally, Maron argues: “Fünfundvierzig Jahre nach dem Krieg sind die Ostdeutschen dazugekommen, freiwillig, in ein reiches, demokratisch verfasstes Land.” Maron’s citation of Grass’s 1992 novel is somewhat misleading. It is true that Grass’s novel’s chief male protagonist, Alexander Reschke (whose background reflects the author’s early life circumstances and who is, in most respects, a spokesman for his author) expresses occasional concern about the conditions 216 John Pizer reunification is bringing about (89, 259), but the toad’s poetic/ anthropocentric warning concerns not reunification but the impending catastrophe of global warming (125—27), and Grass’s imaginatively constructed prognosis is certainly proving to be prescient in the present day, even if Maron is correct in indicating Bitterfeld-Wolfen’s solar energy complex is a huge improvement over the GDR’s environmentally ruinous industrial policies. In its satiric delineation of a German-Polish graveyard society, Unkenrufe takes aim not at Western German colonization of Eastern Germany, but at the reunified nation’s putative emerging financial colonization of Poland. It is also the case that for many intellectuals the reality of the Berlin Republic in the second decade of the twenty-first century does not correspond to the rosy picture drawn by Maron, especially in its eastern regions. As many Europeans as well as North Americans are now rejecting the globalism Maron clearly embraced in 2009, 11 a globalism one might regard as having been inaugurated, at least in Germany, by the fall of the Wall, the debate on whether reunification constituted, and still constitutes, a form of colonialism, will certainly continue for some time to come. As Stuart Parkes has indicated: “Among GDR writers, Christa Wolf undoubtedly came closest to Grass in her rejection of unification” (212). Nevertheless, as Parkes further notes, her disappointment in the GDR’s wholesale incorporation into the FRG was largely due to this act’s shattering of the dream, shared by Braun and others, that “a renewed GDR as a ‘socialist alternative’ to the Federal Republic” could emerge from the fall of the Wall. While she feared, like Grass, that unification could revive tendencies evident in Germany’s dark past (Parkes 212), she was, unlike the West German author, not primarily focused on the economic sphere in articulating that reunification represented a form of colonialism in her second Greek myth novel, Medea . Wolf published the first of these myth novels, Kassandra , in 1983, when the stationing of ballistic missiles on both sides of the inner German border by the respective Cold War alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, led many citizens in both the FRG and GDR to fear that they could become the first victims in a global nuclear conflagration. Thus, the Trojan and Greek rivals in Kassandra are portrayed as, spiritually, one people, united not only by religion and ethnicity, but by their very martial bellicosity. In Medea , on the other hand, Wolf portrays the people of the two ancient kingdoms of Corinth and Colchis as divided by geographic distance, ethnic appearance, and religious practices. 12 She subtly suggests that the many Colchians who accompany Jason and the Argonauts in sailing from Colchis to Corinth after Medea has aided the Corinthians in procuring the Golden Fleece become colonial subjects in Jason’s homeland. Wolf clearly allegorizes Corinth as the FRG, whereas the Colchians are associated with the citizens of the former GDR. While conducting research at the Get- Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 217 ty Center in Los Angeles for Medea , Wolf lived for a number of months in Santa Monica in 1992, and in a diary entry published in the essay collection Auf dem Weg nach Tabou , she reflects on the fate of Medea, around whom all her chains of thought are revolving in this period. She considers the possibility that this Colchian goddess was defamed and persecuted by the male world because of her surplus of imagination, through the power of which she is a healer. Wolf has reached the conclusion that the deed that has made Medea a figure of timeless infamy, the murder of the children she conceived with Jason, was a fiction concocted by the playwright Euripides, a conclusion substantiated for Wolf through her research at the Getty Center. 13 Thus, Wolf realizes she must revise history in order to explain this hatred of the goddess. She sketches Medea’s situation in a few short sentences: “Medea die Zauberin, die den Männern, auch Jason, angst macht. Die von Kolchis andere Werte nach Korinth mitgebracht hat. Die, letzten Endes, kolonisiert werden soll” (243—44). As Wolf’s novel on this figure develops, it becomes evident that not just the eponymous heroine herself is being colonized, but that the Corinthians treat the entire group of refugees from the territory now encompassed by the Republic of Georgia as colonial subjects. Wolf composed Medea during a wave of violence on the part of Neo-Nazis directed at people of color seeking asylum in Germany, and this problem was particularly acute in the new Länder . The complexity of Wolf’s characterization of the Colchians in Medea is rooted in their allegorically overdetermined associations linked to the time of the novel’s composition. Their complexion is darker and their hair curlier than is the case with the relatively fair-skinned Corinthians, so they can be read as ciphers for the people of color who were seeking refuge in Germany. The government of the newly reunified nation assigned them to the various states on a quota system, without considering that the new Länder were quite racially homogeneous. To be sure, the citizens of the GDR had been taught to embrace ideals like the universal brotherhood of mankind and global working-class solidarity, but these were abstract principles never truly taken to heart by the masses there, 14 and, aside from a small group of Vietnamese, the GDR had very few non-Caucasian immigrants. On the other hand, Wolf’s Colchians are also intended to reflect the circumstances of this selfsame populace, the citizenry of the former GDR. The Colchians’ customs, practices, and life ways are regarded as inferior and suspect by the Corinthians, who reflect the attitudes of the West Germans toward their Eastern neighbors in the early 1990s. Sabine Wilke has elucidated Medea ’s construct as a postcolonial text. Medea is a polyphonic novel; each character constitutes the voice of one of this work’s principal protagonists, who narrate the various chapters. As Wilke argues, Jason’s voice is that of the colonizer, who has a command of colonial discourse already in Colchis, before the flight to his homeland (17). According to Wilke, 218 John Pizer the Corinthian court astronomer Akamas represents in even purer form the perspective and narrative diction of the colonizer, given his affective distance from the eponymous heroine. In the voice of Akamas, colonial speech is at one with the discourse of superior rationality; he regards the astronomic practices of the Colchians as primitive, based as it is on the phases of the moon and practiced by women (Wilke 18—19). Broadly speaking, Wilke reads the poles of colonizer and colonized as falling along the respective antipodes of male and female world views. While this is a productive approach, Medea’s failure to bring about peaceful coexistence between the two populaces in Corinth, and the tragic fate to be exiled into the wilderness after she is falsely accused of murdering her sons, is much more linked to her foreignness, her perception by the Corinthians as a disturbing Oriental presence, than it is to her gender. For example, Akamas describes Medea as “nicht von unserer Welt,” and his condescending treatment of the Colchian princess as a confidante is one of the “Spiele mit Fremden” Corinthian leaders could afford in earlier days (122), before relations with the foreigners from the East came to be marked by bitter, irreconcilable acrimony. By the time she wrote Medea , Wolf was anguished by such acrimony on the part of West German cultural elites directed toward former GDR writers who had been lauded in the 1970s and 1980s by precisely this Western intellectual establishment. Wolf’s sense of betrayal, the feeling that this group, like Akamas in his relations with Medea and the other Colchians, was insincere and instrumentalized her, is reflected in her last novel, Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010). 15 The allegorization in Medea of Corinth as the colonizing FRG and Colchis as the colonized GDR is also rooted in its utopian dimension. While Wolf indicated in her 1992 Santa Monica diary entry that the figure of Medea was to be represented as colonized, this figure’s iconoclastic striving in the novel for harmony, justice, and equality among Corinthians and Colchians allows her to emerge as a socialist hero avant la lettre , the sort of leader Wolf hoped would rise to power in a GDR governed according to the principles of genuinely democratic socialism, the “third way” she regarded as possible before real existing unification took place. Stuart Taberner finds “it might be argued that Medea. Stimmen has less to do with coming-to-terms with the ‘real’ GDR past than with the desire to confront a clearly imperfect post-unification present with a vision of what socialism in the east could have been” (39; italics in the original). What must be added is that precisely the cooptation and colonization of Medea by Corinthian leaders like Akamas, as well as the broader colonialist subjugation of the Colchians by the Corinthian elite, blocks the realization of a utopian socialist GDR vision allegorically transposed to Ancient Greece. This transposition is suggested in the figure of the sculptor Oistros, Medea’s lover. In past and present worlds, where Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 219 social origin, nationality, and ethnicity determine the individual’s standing in a community, Oistros appears to have “keine Herkunft,” as he was a foundling adopted by a humble childless couple. He has friends from Crete, Colchis, and Corinth, as well as among people from all social classes, and his salubrious influence stems from his equal treatment of all individuals (165—66). The “voice” narrating Medea’s relationship to Oistros belongs to Leukon, second in rank as court astronomer to King Kreon only to Akamas. Leukon’s voice articulates the utopian dimension of the novel, for he demonstrates that a high-ranking official who belongs to the colonialist elite for the ruling caste can overcome class and ethnic divisions and even admire the colonized minority. He notes that his fellow Corinthians regard Medea’s self-assurance as arrogance, for which she is hated. However, not just Medea, but the other Colchian women, although they perform the most menial tasks, hold their heads high like the wives of Corinth’s highest officials, a circumstance both pleasing and disquieting to Leukon (169). What disturbs the astronomer and enrages his fellow high-born Corinthians is likely rooted in what Homi Bhabha, in his canonic work The Location of Culture (1994), describes as colonial mimicry, whereby the colonized adopt the behavior and discursive modes of the colonizer. While Leukon recognizes that the Colchian women cannot imagine comporting themselves in any other way, the other Corinthians perceive their pride as arrogance because they unconsciously conceive it as taking place in an area “between mimicry and mockery,” and the higher Corinthian caste feels “threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double” (Bhabha 123). In Oistros’ studio, a glimpse of life beyond such divisions between native and foreign, men and women, colonizer and colonized is made possible, and this points towards the utopian vision Wolf hoped to see enabled by the third path of democratic socialism in a GDR still intact after the fall of the Wall. Through the idealized figure of Oistros, whose attitude and deeds bridge the artificially constructed gulf between the novel’s discrete ethnic, political, and economic castes, Wolf imaginatively undermines the unequal relationship between Western colonizer and Eastern colonized she perceived as having been established in the former GDR through reunification. What ruins this spatially constricted paradise is a natural disaster, an earthquake that destroys the studio. The epicenter of this earthquake is south of the city, inhabited by its poorest residents, including the Colchians. Medea is accused of conjuring this event through her “böse Kunst,” and of bringing about the plague following in its wake (178—81). It seems plausible that the earthquake which shatters the brief instantiation of transcendent unity and harmony metaleptically represents Wolf’s take on what happened in the wake of German reunification, the immiseration of the poorest East Germans, who were thrown out of work, as well as the vilification of leading intellectuals such as Wolf herself. 220 John Pizer Braun takes the immiseration caused by these mass layoffs as a starting point for Die hellen Haufen , which creates a fictitious worker rebellion against the Western forces seen to be responsible for their plight. Sonja Klocke notes that while this uprising is entirely imaginary, Braun’s fictional account of such an event allows him to express ideals he has consistently sustained in his career both before and after the Wende , namely, a refutation of what he regards as the capitalist exploitation of the working class and the need for this class to present a united front opposed to the managerial elite. Die hellen Haufen , as Klocke argues, “picks up the discourse of East German colonization by the West to support his ongoing belief in the superiority of socialist ideals” (190). We can add that this description could also be applied to Wolf’s Medea . However, Wolf was never such a consistent, vociferous critic of Western capitalism as Braun, 16 and while Medea ’s critique of Western colonialism can only be discerned through the palimpsest of ancient classical myth, Braun’s novel is situated in Germany in 1992, when the mass layoffs of Eastern German workers by Western concerns, now in possession of formerly state-owned GDR enterprises, reached a high point. Whereas Wolf’s polyphonic narrative uses a variety of discursive registers to reflect the discrete “voices” of the individual protagonists, Braun’s style in portraying the revolt is reminiscent of journalistic third-person reportage, albeit employing an even more spare and simple diction to heighten the novel’s blue-collar ambience. Only the last names and functions of the workers and their sympathizers are provided. Consistent with this practice, there is no real character development or effort to establish reader identification with these figures as individuals, heightening the inference that they are simply cogs in a virtually faceless Brechtian collective. As in Brecht’s “Lehrstücke,” they are stripped of genuine, discrete markers of individuated identity. This narrative style, Braun’s unmediated contrasts of the masses’ moods after the fall of the Wall as opposed to the present, and the presentation of East German territory as now subject to Western colonial rule are all evident in the following passage: “Am 1. Mai marschierten 4000 an die ehemalige Grenze. Vor drei Jahren war sie unter Jubel geöffnet worden. Sie spürten in den Knochen noch das frohe Gefühl, das ein frischer Zorn verwirrte (…). Von der anderen Seite sah man verwundert die neu aufgerichteten Zäune: KEIN KOLONIALGEBIET” (12). The use of capital letters does not just reflect the apparent size of the message on the newly raised fences, but also underscores the most urgent focal points of Braun’s polemics, as is evident earlier in the text, where the words on a stone tablet read: “DIE MACHT SOLL GEGEBEN WERDEN DEM GEMEINEN VOLK” (10). Of course, in the novel, it is not the common people who hold power, but the Western capitalist elite and their proxies in the new Länder . An example of the latter is a man whose dubious role in the colonization of the East is evident Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 221 in his name, Schufft. He is described as a con man who had been a Direktor für Abwicklung (37; italics in the original). He clearly worked in the service of what another character terms “Die treuhänderische Behörde” (33). As we saw in our discussion of Ein weites Feld , Grass favors “Abwicklung” as a euphemistic term to signify the technique used by Treuhand in colonizing/ expropriating former GDR concerns and selling them to Western interests. Braun’s poetic denigration of Treuhand was certainly not unique to Die hellen Haufen . In Der Wendehals (1995), consisting of a long dialogue (the subtitle of this work is “eine Unterhaltung”) between two characters, a first-person intellectual and a state functionary of the former GDR, as well as several shorter sketches, Braun portrays an Eastern Germany that has fully lost its socialist idealism and is given over to mindless Western consumerism, the selfish pursuit of purely individual interests. Eastern Germany in this novel is marked by a decimated human and environmental landscape created by current mass unemployment as well as the biospherical degradation that had taken place during the time of the GDR. In the dialogue between the nameless ICH and the former director of the East German Akademie der Wissenschaften , ER, whose name is Schaber, reference is made on a number of occasions to the Treuhand agency’s wholesale sell-off of the GDR’s assets. Drawing on the term Abwicklung for the agency’s tendency to liquidate East German assets and anticipating his choice of vocabulary in his 2011 novel, the narrator, ICH, describes himself at the outset as “innerlich abgewickelt” (7) and of Schaber as “der abgewickelte Chef” (9). Schaber obsequiously but also literally contorts himself - a human “Wendehals” - to ingratiate himself with the new Western elites who are in charge of financial matters in Eastern Germany, and at times embraces the Western consumerism now evident in his former country. Nevertheless, he speaks of “[d]as Verschwinden des Volkseigentums” (68) at the hands of Western interests represented by Treuhand . Thus, works such as Der Wendehals anticipate Braun’s unmediated equation of reunification with colonialism in Die hellen Haufen . Like Wolf’s novel, Braun’s refutation of Western economic colonialism in Die hellen Haufen contains a utopian dimension which is undermined by the novel’s dystopian conclusion. Braun’s most urgent political messages are expressed directly through their highlighting in capital letters or italics, as in the above-cited examples. The author’s pessimism regarding the possibility that the common people will attain power, or that Eastern Germany might one day cease to be “colonial territory,” is evident in the final passages of Die hellen Haufen , which narrates the violent, deadly obliteration of the revolt by the military. The rebels are either killed or imprisoned. In the novel’s last words, the narrator underscores the fictionality of the story; it never took place, and while it is difficult to conceive that the tale was an invention, imagining that it really occurred 222 John Pizer would be equally dreadful (97). Presumably, Braun’s fear of not seeing his utopian dream of socialistic solidarity realized, as it was briefly in Oistros’ studio in Wolf’s Medea and as it is in the evocation of literary heroes such as Heinrich von Kleist in Grass’s Ein weites Feld , who are conjured to show common cause with present day resistance to inner German colonialism (see Pizer, “Kleist”), is based on his belief that the military forces defending Western capitalist interests in the Berlin Republic would simply crush any rebellion by working class collectives. Thus, Die hellen Haufen implies that the Western colonization of the East is a now permanent fact of life in reunified Germany. Nevertheless, the novel conjures the tableau of a mass uprising against a reunification the masses themselves perceive as a form of colonialism. In presenting this resistance, even as a literary construct the author ultimately represents as futile, Braun creates at least a vision of the potential for socialistic, anti-capitalist solidarity in the domain of the imaginary. This presentation in the realm of fiction constitutes the novel’s utopian dimension. Notes 1 On how exposure to the West through television and care packages before the Wende , and direct physical access to West Germany after the fall of the Wall, led to East Germans’ essentially materialist-oriented embrace of reunification, see Staab, esp. 99—126. 2 Andrea Geier has cogently articulated this position as follows: “Die Rollenverteilung zwischen westdeutschen Eindringlingen in fremdes Gebiet und übervorteilten, skrupellos ausgebeuteten Ostdeutschen ist strukturell begründet und lässt sich an den historischen Beispielen Amerika oder Afrika konkretisieren“ (72). This perspective is reflected in a number of works she discusses in her article “Enteignete Indianer und ausgebeutete Neger: Der Kolonialisierungs-Diskurs in der Literatur nach 1990.“ 3 Staab argues that the success of the “Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus” as a uniquely East German political organization is attributable to the feeling by former GDR citizens that the Western political parties were essentially colonizing the new Länder (76—79). 4 This is the provocative but convincingly argued thesis of Höfer’s monograph Deutscher Universalismus . A related perspective is evident in Johannes R. Becher’s vision of a “Literaturgesellschaft” constituted by a comprehensive network of literary relationships he believed was enabled by the collective nature of literature in the socialist state. Indeed, I would agree with Stephen Brockmann that Becher’s concept might be regarded as the successor to Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 223 the notion of “Kulturnation” ( Writer’s State , (339—40), which idealized the concept of unification through culture rather than politics. 5 See, for example, his “Sieben Thesen zum demokratischen Sozialismus” (1974) in Deutscher Lastenausgleich (52—57). These theses reflect the perspective in the 1970s of the Social Democratic Party, of which Grass was a highly active member at that time. 6 This consistency is evident in the various essays from different time periods in Deutscher Lastenausgleich . 7 Meinecke distinguishes the will toward national sovereignty in this period, born from the spirit of the French Revolution, with a more “vegetative” embrace of the Kulturnation prior to 1789, when intellectuals were content with the idea that German unity was rooted solely in the cultural sphere (10—15). Grass’s embrace of the Kulturnation paradigm is more transpolitical than the rather apolitical concept signified by this term in Meinecke’s discussion of pre-1989 thought. Meinecke himself saw the nation-state as a political structure more evolved than - indeed fundamentally superior to - the cultural nation. For a summary of Grass’s thought concerning the ideal of Germany’s rebirth as a Kulturnation , see Müller 82—87. 8 For a detailed discussion on the antithesis between the positions of Grass and Walser with respect to reunification, see Michael Braun’s article. In addition to rooting Grass’s arguments for a culturally-oriented confederation in Herder’s thought and underscoring Walser’s unreserved embrace of the “sanfte Revolution,” Braun elucidates Günter de Bruyn’s intermediate stance, which guardedly favored reunification but enunciated the wish for a Germany coalesced as, fundamentally, a “Kulturnation” not as the antithesis of a “Staatsnation,” but as its “critical corrective,” capable of sustaining European balance and regional cultural diversity (110). 9 In the diary which inspired Maron’s article, Unterwegs von Deutschland nach Deutschland , Grass claims that while German Southwest Africa, “Deutsch- Südwest,” was lost to the nation as a colony, it has been replaced by a new territorial gain, “Deutsch-Ost” (77—78). This equation of German extraterritorial colonialism with what Grass perceived as inner German colonialism takes his denunciation to a rather extreme level, given that one of the few aspects of Germany’s years as ruler of Southwest Africa still widely known to most educated Germans was the genocide against the rebellious Herero tribe in which the mother country engaged. This deed is frequently regarded as a precursor to the Holocaust. 10 In her Bitterfelder Bogen , Maron discusses how the economic and environmental landscape of this region has been transformed because of the efforts of the solar energy advocates who took it upon themselves to develop this 224 John Pizer industry there. At the conclusion of the “Bericht,” Maron notes that Treuhand could have done more to make the inhabitants of the region feel less displaced and degraded in the early period after reunification, but that all these inhabitants recognize the enormous efforts in which this agency engaged in order to revive the region as an industrial center (153—54). Maron’s feeling about the Eastern economic zone at the time was not unique. In an article published in 2010, Joyce Mushaben surmised that Eastern Germany could look forward to a somewhat rosier future than the citizens living in the territories of the original FRG. Contrary to Maron, Mushaben painted a generally bleak picture of life in a unified Germany subject to the dictates of neo-liberalism, but predicted that Eastern Germans were better equipped than Western Germans to deal with economic realities in the coming decade: “Facing Darwinian competition for jobs, East Germans have already run the gamut of structural change; the next 10 years of unity will show that they have not only survived but are poised to surge ahead, being younger, more entrepreneurial and flexible than westerners” (574). 11 In Unkenrufe, Grass pokes rather gentle fun at this emerging globalization in early 1990s Europe in the figure of the Bengali rickshaw magnate Chatterjee, who, along with the cousins he brings from his homeland after early success in Danzig (where most of the novel takes place), is spreading the use of this mode of transportation throughout Europe’s major cities. 12 This antithetical treatment of the respective pairs of ancient rival groups in Kassandra and Medea is the focus of my essay “From Pan-German Cosmopolitanism to Nostalgic National Insularity.” 13 On Wolf’s discovery through her research conducted at the Getty Center that Medea’s murder of her two sons was actually invented by Euripides, see Magenau 422. 14 See Staab 127—64, who also notes that high degrees of racial violence and nationalist chauvinism in the East were rooted in the damage to the self-esteem of GDR citizens through the region’s massive job losses in the first years after reunification, and through the belief in the West that East German products, education, and lifestyle were of an inferior quality. 15 Wolf’s sense of betrayal by Western intellectuals stemmed in large measure from the brutal West German reception of her short novel Was bleibt (1990), as well as these intellectuals’ harsh condemnation of the author after the discovery of her role early in her career as a Stasi informant. On the controversy surrounding the 1990 novel, see Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification 64—70. 16 On the consistency of Braun’s “critique of real existing capitalism,” see Jucker’s essay. To be sure, both Wolf and Braun upheld the same ideal, most Imagining Resistance to the “Colonization” of East Germany 225 cogently articulated during the brief period between the fall of the Wall and the vote on reunification, of developing a humane, democratic socialism in an independent East German state. This perspective is evident in the appeal “Für unser Land,” composed by leading East German intellectuals on 26 November 1989. Both Braun and Wolf were actively involved in the drafting of this document. See Braun, Werkakte I 986. Works Cited Bednarz, Dan. East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture . London: Routlege, 1994. 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