It is surprising how few novels have been written about Die Wende. Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir is probably the best known. Otto Emersleben's NovemberMärchen is virtually unknown. One of the very first novels dealing with the early days following the fall of the Berlin Wall was best-selling novelist Arno Surminski's Kein schöner Land (1993). Surminski is THE novelist of Flucht und Vertreibung and the lost territories of East Prussia, so he brings a unique perspective to the subject of German reunification and the events of 1989.
The central figure in Kein schöner Land is the midde-aged Hans Butkus, a mid-level manager in a Hamburg shipping company. Butkus is a "double-expellee", having fled East Prussia as a child and then getting expelled (or rather bought by West Germany) from the GDR, after he was thrown in Waldheim prison for suspicion of wanting to escape from the "real-existing socialist" state. Butkus left behind a wife and young daughter in East Germany, but in Hamburg he quickly remarried and had another daughter. His past life in the east has been forgotten, or so he thinks. For when, in November 1989, his television screen is filled with images of East Germans crossing over and through the wall his mind is flooded with memories of his lost family. After his long lost daughter Claudia (now a grown woman) shows upon his doorstep Butkus realizes he has unfinished business in Schwerin, the city he lived in until imprisonment.
Surminski excels in writing about family relationships. That is really the strength of his earlier novels such as Johkehnen and Kudenow. And Kein schöner Land would have benefited as a novel if Surminksi had focused on Butkus and his relationship with Claudia - a loyal Stasi-informant and FDJ member. But in this book Surminski has a political agenda: he wants to highlight the continuity of oppression from Nazism to the East German communist state. Thus Butkus' plans for revenge against the SED functionary Walter Strobele, the man who sent him to prison, emerges as the central narrative of the novel. The course (or "curse") of German history is signified by a luxury villa on the lake in Schwerin. The house was built by a Jewish entrepreneur who was forced to flee the Nazis. It was appropriated by the Nazi functionary Grabow and then, after the war, "liberated" by Walter Strobele. It turns out that Strobele had been sent to a concentration by Grabow for an minor infraction, just as Strobele sent Butkus away for insufficient socialist fervor - destroying his family. Now it is Butkus' turn to visit retribution on Strobele. But things don't go according to plan.
Claudia reappears towards the end of Kein schöner Land and Butkus begins to see her as his lost daughter instead of as merely a victim of an unjust regime. It is Claudia who sees the possibility to end the cycle of persecution and revenge through reconciliation:
"Vielleicht wird das die grösste Leistung des Westen sein, dass er auf jede Abrechnung verzichtet hat. Die Verfolgten verfolgen nicht mehr ihre Verfolger. Ende des Kreislaufes. Schulssstrich. Wir fangen neu an." (Perhaps the greatest achievement of the west is that it has renounced any reckoning. The persecuted will not persecute the persecutors. We put an end to the cycle. A line is drawn and we start from the beginning.)
So the novel ends on an optimistic note that, looking back nearly 18 years, seems a bit naive. Still, Surminski deserves credit for crafting a fictional account of subject few German writers have attempted thus far.
Note: the writer Patrick Findeis came out last year with a novel with the same title - Kein schöner Land - which looks worth reading.
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